A Season ‘YOU’ Won’t Forget

“hello you...”

These are the first words Joe Goldberg says after meeting Love Quinn, his fellow coworker. But the audience already knows from season one that she’s his next victim.

While most revenge/thriller TV shows trail off after their first season, the second season of “YOU” is just as captivating as the first. Our protagonist Joe (Penn Badgley) isn’t Joe anymore; he now goes by the pseudonym “Will.” He’s a mysterious guy new to L.A. with no social media who is attempting to get a fresh start, this time with a pessimistic outlook on love. That is, until he meets a confident, tragically widowed woman ironically named Love (Victoria Pedretti). While Will still mourns Beck (his ex-girlfriend from season one), he immediately becomes captivated by Love.

He becomes infatuated with her, similar to how he did with Beck, and the first few episodes of season two mirror those of the first season. Joe creepily becomes closer to Love and becomes threatened by her relationships with her friends and family. But season two differs when it uses the stereotypical privileged L.A. culture as a plot device and goes more in-depth with side storylines. While season one Joe was mainly preoccupied with stalking Beck, Joe now has to juggle exposing a celebrity, babysitting Love’s temperamental twin brother, and escaping his ex who is hell-bent on exposing him—all while dating Love, which is quite a task list, even for him.

The main setback for season one, which season two fixes, was Beck’s lack of personality. Beck was indecisive, insecure, and codependent on her friends for emotional and career support. Watching Beck’s scenes became tiresome after it was apparent she had no depth as a character. She was never really in control over her own fate and seemed more like a character from a young adult novel created to be a blank slate for readers to project themselves onto. However, Love is the complete opposite; she’s bold and initially pursues Joe (her mistake), which Beck never would have had the guts to do. Love also basically raised and protected her twin brother from a young age and was already married and widowed before she met Joe, so her character is immediately more fleshed out than Beck’s.

While this season succeeds in being bingeable and interesting, its shortcoming is its predictability. The Will/Love storyline plays out almost exactly like the Joe/Beck one with the exception of the major plot twist ending. The people most important to Love’s life are pushed out of the picture the same way Beck’s friends were in season one. Even Joe’s behavior and habits stay the same, despite his attempt to start fresh and leave his murderous tendencies in the past. The fact that Joe never learns from his mistakes makes “YOU” a bit repetitive, especially if this persists into possible later seasons.

Badgley’s portrayal of Joe is eerily similar to his role as Dan Humphrey in “Gossip Girl.” Both Joe and Humphrey are loners who become obsessed with an unsuspecting girl, only for her to later realize that Joe/Dan was actually a creepy stalker all along. But their most prominent resemblance is that in the process of hurting their loved ones, both truly believe that they’re the good guys. And both “Gossip Girl” and “YOU” succeed in making us root for Dan and Joe despite their despicable deeds.

However, some fans of “YOU” have openly expressed their love for Joe, describing him as attractive and misunderstood. This is mind-boggling, especially because it seems that Badgley just has a talent for playing characters that viewers end up loving, while a rational person would him find stalker-like and creepy. Humphrey from “Gossip Girl” was one of my least favorite characters, especially because (spoiler alert) he was Gossip Girl, but somehow I still ended up rooting for him. But fans of “YOU” take it too far, since Joe (or Will, who knows) is literally a dangerous psychopath willing to do anything and everything to protect what he sees as love. As the show progresses, viewers gradually see how Joe genuinely believes in his own lies. In both seasons, Joe’s justification for his actions eventually convinces viewers into seeing his point of view, and his charming and benign demeanor tricks us into rooting for him, up until the second he bashes someone else’s head in.

Season two succeeds in being just as good as season one, especially because of the ending and the possibilities it brings for season three. But if “YOU” wants to have multiple seasons without becoming repetitive, it needs more plot changes other than just different set locations. The lesson from seasons one and two seems to be that Joe just never learns, and though that’s part of the charm of “YOU,” it would be nice if the scriptwriters could return to reality for one second and plausibly explain why the Quinns never found out about Joe’s past with all their resources or what happened with the private investigators Peach’s family hired after her suspicious death. But then again, watching Joe miraculously conjure solutions out of thin air when he’s sure to be exposed is almost just as enjoyable.