What the hell just happened?

Ho-ly shit. 

Netflix’s You could’ve had people talking for years with just the one season from Lifetime and author Caroline Kepnes, but we should’ve known back then that this was hardly a series to do things by half.

After an increasingly insane Season 2 rollercoaster, we’re reeling from a ride that was nothing short of bananas, not to mention left us wanting desperately for more.

Without further ado, let’s dive into that batshit Season 2 ending (and the twisted road that took us there).

We catch up with Joe in Episode 9 standing over the fresh corpse of Delilah, brutally slaughtered in her last hours before freedom by — well, we’re not sure who. The episode is expert, edging on sadistic, with how it yanks the audience between certainty about Joe’s guilt and believing the possibility of his innocence. 

As usual, Penn Badgley sells the whole emotional journey and then some. We’ve watched Joe try or at least claim he’s trying to be good for nine episodes, and when he gazes in horror upon Delilah’s body in a pool of blood we know that he did want to do better. He wanted to not be the kind of guy who senselessly murders a woman in a drug-induced blackout, but neither we nor he can readily believe he isn’t that guy. If he is, he posits, then he doesn’t deserve freedom, a second chance, or Love. If he did this, he’s ready to be punished.

We watch with tense fascination as Joe tries to retrace his steps and rebuild the night. We recall along with him that Forty confessed to murdering his au pair under similar circumstances (a revelation we all forgot after discovering Delilah). We find out that Candace is still orbiting the Quinn family in order to protect them, and she tracks Joe back to the storage unit and locks him in with Delilah’s body, still seeking answers to her murder.

“While I was seeing you, really seeing you, you were busy gazing at a goddamn fantasy. A perfectly imperfect girl.”

This is where things got positively juicy. You Season 2 keeps us constantly on our toes, and we go into the finale with no idea of where this runaway train will inevitably crash. We’re already there, wondering how in the world Joe will escape or Candace will seek justice, when the show pulls the rug out from under us again by bringing Love face-to-face with her ex-boyfriend’s true identity.

And she accepts it.

She kills Candace, right there in the storage unit, then runs back to release Joe and tell him the truth; that she marked him from their first meeting, chose him to start her new family and put her childhood behind her. That’s where the finale starts.

Watching Love gaze at Joe in the cage, just as he once stared at Beck, is a positively out-of-body experience as a viewer (his inner monologue even says that he knows what Beck feels like — not entirely false, but still laughably off-base). Where Beck once pretended to accept Joe’s horrific history, Love actually does, and answers in kind with her own truths that chill even Joe (not to mention us) with her manic energy. The truth about Love (“Love, Actually,” as the episode is so cheekily named) casts further light on the excellent casting of Victoria Pedretti, whose performance sits on that frenetic, unfiltered Love right from the first episode. 

Image: Beth Dubber/Netflix

“You didn’t break me,” she says tenderly, urgently, after confessing the whole story. “You opened your heart to me. We’re soulmates, Joe.”

It feels ironic in the moment that Joe’s mind first snaps to Ellie, who he has constantly endangered in his attempts to save her, but Joe Goldberg considers himself a protector of those who need protecting, from Paco to Beck to Ellie to Love herself. He’s genuinely disbelieving that Love — sweet, compassionate Love — would do something to harm a child (to say nothing of the two dead adults now wasting away in the storage unit).

The truth about Love gives way to Joe’s deep-rooted misogyny; he thinks she’s spewing a “river of crazy,” but continues to justify his own inappropriate and harmful history. Joe cowers away from her affection and plotting because he wants to be the only one pulling strings, and to come home to the kind of simple, affectionate woman he’d find in a story. 

“While I was seeing you, really seeing you, you were busy gazing at a goddamn fantasy,” Love ascertains. “A perfectly imperfect girl.” 

Image: Beth Dubber/Netflix

Meanwhile, Forty Quinn, previously a top contender for Most Annoying Fictional Character of 2019, manages to put enough pieces together to suspect that Joe is the peripheral boyfriend and true murderer in Guinevere Beck’s novel. He visits the wrongfully convicted Dr. Nicky in prison (hello, John Stamos!) seeking answers, or at least indignation, but Nicky has found peace through religion, convincing himself that he deserves his punishment. It’s more than a little convenient as a way of writing Nicky out of future seasons where he could threaten Joe’s life as a free man, but luckily for us Stamos sticks the landing. He warns Forty to stay away from Joe, then encourages him to “trust in divine justice.” Uhhh … not on this show, buddy.

Back in the storage unit, we get a quiet scene with Joe and Love, some convoluted semblance of normalcy apart from the decomposing corpse in the corner and the latent knowledge that Joe is probably pretending to be cool while plotting his escape (which will no doubt include Love’s murder). When he finally seizes his weapon and pins her to the glass wall, Love shrieks her defense: She’s pregnant. 

She lays out the case once more for the two of them being soulmates, giving Joe an out if he wants it and saying that she understands if he doesn’t accept her. This comes as much from genuine defeat as it does from the Amy Dunne Handbook for Making Men Pay. Unlike Amy’s husband, Joe Goldberg will think this is his idea, and at least part of it is. They stay together in a mutual decision, un-coerced … for the time being.

The entire finale is a river of crazy, so much so that the Henderson murder investigation sneaks its outcome upon us. But the path is laid early on: Detective David Fincher receives an anonymous tip about Ellie, but he never truly suspects the 15-year-old of killing her strange companion, despite Henderson’s history with underage girls. Instead, he turns his eyes on the Quinns, whose expensive fixer-upper lawyer swoops in to take Ellie away from the station and is ostensibly working to protect the family’s interests, however they may pertain to this case.

(By the way, David Fincher = director of Gone Girl, and we just … I need to sit down).

Image: Beth Dubber/Netflix

For whatever reason, perhaps because the set was already decorated and ready, Forty invites everyone to Anavrin for the final confrontation: Ellie, who has been texting him for legal advice and help, and Love so that he can warn her in person and get her out of harm’s way. It’s a horrible plan because Forty should know by now that Joe is either with or tailing anyone he knows at any given moment. Anavrin is the first place he’d look to find Love or Forty, and calling Ellie there places her in immediate danger. 

Ellie’s final scene has quite the impact, showing us how far she came from the first impression. As much as she wanted to be treated like an adult, she’s a child who has suffered, now burdened with adult trust issues and forced to move through life alone. The girl who couldn’t suspect Henderson of any wrongdoing a few episodes ago looks Joe boldly in the eye and tells him she hates him, that he’s a monster who ruined her life. And then Joe, in a rare moment of honesty with himself or anyone else, admits to Henderson’s murder and to feeling no remorse. His eyes glint with the madness he hides clinically, even during acts of violence, revealing the true Joe to Ellie’s face.

“What I am is all that stands between you and people who are worse,” he hisses. It’s true, but it’s one of the darkest truths the show has given us.

Image: Beth Dubber/Netflix

Forty faces the two lovers, confronts them with the horrors of which they are capable, and pulls a gun that he points right at Joe’s head. “This is the sanest I’ve ever been,” he says, and we can confirm that it’s the most sense he’s shown this entire season. Unfortunately, he’s being gaslit by murderers from every direction, and some of his last words spit truths that will stay with Love and Joe for a long time. “Crazy” and “psycho” bite harder than anything Forty has said all season, and he tells Love scornfully that she’ll make a terrible mother. 

We still have no idea how this will end when Joe begins his final soliloquy, all but sealing his safe passage out of this moment. You is at its most predictable for these few seconds, when we brace for the gunshot and know it will hit Forty (turns out that whole “Old Sport” bit was just a way of warning us that he dies). The injustice still stings, as does Pedretti’s wrenching performance as Love sobs over her brother’s body.

Everything ends with ample setup for the inevitable Season 3: Ellie is safe and far away, taking Joe’s money and no doubt plotting her own investigation and revenge. (Find Paco! Fight crime!) Everyone who would suspect Joe is either dead or neutralized (we’ll miss you, John Stamos), all touched by that toxic spread of injustice. The dead cannot speak for themselves or be avenged, and their killers roam free — happy, even. Joe Goldeberg is living a life of monotonous domestic bliss with eyes on a new You: the bibliophile neighbor with the wedding ring. 

Joe’s inner romantic (a.k.a. psychopath) won’t simply leave this alone, so he will do what Joe does: He will spy and stalk this woman, do everything he can to get close to her. But this time, he’ll have to contend with the perilous instincts of his murderess wife, and he’ll be lucky to get out of that situation alive.

You Season 2 is streaming on Netflix.