TL;DR
You Season 4 sends Joe Goldberg across the pond for his most twisted identity crisis yet. With an unreliable narrator more unreliable than ever and a surprise villain reveal that makes Fight Club blush, it’s a dark, bloody, and frankly exhausting ride through delusion, denial, and designer trench coats. If you’re prepping for Season 5, just remember: Joe’s body count is higher, his lies are messier, and he somehow managed to land another rich girlfriend. Good luck, New York.

Welcome to Joe’s European Misadventure: Now With 200% More Denial

At this point, watching You is a bit like watching someone convince themselves they’re the hero of the story—while holding a bloody knife and standing over a corpse. Season 4 cranks that up to eleven and sets it against the foggy, gray sprawl of London, where Joe Goldberg goes full Anglophile psychopath under the pseudonym Jonathan Moore.

If Season 3 was about Joe pretending he could be a family man, Season 4 is about Joe pretending he doesn’t remember killing people. Which, as lies go, is both very on-brand and very disturbing.

Following the fire-and-fake-death finale in California, where he framed his wife Love Quinn for a murder-suicide and abandoned his son like a forgotten gym sock, Joe flees to Europe to “find himself.” And by “find himself,” I mean “kidnap his ex again and start a new cycle of violence, delusion, and performative brooding in turtlenecks.”

He becomes a literature professor (because of course he does) and quickly weaves himself into the inner circle of the rich and ridiculous—think Gossip Girl meets Knives Out but everyone’s also emotionally bankrupt.

From Librarian Crushes to Billionaire Daddy Issues: The Women of Season 4

In case you were worried, Joe does find a new obsession. Enter Kate—cool, British, guarded, and unknowingly allergic to men with glass cages. Initially standoffish, she predictably falls into the Joe trap: wounded intellect, emotionally repressed man, seems safe because he reads books and wears cardigans.

Of course, she’s also the daughter of a corporate ghoul with more red flags than a political rally, which only fuels Joe’s need to insert himself into her life and play murder therapist. Kate hates her father, billionaire puppet master Tom Lockwood, and for a while it looks like she might be Joe’s moral counterweight. That is, until she joins him in a Bonnie-and-Clyde-for-the-1% fantasy once her dad is conveniently dead. Joe kills him, obviously. This is You. Nobody ever breaks up over brunch like normal people.

Kate is the season’s paradox: a woman smart enough to see Joe’s darkness but rich enough to make it disappear. She says she wants honesty, and Joe, in a rare moment of clarity, gives it to her. The result? They team up to clean his slate, move back to New York, and reboot their lives like two sociopaths redecorating their trauma.

Plot Twist of the Century: Joe vs. Himself

The big twist in Season 4 is a mind-bender, even for You. Joe’s been playing detective all season, hunting down the mysterious “Eat the Rich” killer who’s taking out his new wealthy friends. Texts, clues, paranoia—it’s a classic whodunnit with Joe assuming someone else must be doing the stabbing for once.

Except… that someone is Joe. Or rather, a version of Joe. Say hello to Rhys Montrose: a real-life political author turned hallucinated alter ego. It’s like Mr. Robot had a baby with Dexter, and the baby took a creative writing class.

Joe’s fractured mind created Rhys as an external projection of his worst instincts. So while Joe thought he was blacking out and waking up next to dead bodies with a hangover and a guilty conscience, it was Rhys—aka his own repressed serial killer side—doing the dirty work. He even kidnaps Marienne again (because what’s a You season without one woman in a cage?), but Joe doesn’t remember doing it.

Watching Joe unravel is painful, fascinating, and honestly, a little exhausting. His brand of self-loathing has now gone full dissociative identity, and it begs the question: Is Joe still human, or just the world’s most charming trauma factory?

Nadia, Marienne, and the Trapped Women of Joe’s World

Let’s talk about the real MVPs of Season 4: the women who don’t fall for Joe’s crap.

First, there’s Marienne. She escaped Joe in Season 3 only to be lured into his orbit again by fate and fiction. Kidnapped and caged (again), she’s the season’s quiet survivor. Her escape is beautifully understated—a clever scheme involving fake pills and a dramatic faint, with the help of Joe’s student, Nadia.

Nadia is a standout: smart, suspicious, and unafraid to follow her gut. She represents the viewer’s skepticism, the one person who actually asks, “Wait, isn’t this guy super shady?” She finds Marienne, helps her escape, and nearly brings Joe down. But Joe, being Joe, turns the tables. He frames Nadia for a murder she didn’t commit, ensuring she becomes another silent victim of his carefully curated narrative.

And that’s the tragedy of You. For every woman Joe claims to love or protect, there’s another buried under his lies—metaphorically, or quite literally, under a bookstore basement.

The End of Pretending: Joe’s Faux Redemption Arc

The climax of Season 4 is a darkly poetic finale to Joe’s journey across the pond. After killing Kate’s dad and trying (unsuccessfully) to off himself, Joe gets rescued—because of course fate won’t let him go that easily.

In his final moments of honesty (or what passes for honesty with this guy), he comes clean to Kate. About everything. The murders. The stalking. The cages. And she doesn’t leave. In fact, she uses her wealth to erase his sins. It’s the perfect ending for Joe: absolution through affluence, salvation through complicity.

Season 4 ends not with Joe learning a lesson, but with Joe ascending. New name? Nah. Old identity back. Old city? Check. New wardrobe? Probably. Same monster? Always.

Final Thoughts: A Bloody, Beautiful, Bonkers Penultimate Ride

Season 4 of You is not flawless—it drags in places, leans too hard into its twisty gimmicks, and occasionally forgets it’s supposed to be fun. But it is ambitious. It takes big swings. It dares to say: what if our anti-hero is actually the villain of his own mind?

It’s also a turning point. Joe has always lied to us—and to himself—but now, with Rhys gone and the mask peeled back, he can’t pretend anymore. He’s the killer, the stalker, the manipulator. And Season 5 promises to be the reckoning.

Final Verdict

You Season 4 is messy, moody, and more self-aware than ever. It’s the show’s darkest hour—a psychological thriller that drowns its protagonist in his own lies and dares him to swim. Joe Goldberg is no longer hiding. The final season will show us if he can survive being seen.

You season 5 airs April 24 on Netflix.