Has Candace been right all along? Have I just been refusing to face who I really am? This doesn’t last. What kind of man would do this?, he thinks to himself. There is a swath of the penultimate episode where it seems Joe is finally stepping into reality after Candace (Ambyr Childers) locks him in his own cage with Delilah’s dead body and plans to call the police about his crimes. And the twist about Love underscores that we have choices when it comes to the pitfalls of our familial life: Will we repeat them or buck them entirely? They are a venue to witness the ways that abuse cycles through generations. But by the end of the season, I came to see them as prescribing a reason for his villainy, not absolving it. The washed-out nature of these flashbacks initially renders them as blunt visual clichés worst yet, I thought they were a way to absolve Joe and make him more sympathetic. Throughout this season, flashbacks to Joe’s fraught childhood revealed how he witnessed his mother’s abuse at the hand of her husband and how he eventually killed the man to save her. Joe may not see himself as abusive, but how else can you describe a man who stalks, manipulates, and even kills women when they don’t fit into the storybook romance he seeks to write? What he finds instead is a mirror that reflects everything he doesn’t want to see in himself: his propensity for great violence, the looming darkness within him, and the horrors of his childhood. What Joe was looking for in Love was a vessel, the kind of woman he could map his needs and desires upon, absolving him of the darkness he chooses not to face. But with the revelation that Love is as murderous and warped by the traumas of familial life as Joe is, You reshapes the understanding of this season and its two most important characters, revealing the corrosiveness of all-consuming desire. There were issues that prickled, of course: Joe’s insistence that wearing a baseball cap is like donning an invisibility cloak the grating precociousness of Delilah’s young sister, Ellie (Jenna Ortega) and, of course, the near perfection of Love herself. Like its first season, You season two is arch, infuriating, and wholly engaging. In essence, his dream girl becomes a nightmare.
In its place is a prickly, dejected confusion as Joe ( Penn Badgley) listens to his latest paramour, the heiress and chef Love Quinn ( Victoria Pedretti), as she carefully extols her myopic derangement and the murders she has committed - including that of the poor Delilah Alves (Carmela Zumbado). Gone is the wiry menace with which he usually navigates the world. There is a look that settles across Joe Goldberg’s face in the finale of You’s second season that I can’t get out of my head.
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