‘YOU’ should have stopped after season three

All the way back in 2018 a show called “YOU” dropped on Netflix and instantly became a major hit in the category of crime drama. The show’s main character,named Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley),  isn’t one of your typical rom-com lover boys. Instead, like we saw in season one, two and three, he will find a girl, become obsessed with said girl, and then do whatever he possibly can to protect this person even if it means killing someone.

This show became such a hit because Joe would become obsessive over his love interests, from the very start of the show. He would do a deep dive into all their social media platforms and figure out every loose end there was to know about someone, before he even had a real conversation with them.

The reason this grabbed so many people’s attention was because it provided a harsh reality check that any given person can dive into your social media pages and figure out so much of your personal life. If there is one thing I take away from this show, it is to not put your whole life online.

This show is very binge-worthy, but unfortunately this season the writers have decided to break the release into two parts, both one month apart from each other. Part one and two both have five episodes. This split release process is used to elongate the suspense and anticipation of a show, but for me this season should not have been dragged out after a very anticlimactic part one.

After many love interests and crimes committed, season four started off with everyone’s favorite murder/stalker Joe escaping his past life and moving to London, where he began what he calls a “well-deserved” holiday.

A show that has made an audience sympathize with a murder has once again changed the setting and characters. It is now set in the groggy city of London where Joe has the new name of Jonathan Moore and grown out hair accompanied by a long beard to disguise his identity.

For a long time, the creators of “YOU” avoided the whodunnit trope that we see copied and pasted in all forms of the mystery genre. This is what set the show apart from the rest. However, this season there has been a new murder that for once Joe did not commit, and has now left Joe and the audience to solve it.

This is where it started to go downhill for me. In the previous seasons, it was blatantly clear that the person who committed the crime was Joe. That was the interesting part of the show: how, as an audience, we could root for the underdog, who was also a murderer. I tended to use the excuse that he was doing whatever he could for the people he loved, but truly I was just lying to myself.

Typically, when someone watches the mystery genre, there are guesses being fired out on who they think the killer is. I did this all throughout the start because all the new characters seemed eligible to be the murder. When I got to the end of episode five and there was a big reveal of who did it, I found myself repeating that I had guessed it all along.

Like how I root for Joe as the underdog to make it out free, I am now rooting for this show to break free of this bland storytelling and really bring it home in part two. After watching part one I feel like it was predictable and underwhelming, and wish I was able to have watched both parts together so it would feel more concluded and fulfilling. Nonetheless, part two comes out on March 9, where I will once again be anticipating this exciting tale. Who knows, maybe part one was just all the background information needed to set up something big in part two.