Since the first season of You, we all know at this point that it's him, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley); he's the problem, it's him. And even at tea time with the elites in Season 4, everybody agrees that despite everyone's possibility of being a killer, it's Joe we're pointing fingers at. But at some point in the first half of Season 4, audiences were led to believe that Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers) was the culprit this time around. As if that wasn't a shocking twist enough, it was revealed on the second half that it has always been Joe, and it turns out that Rhys—all along—was just a figment of his imagination. As Joe goes even more deranged from season to season, the show's showrunner, Sera Gamble, explains why she chose to go down that path and why it's crucial for her to challenge herself as a writer.
Joe Goldberg, now called Jonathan Moore as he starts a new life in London, has always been demented, even going beyond killing someone all for the sake of love. He also ended up causing physical damage to the people he used to be obsessed with, starting with Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Candace Stone (Ambyr Childers), and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). But just as we thought the cycle stopped with Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), Part 2 of Season 4 shows that Joe actually did kidnap her, and he couldn't even remember doing so—as for him, it was Rhys who had a hand in every crime he actually committed himself. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gamble shared that all the twists and turns in the series, particularly in Season 4, had already been planned early on. On her decision to take such a challenging route, the showrunner explained: "You have to have a great reason that you’re doing this, and then also have a lot of ideas up your sleeve about what to do with it when you jump into the deep end. The first thing that was appealing was that this was going to be a real challenge. For better and for worse, I don’t have much interest in working on a season of TV that isn’t continuing to challenge me as a writer and challenge the writers room. I wish I didn’t feel this way."
Gamble also disclosed that her team kept a close eye on how insane Joe went from season to season and that she didn’t want to shy away from the concept. She added: "This was the hardest season by a mile. First, we did an entire whodunnit, and then the whole time we were then going back to the beginning of every single scene and tracking it with what happens when you find out what’s really going on with Rhys. We had this in mind for several seasons. We started talking about it early. We didn’t commit to it for this season until we knew we were doing the whodunnit, but we did keep a close eye on how crazy Joe was from season to season because we didn’t want it to come completely out of left field."
The Netflix series wasn't afraid to pull off twists from one season to another, and Season 4 didn't deviate from the show's usual beat. When Season 2 ended, viewers learned that Love shares the same unhinged mind as Joe. In Season 4, however, Rhys was the killer this time—or so we thought. Though it was just in Joe's mind, Speleers also got to play an insane character.
Apart from Gabrielle and Badgley reprising their roles in Season 4, as well as Speleers as Rhys, the newest season of You also introduced new characters, including Charlotte Ritchie as Kate Galvin, Tilly Keeper as Lady Phoebe, Amy-Leigh Hickman as Nadia Farran, and Lukas Gage as Adam Pratt.
Part 2 of You Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix. You can watch the trailer below.