[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of You, "What Is Love?"]
No season of Netflix's You ever ends in a particularly happy way, as Joe Goldberg's (Penn Badgley) enduring hunger for a perfect love continues to chew up and spit out the people in his orbit. Season 3, though, took the character on quite a journey, as things begin with Joe living the seemingly idyllic suburban life with his beautiful wife Love (Vanessa Pedretti) and their baby son Henry, and end with Love dead, Henry abandoned to another couple to raise, and Joe, presumed dead, now living in Paris as "Nick" and once again on the lookout for his You.
Love's death might not have felt inevitable to viewers, but as showrunner Sera Gamble told Collider during a recent interview, this was always the ending planned for the character. "We went into the season knowing where the arc of that relationship would end. And I'll even go further — we knew where this arc would end before we wrote the scene where they meet in the grocery store. Right? We always had the idea that there would be this kind of two-season arc," she said.
Love dies after Joe uses her own poison to kill her, and (in a macabre touch Shakespeare would approve of) chops off two of his own toes — one to bake into a pie, one to preserve as a fake keepsake for her. He then burns their never-really-happy home to the ground, ensuring her legacy as "Mrs. Lovett of Madre Linda," while he makes his escape and the rest of Madre Linda's surviving residents find some sort of happiness.
As for baby Henry, Joe manages to arrange things so that friendly neighbors Dante (Ben Mehl) and Lansing (Noel Arthur) are able to adopt him, but does that mean that Joe's really ready to say goodbye to his son forever? He does say to Henry, while dropping the baby off on Dante and Lansing's doorstep, that "this isn't forever" but when asked by Collider, Badgley wasn't sure. "I think, trying to give some reality to Joe, he's really, really mentally ill. I don't know that he has the capacity to hold onto anyone for that long."
One of the surprises of the season is that Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) manages to escape the carnival of murder that surrounds Joe as a rule, disappearing with her daughter after being warned to do so by Love. Theoretically, it's trying to find her again that brings Joe to Europe, but, of course, he's got more to deal with than just that.
Looking forward towards the just-announced Season 4, not much is known. But when it came to crossing over with another France-set Netflix series, Gamble remarked that "I think Joe in Paris is hilarious. The idea of him caring about fashion, for example, would be really funny. But no, that's not what we're doing."
Instead, she said, the focus will be on how the end of Season 3 leaves Joe even more damaged than before, and needing to recover from it. "I feel like Season 3 is a season of a huge amount of just loss and tragedy for him. We leave him having lost or felt like he had to let go of everything he cared about really. So the story from here, is about how he gets any of that back or how he finds something else. Because if the Joe you met in the first scene of the pilot, where the bell rings in the book shop, and then the girl in the jeans walks in, if he had one hole he wanted to fill in his heart — now he has like 17. So we've been with him longer, so we know more about his baggage, right? So I think there's a lot of that to explore."
Meanwhile, the question of Joe's capacity to find happiness in life is one that is the biggest the series still faces. "In the real world... where does a person like Joe go? Where is justice for him and for us? Does that mean happiness? I mean, it's like does a person like Joe deserve to die? Yes. But does anyone deserve to have to kill him? I really think this is the question," Badgley said.
But also, he noted, the new season could end up being quite different: "I think it might be more about Joe's relationship with himself... Because this isn't really a show about a murderer. I think it's taking the mistakes that we make in relationships to the extreme for the sake of a good story. Like, we really need to lay down our swords and stop being competitive in relationships. But that's very hard to do."
Gamble added that when it came to Joe's potential for happiness, "I feel like I've been alive for a while now, and I'm still not always really good at knowing what's going to make me happy. It's such a strange thing about people, isn't it? We're frequently very bad at knowing what's going to make us happy, and we run around and pursue what turned out to be all the wrong things. It's certainly something I've been thinking a lot about in the last year because of the world. But [Joe] does doom himself, I think, by his relentless pursuit of this kind of love. I think the story is kind of tragic in that way. I mean, yes, he will have intense moments of happiness along the way, but things do tend to unravel because of what he's going for."
Which gets back to the issue of Love, who might have seemed like Joe's soulmate... which Gamble said "is part of the problem. What a ton of pressure we put on ourselves, when we think that that's a thing. And by the way, I think it's also incredibly romantic, and I used that word all the time when I was younger. And maybe now I just think I have a lot of them, and some of them are just friends or something. But I also think that that term of soulmate is totally part and parcel of his notion of romantic love that turns into an obsessive pursuit for him."
Added Gamble, "Are [Joe and Love] well-suited? Incredibly well-suited. Do they have more in common than he ever could have imagined? Yes, but so much so that she forces him to look at things that I think he'd rather not. So, that's marriage in a nutshell, isn't it?"
You Season 3 is streaming now on Netflix.