Plus, what lies ahead in season 4.
All Your Burning Questions About the ‘You’ Season 3 Finale, Answered by the Showrunner
Warning: Major spoilers for You season 3, ahead.
If you’re reading this, you’ve finished the third (and in this writer’s humble opinion, the best) season of Netflix’s serial killer drama, You. So, there you have it: The dysfunctional marriage between serial killers Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) has come to a fiery end to the tune of Taylor Swift’s ballad for ex-lovers, “Exile.” After murdering Love, framing her for both their deaths, and setting their suburban home ablaze, Joe abandoned his son with a kindly gay couple and flew across the globe to Paris to hunt down his next One True Love, Marienne (Tati Gabrielle).
While Love didn’t make it out of Madre Linda alive, Joe’s body count was actually relatively low, leaving a surprising number of characters who know the truth about his proclivities breathing and TED Talking. Between tech billionaire Matthew (Scott Speedman) and his step-son Theo (Dylan Arnold) and the “optimized” influencer couple Sherry (Shalita Grant) and Cary (Travis Van Winkle), Joe better hope the rumors of his death hold up.
So, will we be meeting any of these survivors again in season 4 ? And will Joe be sticking around Paris? I asked showrunner Sera Gamble about all of that, along with more of your burning questions about You season 3.
Glamour: I wanted to start by asking you about that iconic finale moment featuring “Exile” by Taylor Swift. Did you go to Taylor directly for permission?
Sera Gamble: No, but I kind of wish I did because I’m a huge fan. We have a wonderful music supervisor, Season Kent, and she makes a lot of suggestions, but this one I asked for because I was listening obsessively to that album. In trying to describe the vibe of the scene to Rita Sanders, the editor, I asked her to listen to Folklore.
Before we jump into the finale, I wanted to know how much of the storyline surrounding Love’s murder of Gil (Mackenzie Astin), the anti-vaxxer, was influenced by our country’s current COVID-19 vaccine crisis.
We started talking about the season in February of 2020. That’s when our room opened, so there was no pandemic, and we were all just sitting in a room talking about what is the scariest part about being a parent—what is so terrifying or infuriating that you would hit someone over the head and lock them in a cage? The parents in the room talked about how scared they are when their children are sick.
I think, certainly, we’re all watching that differently than we did a year ago. There’s a lot about that character who’s a really good dad. It wasn’t our goal to paint some kind of caricature or monster.
Still, this seems to be one of the few moments of the series where viewers really empathize with Love; meanwhile, many fans let Joe get away with so much more.
Part of what we’re trying to do is invite you to look a little more deeply at your reactions. For me, I have this knee-jerk reaction to what I see as a romantic hero, where I believe him when he tells me why he’s motivated, and I think he’s being heroic and romantic. The invitation of the book and the show was to look at that a little more deeply. He’s a stalker, he’s a killer—like, is that really what you want in your life?
Hopefully we’re also inviting that question to pop into your head about the women on the show too. Just as much as we are used to lionizing white male romantic heroes, we are so fucking quick to judge women. And by the way, at the top of the list of women are mothers. They really can’t get it right, no matter what they do. So if it makes you pause for just a second in between screaming at your TV, and just be like, “Huh, yeah, she’s not actually worse than he is, but my reaction is different,” that’s good.
That brings me to that moment between Love and Marienne, where we hear what’s really going on alongside Joe’s rationalizations. Love’s like, “He’s obsessed with you,” while Joe is thinking, “No, I’m saving you.” I have to say, I really liked that Marienne instantly believed Love and chose to leave without Joe.
It’s interesting that you say that, because I’ve actually talked to people today who asked me the question, “Who is she running away from?” And I think that maybe some people will watch it and think she’s running away from Love.
Either way, Marienne has good instincts. I actually think most people have good instincts, and then we’re socialized not to listen to them. That’s especially true for women. You hear so often, “I had this weird little feeling, but I was trying to be polite.” Part of Marienne’s story is that she has had quite a journey with that. Her relationship with Joe is not all bad. She is gaining strength from that friendship at times. But it was important to us that ultimately, she’s making an independent decision in that moment because her first priority is her daughter. Romance is cool, but these people are a lot of trouble.
Now that we know we’re getting a fourth season, have you started brainstorming?
Oh, my God, yeah. Basically any question you could ever ask me, the answer is, “What would an anxious person do?” Of course, I think about it and worry about it, but I’ve also had a bunch of really fun conversations with Greg Berlanti, who cowrote the pilot and executive-produces the show. He calls me, and he’s like, “I was just walking down the street and this is what I think the big twist of the next season could be.”
So far every season has been in a new location. Are we sticking around Paris for season 4, or will we pick up with Joe somewhere else?
Especially since we’re still dealing with what we’re dealing with in the world, I don’t expect anything, but the show moves from place to place each season, so it would be really fun to do a season outside the United States.
Every season Joe seems to leave more and more people alive who could come back to haunt him. I’m still waiting for Dr. Nicky (John Stamos) to show back up. Are there any characters you’d be interested in revisiting?
All of them would be fun to revisit! I think anything that puts Joe in a terrible bind is good. We had a handful of plans like that for this season which, of course, was complicated by COVID. I was really happy we got to see James Scully [who plays Forty] again. That was one of the ones at the top of our list. There’s a lot of characters who have Joe’s number, but they're really busy booked actors. Never say never.
What storyline would you say you were the most excited to tell this season?
I got married in September of 2019, so I was writing my wedding vows at the same time as writing the wedding vows that were in the finale of the previous season. I was personally really excited to go into the season to really get into marriage.
In certain ways, I’m still in the honeymoon period because it’s the first couple of years, but we’ve been together for a very long time. That’s kind of the love and intimacy that you see less of as the centerpiece of certainly romantic kinds of stories. We’re much more interested in that first six months where you’re basically on cocaine all day every day because love is so amazing. I was very excited to dive into the complications of that.
Love and Joe never really had a honeymoon period, so you were able to jump right into couples therapy. Did you bring any personal experiences into those scenes?
Neil Reynolds wrote most of the therapy scenes because they’re in those early episodes, but most of us in the writer’s room have been to therapy. I’ve also been to couples counseling.
My husband is a therapist, so he loves therapy. I would jokingly call it prophylactic couples therapy because there’s no such thing as “we’re perfect, we’re fine, but we’ll go just in case.” You get in there and you’re like, “Oh, there’s some shit to talk about.” So if it feels like it got personal, it’s because it did.
Does your husband ever consult when you tackle therapy sessions?
No, he doesn’t, but he does watch the cuts earlier. I had a lot of trepidation when I handed him that. Our pandemic routine became that he would go watch cuts on the iPad in the bathtub. When he came out from having seen the first couples therapy scene, I was really worried because he does a lot of that for people. But he was really amused and says we got it right. So we have the stamp of one extremely biased therapist.
I don’t know if Love has any room to talk, but there was a moment in the finale where Love calls out her neighbors for salivating over other peoples’ trauma. I couldn’t help but think of Gabby Petito’s disappearance and discussions about the ethics of our collective obsession with true crime.
I noticed that because the phrase “missing white woman syndrome” was trending on Twitter, and that was something we brought into the conversation this season. You see a lot about what we care about in our culture from what people are interested in, in a salacious kind of way. But on the flip side, just to be a little less judgmental than Love is in that scene, I think part of why our weird squishy little species is still around—even though a lot of animals on this planet have sharper teeth and should have eaten us by now—is because we are right to be curious about stuff that can hurt us.
Yes, it also illuminates a lot of stuff that’s very fucked up about our society and unfair and that we need to take a hard look at. But it is relevant to your interests to know how to spot someone who could do you harm. To hear the mistakes other people made, so you can try not to make them. The weird cul de sac we go down is, “Well, let me just judge that woman.” Or let me decide that that killer is a monster, that he’s not human, that he’s not like me at all. Those are not helpful because they don’t keep us safe. They actually just give us the illusion that we’re so different, and it could never happen to us.
As I said, I’m an anxious person. I believe anything could happen to any of us at any moment. That’s why I’m interested in that kind of psychology. I want to know so I can spot it.
You season 3 is available to watch on Netflix. Emily Tannenbaum is an entertainment editor, critic, and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Condé Nast
