Posted by We must say that: Season 4 of You was definitely the most surprising of all. It was even clever to split it into two parts, letting viewers believe for the first half that the whole story was converted into a whodunit thriller, and then twist everything in the second part, revealing a huge plot twist. One not easy to understand for everybody: what really happened? Did Joe imagine everything? Does he have multiple personalities? Who’s Rhys, and what’s true around Marienne? You will have everything in this article, including the ending, simply explained.
You can watch the official trailer for You Season 4 part 2 here on Youtube.
You explained: the huge plot twist in Season 4, Episode 8
Let’s return to the plot twist in Episode 8 of Season 4. We have two big shocks, seeing the evolutions of two streams of events in parallel: on one side, we see Joe/Jonathan kill Rhys, and immediately after, we see a walking Rhye, talking to Joe and mentioning again Marienne closed in a cage; in parallel, Nadia steals a key from Joe’s apartment, opens a door in an abandoned building in London and finds Joe’s glass cage with Marienne inside. That’s the most confusing moment: what happened? Until now, Rhys said he kept Marienne hostage in a cage, but we see Marienne imprisoned in Joe’s glass cage, and Jow has the key. Besides, is Rhys alive or dead? Why are there two Rhys?
Episode 8 starts to explain what happened through images intertwined with Marienne’s story, and we have the feeling what we see isn’t really true. We see Joe drugging Marienne, closing her in a cage, and feeding her day after day. Episode 8 of You Season 4 has also explained the relationship between Rhys and Joe: the two never met. The relationship between Joe and Rhys is only imagined by Joe, in a Fight Club/Shutter’s Island-like plot twist. So what’s true now?
The truth is shown in the infamous Episode 8: everything Joe experienced with the rich friends, the Eat The Rich Killer, and his relationship with Rhys was a projection Joe created to believe he’s trying to be a good man. The last true thing in Season 4 was the guy sent by Quinn’s family and the agreement about killing Marienne: what really happened that day is what Episode 8 explains. Joe developed a severe personality dissociation; he drugged and kidnapped Marienne, imprisoned her in a cage, and kept feeding her. While doing all that, “he wasn’t Joe,” as he kept repeating to her: he was an alternate personality who needed to exist and keep Marienne imprisoned because the “Joe” inside him could never do that to Marienne. Rhys is another alternate personality, and also Professor Moore. After he did that, Rhys’s character was created to impersonate the evil inside him: Rhys was staging the Eat The Rich Killer, but it was actually Joe the one who killed everybody.
Joe’s psychology in Season 4
Let’s try to clarify Joe’s behavior and psychology up to this point in the plot of You, having some details explained. From an analytical point of view, we can identify four separate personalities inside Joe right now:
- Joe: he’s still in love with Marienne and could never hurt her. When the guy sent by Quinn’s family asks him to kill Marienne, he gets broken and needs to come up with a serious plan. His plan is the personality dissociation: he will create an alternative personality that kidnaps Marienne.
- The personality who keeps Marienne imprisoned: this part of Joe has no name. It’s not Joe, who loves Marienne; he’s not Professor Moore, who’s trying to get clean and start a new life; and he’s not Rhys, who doesn’t really agree with this.
- Rhys: he’s the evil inside Joe. He kills whoever (he thinks) deserves it. He impersonates an externalization of the reasons why Joe is evil. Instead of accepting that Joe killed all those rich people because he doesn’t like them or they suspected him, Joe created Rhys as an external character, who kills for other reasons, and he treats him as an enemy. It’s the biggest internal conflict in Joe: the one between the part of himself who wants redemption and the evil part capable of killing.
- Professor Jonathan Moore: he’s the part of Joe supposed to live his future. Cleaning up his past, becoming a better person, and never doing those evil things again.
That’s why, when Joe kills Rhys, he says he doesn’t know him. It’s true, Joe and Rhys never really met; all the scenes where the two interacted were just Joe’s imagination. And the Rhys that shows up after the real Rhys dies is just Joe’s evil personality. He needs to reveal himself now because it’s urgent: the personality dissociation Joe created is not sustainable. Marienne is really in a cage (that was the trick Rhys found to show the truth to Joe slowly): it was Joe (or better, one of his personalities) imprisoning her there, and it’s time to fix all this.
The solution Rhys proposed is obviously evil: kill Marienne (and probably Nadia, too), and try to start a new life with Kate. But Joe cannot kill Marienne because a part of him loves her. That’s why the other solution becomes (again) to escape under a new identity. This brings us to the ending of Season 4, which you’ll have covered and explained below.
You Season 4 ending explained: does Joe have a second chance?
At some point, Joe realized the most important truth: there’s no hope for him. Whatever effort he tries to put into his future, he will always end up killing innocent people, running away, and hurting others. So he decides to do the last thing for Kate, kill her narcissistic father, and then Joe plans to commit suicide.
Of course, Rhys (who’s an authentic, meaningful personality representing Joe) doesn’t want that because it implies he dies too. He tries hard to convince Joe that he’s not suicidal, deserves love, and deserves to live a normal life. That doesn’t persuade Joe: after he kills Tom Lockwood, after he believes Marienne is dead, he wants to kill himself.
For the spectator’s benefit: Marienne is not dead. She faked her death with some pills provided by Nadia, as a plan B in case they failed in killing Joe. After Joe believes Marienne is dead, he brings her to a bench in the park. Nadia follows him and injects the substance into her to revive her: Marienne will secretly return to Paris and live again with her daughter. The part where the contact in Marienne’s phone says her daughter was given in custody to her grandmother was fake: it was Nadia writing from that contact.
So Joe jumps from the bridge, but he’s rescued and saved. Kate is at the hospital with him: she now knows Joe killed people, but she wants to be with him and “keep each other good.” Joe is in heaven: life has really given him a second chance. He does the (apparently) last evil thing of his life: he frames Nadia’s boyfriend for all the murders, and Nadia ends up in prison for her boyfriend’s death. Nadia is a victim of Joe’s plan for his new life.
So everything is sorted out, Joe and Kate are living their new life, the past is clean, Season 4 of you has reached closure and has explained everything. He can even live again as Joe Goldberg, and he’s a hero for the press. From the spectators’ point of view, of course, he doesn’t deserve any of this, and we all hope that something will (again) go wrong in his life. But for that, we guess we will need Season 5. Don’t we?
