YouDunnit Now! Thoughts on Season 4 of You
Everyone’s favourite trash show is back! After several months, we’re finally reunited with lovely, horrifying Joe, the resident serial killer soft boi. Who’s going to end up in the murder box this time around? What shenanigans will he get himself into whilst gruesomely disposing of a body? After the explosive events of the season 3 finale, viewers were waiting to see how the show could possibly outdo itself? How can you top fake murder-suicide whilst Taylor Swift plays in the background?
Well, turns out you can’t top it. Instead, we’re off to fictional London to play a tired whodunit, and make a tone deaf attempt at class consciousness.
Spoilers ahead for the first half of You Season 4
The Initial Appeal Of You
When You first debuted in 2019, behind the flashier and trashier elements, it was ultimately a story about toxic masculinity and the worst possible outcomes. Despite vague feminist platitudes from Joe, he fully subscribes to the concept of toxic masculinity; he believes that his woman should be protected, and he will do anything (including several murders), to do so. Despite claiming to be madly in love with these women, Joe doesn’t actually see his partners as women; they’re concepts. He stalks them, fantasises over them, and pushes his own agenda onto what he thinks they should be like; when the women don’t fit that mould by being complex human beings themselves, he either looses interest or becomes stabby. Star of season 2 Love Quinn, played to perfection by Victoria Pedretti, was the perfect example of this; for the majority of season 2, she was the perfect Manic Pixie Daydream Girl for Joe to project his views onto. She was beautiful and quirky and attractive, but Joe sensed a darkness in her which he wanted to save her from. When the true nature of said darkness is revealed – that she’s also a murdering stalker just as bad as he is – he is repulsed, and only spares her life because of the baby.
A moment for Love Quinn, who is perfect (if a little problematic)
This season takes a swerve; instead of seeing Joe make terrible decisions and watching the fallout, we have a Cleudo-eqsue whodunit. Seeing as Joe is no longer a stalking murderous psychopath, we’re just watching some guy. Where’s the fun in that? Earlier in its run, even though he’s surrounded by terrible people, be it the pseudo-intellectuals of New York or the free-spirited ultra capitalists of LA, the thrill of You comes from knowing that Joe is the worst person in any room. While we do enjoy seeing the murders and how they play out, the real thrill of the show comes from why Joe does the murders, and how he can talk the audience on his side using faux feminist and toxic white knight language. If you remove that from the show, you’ve just got a guy hanging out with some rich people in London for some reason.
There are still some stalkerish elements; Joe gets some mysterious anonymous texts from the killer threatening to out him and his past - we watch the ultimate stalker get stalked, and him descend into paranoia. While it’s satisfying to watch him get a taste of his own medicine and meet his match we’ve already seen Joe get stalked. Love Quinn hired a PI to watch him in season 2, and at the start of season 4 another Quinn PI finds him and gives him his new identity. When Joe stalked his victims, he would watch his prey, get to know them, and use his knowledge to manipulate them into falling for him. Joe’s stalker isn’t manipulating him, he’s goading him. Definitely satisfying, but why is this happening?
The Weird Class Consciousness Attempts
Before we get into the actual plot of the show, a brief aside for this fictional mythical London the showrunners have invested. Joe has a professor job in a London university with a sprawling campus that’s clearly inspired by an Oxbridge campus. He lives in Knightsbridge in accommodation provided by the university – somehow this is a beautiful fully furnished, spacious one-bedroom flat that would probably cost about £3000 a week to rent. In episode 1, according to some top tier investigative journalism by The Tab, he walked non-stop for ten hours without breaking a sweat or any time passing. Also, London is the most CCVT’d place in the world, yet these murders are barely being investigated?
Right enough annoying British fact-checking. This season sees Joe surrounded by the British ruling class. They take boatloads of cocaine and other drugs practically daily, barely seem to care when their friends and family are violently murdered, and gleefully declare things like “fuck democracy,” as they sneer at us mere paupers. The new cast are unbearably unlikeable, and paper thin cardboard cut outs of “British” and “rich.” The audience doesn’t care about their interpersonal struggles with bad NFT funding and golden showers, and frankly I welcome their inevitable deaths in the second half of the season.
The only other character with some semblance of a personality is Rhys, played by Ed Speelers. Rhys, just like Joe, came from a rough and traumatic upbringing. His memoir about his rough upbringing pulled him out of poverty, and he now gets to party with the upper class. He is touted as the one good man, who will save the country. In a shocking twist of events, it turns out that Rhys is the Eat-The-Rich killer, and he was planning on framing Joe for his crimes whilst he runs for Mayor of London (against Sadiq Khan I guess?). The murderer this season is the only other character who comes from an impoverished background, and Joe’s sympathies lie with the objectively terrible rich people. Maybe I’m a bit bitter with the cost-of-living crisis, the price of eggs, and the current economic turmoil, but I’m rooting for Rhys.
Admittedly, the second half of the season hasn’t been released yet, and maybe something ties it all together (like the current running theory that Rhys is a figment of Joe’s imagination a la Fight Club), but ultimately this season is a swing and a miss. As much as I love the concept of a whodunit You shines when it leans into social satire and the perils of toxic masculinity.