Dhruv Trivedi
‘You’ follows the hopelessly romantic murderer Joe Goldberg as he looks for the perfect partner while leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. Season 3 finds Joe uneasily settling into suburban life with his equally murderous spouse, Love. As expected, murder, jealousy, and the occasional couple’s therapy session form the backbone of the central couple’s marriage, and the season finale comes down to one of them killing the other. The fact that both Love and Joe have demonstrated on multiple occasions just how efficient they are at killing makes the showdown a very worthy climax to season 3. So does Joe survive in the end? Let’s find out. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Is Joe Dead or Alive?
Joe initially spends months agonizing about how he is married to an impulsive killer like Love. After she kills Natalie out of jealousy, Joe realizes that any woman he falls in love with (or even appears to be interested in) will be at risk of getting killed. It isn’t until much later that he finds out about James, Love’s former husband, who mysteriously died when he tried to leave her. Joe, therefore, realizes in a panic that he, too, is in danger of getting killed by his wife.
During the tense roast chicken dinner that Love prepares for him, Joe senses that she knows about his affair with Merienne. After they bring up the subject of a divorce, he becomes certain that Love will try to kill him and grabs a large knife from the table while she is distracted. Of course, our murderously romantic hero has an equally wily wife, and Joe soon begins to feel faint.
He then realizes that Love has covered the knife’s handle with a sedative and is soon unable to move. It is poetically twisted that the drug she uses on Joe is the same one she employed to kill her former husband, James. In the scene where she carves the chicken, one can clearly see Love using a glove to handle the poisoned knife.
The twists do not end there, and when Love comes over to Joe’s immobile body to finish him off, he surprises her by injecting her with a lethal dose of, you guessed it, the very same drug (which is incidentally called aconite). Joe then reveals how he deciphered Love’s intentions when he saw her planting wolf’s bane and ingested an adrenaline pill just before Love poisoned him. This helped reduce the effects of the sedative and allowed Joe to turn the tables on his wife.
Our hero then sets his house on fire and flees the city. The last we see him, Joe is alive and well in the city of Paris, which has apparently seen an influx of ex-pats because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blending in with the crowds, Joe walks out onto the streets with the Eiffel Tower behind him. The slight limp in his gait is because of his severed toes, which he has left to be found in the burnt wreckage of his house. Therefore, Joe is very much alive but is thought to have perished in the fire that engulfs his home, essentially giving our hero a fresh start.
Read More: The Full Recap of You Season 1 and 2
