After a widely successful first season, the Netflix original series “You” released a second season on Dec. 26, 2019. The series follows an intelligent, charming young man named Joe who becomes obsessed with girls he develops crushes on, and uses any means necessary to get rid of anything or anybody that stands in his way.
First off, “You’s” second season is just as good if not better than the first. While I enjoyed the surprise and unexpected turns of the first season, the dramatic irony of the second season keeps viewers just as interested. I liked that I thought I knew how the season would end, only to be thrown off during the last few episodes.
As a true crime show fan, the idea of an obsessed stalker murdering the object of his affection is not foreign to me, but seeing it from a perspective other than that of law enforcement was fascinating. While true crime shows make it clear that what these people are doing is bad, “You” has a perfect balance of what could be seen as glorifying having a stalker, and showing how dangerous situations like that can really be. I was fully expecting the second season to end the same way as the first, in a way to show that sick, evil people never truly change, and Joe finding a significant other that is just as crazy as he is wasn’t an ending that I could have ever guessed.
The season finale was a wild ride, and the last episode’s shock factor by itself triumphed over that of the entire first season. A crazy girlfriend? Something I certainly did not expect, but not completely unpredictable. At first I was excited that Joe would be getting a taste of his own medicine, but then it turned out that his main concern was that he didn’t want Love, his girlfriend, to turn out like him. That definitely showed Joe in a completely different light, where deep down he knows what he does is wrong, but he’s sick, and can’t stop.
The most unexpected twist was the one at the very end. Joe’s crazy girlfriend is pregnant? That is an awesome setup that will have me watching the potential third season as soon as it gets released. I can’t imagine Joe and Love being good, stable parents, so watching the two of them navigate parenthood is going to be incredibly entertaining. Will their mental illness be passed on in their genes? Will their child be just a crazy as they are? There are a lot of great potential storylines that can be included in the third season based off this finale alone.
The show itself has always been oddly appealing to me. The protagonist is obviously a twisted human being, but I can’t keep myself from rooting for him at different points during the story. He seems like such a great guy on the outside, and I find myself asking what the problem of him eliminating threats to his relationship actually is. What’s the harm in loving someone so much that you would do absolutely anything for them? Penn Badgley, the actor that plays Joe, says this of the show in an interview: “[‘You’ is about] how far we are willing to go to forgive an evil white man.”
This show is a great example of how society tends to support a seemingly normal white man despite the horrible things he has done. Even though viewers literally see Joe become obsessed and kill people, they still have a hard time calling him a bad person. Evidently, a lot of things are wrong with that, but it puts things about our society into perspective, and I applaud everyone involved in the making of “You” for putting their message out into the world in such a beautifully entertaining way.
By: Emily Chambliss, Feature Writer
