Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘You’, Joe Goldberg lives a double life. On the surface, he is a bookstore manager who comes off as a sweet and kind person. Deep down, however, he is a serial killer who has the blood of many people on his hands. In every season, we find Joe on the quest of finding his perfect partner. Every time he finds such a woman, he dedicates himself to making her life better, which often means weeding out the people that he considers are bad for his love interest and might ruin their perfect life. By the third season, however, he ends up getting married and having a child. His son, Henry, is the only reason keeping his marriage with Love from falling apart, but in the fourth season, his son is nowhere to be seen. What happened to Joe’s son? Let’s find out. SPOILERS AHEAD
Henry’s New Beginning
When Joe fell in love with Love, he didn’t know that she had a dark side as well. It turned out that much like him, she too was obsessed with finding a perfect partner for herself and was ready to do whatever it takes to keep her relationship from falling apart. If that meant murdering people, then so be it. Finding someone exactly like him should have been a relief for Joe, considering that Love, unlike every other woman, was not horrified when she found out about all the women he had killed. Instead, he found her appalling.
Despite his reservations about Love, who proved to be much more impulsive but extremely shrewd and calculating, Joe tried to make things work with her. He didn’t want his son to grow up without his mother, which meant that he couldn’t kill Love just because she didn’t turn out to be the woman he had expected her to be. Still, by the end of the third season, it was clear to both Joe and Love that they couldn’t co-exist. One of them needed to go if the other was to live in peace.
When Love discovered that Joe was having an affair with Marienne, she decided to kill Marienne, but then retracted and turned her focus on Joe instead. She didn’t realize that Joe was one step ahead of her. He anticipated that she would try to do something drastic, so he came up with a plan of his own. He killed Love and washed his hands of all the murders that happened in Madre Linda. In his defense, it was she who killed them. He was only an accomplice who helped her get rid of the bodies.
Despite pinning everything on Love, Joe knew that there were people like the Conrads and Theo and his father who suspected his involvement in the murders. They wouldn’t allow him to go free. Joe would go to prison which means that his son, Henry, would be sent to the care of the state. Having been through the system himself, Joe didn’t want to put his son through the same thing. He wanted Henry to have a kind and loving household. He’d hoped to get a divorce from Love and create a family with Marienne. But for that, he first needed to find Marienne.
Joe decided to leave for Europe to look for his lost love, but he couldn’t take Henry with him. He’d successfully faked his own death, which meant that no one would look for him. However, everyone knew that Love would never hurt Henry, which meant that Love’s family would keep looking for her son. But giving him over to the Quinns meant that Joe could never be reunited with his son. Leaving Henry was supposed to be a temporary thing, so Joe found the couple he could trust. Before leaving for Paris, Joe leaves Henry with Dante and his partner, Lansing.
Joe knew that they were good people who were looking to start a family of their own. Dante had mentioned their desire to adopt a child, which means that they were ready for such a responsibility. Joe leaves Henry at their doorstep, with a letter explaining that he needs Henry safe from Love and other people he thinks could potentially hurt him. Eventually, Joe is officially declared dead. Love’s mother tries to claim her place as Henry’s guardian, but seeing that she is going through stuff of her own, the state decides to let Dante and Lansing adopt him instead. This means that Henry is in good hands, however, Joe had promised to return, which means that we can expect Joe to take his son back somewhere down the line, which makes us wonder if it would mean a bloody end for Dante and Lansing.
