Joe Goldberg, Netflix’s most loved yet hated sociopath is back to send shivers down our spines for yet another season in You 3. And this time around, he is in for a stickier and messier entanglement to crawl his way out of. The third season of the psychological thriller begins where the last season left off—Love (Victoria Pedretti) and Joe (Penn Badgley) move to Madre Linda, a swanky Californian suburb, sleepy and sneaky enough to drive the newlywedded machete-wielding couple, nuts. Joe and Love reel from their psychotic discoveries about each other’s killings, while raising a crying infant in the process. Their actions might be as domesticated as they are, but their bloodthirsty urges tell a different story.
And as with every other season, Joe lands his target a few minutes into the show. But the season dares to go beyond his obsession. It peels into layers of toxicity and raw emotions behind a couple, whose love language is violence. Unlike the previous seasons, You 3 is centered around a suburb, which ends up playing a bigger role and obstacle in Joe’s universe. We are introduced to some of the most deliciously written characters in the show—Sherry Conrad (Shalita Grant), the town’s twisted queen bee, who calls herself a mom-fluencer, Theo (Dylan Arnold), a troubled teenager who loses his heart and head to a world of self-sabotage and Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), a Parisian librarian with a past of her own.
Creators Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble manage to pull us into Joe and Love’s world of hurt, revenge and power politics by crafting an ironic take on a suburban murder mystery. And on their way, they also explore race, the microaggressions of social media, and the double-sided nature of love and insanity. The series is as much about fatherhood and motherhood, as it is about blood-curdling murders. While the makers do take some time to get the engines revving in the first few episodes, they end up giving us one nightmare of a ride.
