Yahoo Movies You season 4 part 1 recap: Joe finds a spot of bother in London
Joe Goldberg's back, baby, and so is that wickedly witty inner monologue that almost makes you root for him despite, well, everything.
Like its lead character, You is a master of reinvention. Season 1 was all New York intellectualism and rain-washed streets. Season 2 hopped coasts to darken that sunny California vibe. Season 3 found Joe barely surviving the exquisitely manicured suburbs. And season 4, the first half of which dropped Thursday on Netflix, finds our favorite well-read killer navigating British high society in an unfamiliar position: stalk-ee, not stalker. Let's recap!
Episode 1: Joe Takes a Holiday
Meet Professor Jonathan Moore. He's bearded and wearing the hell out of a vest and rolled-sleeve dress shirt while presiding over a class of smart, eager-to-argue literature students at Darcy College in London.
Yep, Joe (Penn Badgley) has found the perfect new identity, and he congratulates himself for keeping vaguely racist white men off his syllabus in this tweedy utopia. But nothing gold can stay — especially not if you're presumed dead and hiding out in London after murdering your wife to keep her from murdering you first.
Although Joe's voiceover tells us that he's sworn off love and is trying to keep to himself, he's nevertheless drawn to his neighbors Malcolm Harding (Stephen Hagan), a wealthy, brainless colleague at Darcy, and Malcolm's girlfriend Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie), a tightly wound art gallerist.
From his flat's vantage point across from their big picture window, Joe admits that he misses having someone worth watching, but he forces himself to look away when he catches Kate enjoying some hands-down-her-pants solo time while Malcolm's out.
Netflix Penn Badgley
Then one night Joe saves Kate from muggers, and as thanks, Malcolm drags him out for a night at Sundry House, the exclusive SoHo club with an annual fee of £25,000. If you're wondering whether Malcolm's a rich guy with a heart of gold, rest assured he is not. In his mind, the wealthy are the real victims, preyed upon by the scum-by-birth beneath them.
At Sundry house, we meet the rest of the new characters this season — rich, gorgeous, and breathtakingly awful, the lot of 'em. There's American Adam Pratt (Lukas Gage, who I sincerely hope has been able to upgrade his living situation), the owner of Sundry House and boyfriend of Lady Phoebe Borehall-Blaxworth (Tilly Keeper), Kate's sweet bestie. Blessing Bosede (Ozioma Whenu) is a Nigerian princess and NFTs pyramid scheme queen, Simon Soo (Aidan Cheng) is a broody artist, and his sister Sophie (Niccy Lin) is a jet-set influencer. Roald Walker Burton (Ben Wiggins) is a protofascist with an alarming knife collection, Connie (Dario Coates) owns horses, and Gemma Graham-Greene (Eve Austin) is a braying, racist nightmare.
Joe finds one worthwhile person among the sneering elites: Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), who grew up in hardscrabble poverty before discovering he was the son of a duke. He adapted to his new lifestyle, wrote one of the best memoirs Joe's ever read — high praise there; we all know Joe's a literary snob — and is considering running for mayor of London.
In the middle of the obnoxious excess of Sundry House, Rhys and Joe bond over their awful childhoods, and I start to worry. Rhys seems great, which means there's a higher-than-average chance he's going to turn out to be the worst of them all, right?
Joe's night quickly turns into a alcohol-soaked nightmare. Phoebe forces absinthe down his throat, and the one-percenters start competing to see who can be the most loathsome. Malcolm wins by saying crude and demeaning things about Marienne, the one who got away in season 3.
"If I could move, I'd kill this guy," Joe seethes as he careens toward a blackout. And that right there is the appeal of Joe Goldberg: he loathes the people we loathe, and he does it in such a droll, relatable way that you can't help but laugh and agree.
Then again, Joe might actually kill that guy, which is where the similarities end.
And oops, that seems to be what happens. Joe wakes up on his own couch wrapped in a fuzzy rainbow coat with Malcolm stabbed to death on his kitchen table, a pinkie finger missing.
Joe has no memory of doing a murder, and he curses the whole time he's dragging the body to the boot of his borrowed car. "I've got till dark to figure out what the hell to do with him and mentally prepare to drive on the wrong side of the road," he grumbles.
So yeah, Marienne's (Tati Gabrielle) still a sore spot. Before he became Jonathan Moore, Joe fled Madre Linda and tracked Marienne from Paris to London, where he confronts her at an art fair. He chases her into an empty building, and she pulls a knife on him, clearly terrified. But she's brave (or foolish?) enough to tell him the truth: he's not the good man who did a bad thing like he thinks he is. He's a murderer.
Joe's shaken by this accusation and attempts to prove her wrong by letting her go unharmed. Their confrontation's witnessed by Elliot Tannenberg (Adam James), a hitman hired by Joe's former father-in-law.
Although Love's dad wants Joe dead, Elliot would rather retire. In exchange for the money in Love's secret account, Elliot sets Joe up with the Jonathan Moore identity and lets him go — provided Joe silences Marienne, the last loose end.
But Joe can't bring himself to kill her and instead swipes her locket as proof of death. He's still holding on to it as season 4 gets underway, and if that doesn't turn out to be Chekhov's incriminating jewelry by the end of the season, I'll eat my deerstalker cap.
Back in the present, Joe's relieved to find that British sawmills use similar tools to American ones and makes quick work of chopping Malcolm's body up into dumpable pieces, pausing once when he has to vomit and once when he uncovers Malcolm's Prince Albert piercing.
Body dispatch complete, Joe returns the furry rainbow coat to Sundry House (raise your hand if you'd have kept it!) and finds Rhys there drinking alone. Again, they recognize something damaged in each other, and Rhys says he's using that damage as the catalyst for a new path to protect the people he loves, including the city of London. Oh, God, he's absolutely going to end up as awful as the rest of them, I just know it.
On campus, Joe bumps into Kate, who's worried about Malcolm's disappearance and who doesn't trust the way he's parachuted into her friend group. She grudgingly invites him to a dinner at Phoebe's insistence.
When Joe arrives for the party, he gets a message on Evanesce, a high-end disappearing-message app that he doesn't remember installing on his phone. It reads, "Hello, you. You surprised me, handling Malcolm like that."
Joe's at once relieved that he didn't kill Malcolm and alarmed that someone from the Sundry House bash is trying to frame him. So he heads inside to sit down for dinner with a murderer.
Well, a fellow murderer.
New places, new players, and a new you to obsess over. Unlike Joe, death will not be taking a holiday this season.
Bookbindings
A moment, please, to appreciate Penn Badgley's comedy chops, first when Malcolm hands Joe a baggie of drugs that he hilariously, fussily tosses away, and second when he refers to it as a soccer match before huffing, "Yes, I know that's not what they call it." It's so good to have you back, Joe.
Henry alert! Joe tells us that leaving his son behind in Madre Linda was the hardest thing he's ever done. Let's just hope Henry didn't inherit a single thing from either of his parents.
"A man named Mooney" — yep, Joe's horrific mentor isn't forgotten this season either. Joe's about to make Malcolm's murder his circus and his monkeys.
Episode 2: Portrait of the Artist
"I'm in a whodunit, the lowest form of literature."
Solving Malcolm's murder may have left Joe at sea in a new literary genre, but his whip-smart student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman, a charming scene-stealer) is happy to school him on the conventions while busting his chops for being a literary snob.
When Joe lies that he's working on his own crime thriller, she tells him that whodunits are fun. While white male geniuses are called brilliant for writing books that are dull as dirt, genre authors — which often include women, nonbinary writers, and people of color — draw readers in with entertaining prose and social commentary. They require no coincidences, and motives usually range from sex to money to revenge. Also, the first suspect is usually the second victim.
Joe quickly rules out Elliot, who's meditating in the mountains, only to get an Evanescence message from the new you, gloating that he knows the color of Joe's jacket. To be fair, though, brown's a pretty safe guess.
From there, Joe is summoned to Phoebe's place. He made quite the impression on her during their conversation when he was out of his mind on absinthe. Although he has no memory of what he said to make her think he saw the real truth of her, it was enough for her to fold him into her circle of friends — much to the dismay of Adam and Vic (Sean Pertwee), Phoebe's bodyguard.
Phoebe invites him to Simon's gallery opening and orders him to select a suit from the closet of freebies she gets from designers. There he finds himself the object of scorn from the rest of Phoebe's group. "I'm in a West End revival of Mean Girls," he gripes.
But dropping Phoebe's name is enough to get them to leave him alone and turn their vicious attention on Malcolm, whom everybody hated. He also can't help but notice that Kate seems to be the only person with an actual job.
Netflix Penn Badgley, Charlotte Ritchie
Joe's next stop is Malcolm's office, where he finds a false-bottom lamp with a wad of cash and a notebook full of IOUs and other cryptic scribbles. He bumps into Nadia as he's leaving, and she helps him again by telling him that his fictional detective needs a super skill, like Holmsian deduction. Joe realizes he has one of those: "I'm… observant." Sure, Joe. Observant.
A note in Malcolm's book links Adam to "dagger," so Joe follows Adam to a staff-only area of Sundry House and watches as Adam happily receives a golden shower from an employee with a dagger tattoo.
That… was not on my bingo card for You season 4. Same for Joe, apparently, who's still processing what he saw when Vic grabs him. Joe lies that he's doing research for a book about the rich. Oooh, is he gonna call it Inside? Is the protagonist Dylan Hunter? Vic rifles through Joe's pockets, keeps Malcolm's cash, and lets him go.
Time for the gallery opening! To avoid the paparazzi, Joe slips in through the back with a woman who knows the door code. Once inside, he focuses on Adam. He's high on Molly and intently studying an egg on a pedestal that you can buy for £70,000 and break to see what's inside. Um, it better be a replacement £70,000 for the bundle I just dropped on that egg.
Adam warns Joe that Malcolm's a blackmailer, and Joe realizes this honestly makes it unlikely that Adam's the murderer. He's back to square one. Also, Adam buys the egg.
But hey, there's actual art here too. Joe finds himself gripped by Simon's oversized paintings of hairless cats. Rhys, too, appreciates the power of the art, and Joe hesitantly asks how such a good guy is friends with this pack of jackals. Rhys says they were kind to him when he needed it.
Their conversation's interrupted when the woman who let Joe in splashes red paint on the cat paintings, shouting that Simon's a gaslighting piece of s---. Simon tries to play it off as part of the opening but afterward tells Kate that if she doesn't make sure the vandal's silenced, she'll never work with another artist again.
Joe saves the day with his observation skills, leading Kate to the vandal thanks to the hostel key he saw sticking out of her pocket. There they find Blue Cahill, who says she painted those canvases, not Simon. They're of her aunt's cat Isis — another notation in Malcolm's book — and Simon got her hooked on drugs to discredit her claims.
Kate writes her a check for three thousand pounds and leaves, while Joe sticks around to confirm that Malcolm threatened to expose Simon. Enter a new suspect!
Er, new victim. Simon almost immediately turns up with a knife in his chest and a missing ear.
Naturally, the friend group gathers to mark Simon's death with alcohol and a general callous disregard, although Joe does learn that Kate's secretly paying for Blue's rehab and Rhys also knew that Simon was a user and a liar.
Then Joe returns home to find that the new you has been busy wallpapering his flat with Joe Goldberg clippings, punctuated by a disappearing text saying, "Hello, Joe."
Bookbindings
I'm just gonna say it: paint-splattered Isis looked cool.
LOL, of course Joe finished Infinite Jest. What a delight to see Nadia breezily schooling her professor in the conventions of popular literature. I want her mythological creatures mystery on my Kindle right now.
Okay, but what was in that egg???
Episode 3: Eat the Rich
Boy does Joe not like being stalked.
At first, he attempts to ignore you, but that leads to an "I won't be ignored, Dan" escalation. Malcolm's finger is mailed to the London Dispatch, and a text threatens that Simon's ear is next — along with Joe's name, if he doesn't confess to his real identity. Joe angrily complies, texting, "If I'd done it, I had no other options."
Next he has to deal with the police offers Kate sent his way. He lies and says Malcolm told him about blackmailing Simon, offering up Blue's name and whereabouts.
Once they're gone, you texts to suggest that Joe needs to eliminate Kate, which sends Joe into a frenzy looking for surveillance devices in his apartment.
So that's on his mind at Simon's funeral, where picketers holding "eat the rich" signs have amassed outside and the filthy rich are all on edge in case they're next on the murderer's list. Rhys delivers a poignant eulogy, then the group retires to Sundry House, where Joe tried to cozy up to Vic by talking like they're both outsiders. Mistake! Vic is loyal to Lady Phoebe.
Netflix Ozioma Whenu, Ben Wiggins, Dario Coates, Lukas Gage, Tilly Keeper, Charlotte Ritchie, Niccy Lin
Another text from you has Joe worried about Kate's safety, so he follows her to a pub. Listen, the woman's making plans to bury her philandering boyfriend's finger. Let her drink in peace!
Her animosity toward Joe has been steadily building since they met, but the ice thaws a bit when she confides that she had to guard her emotions while growing up, so she doesn't know how to be the grieving girlfriend now. Joe suggests that burning something of Malcolm's could help. I mean, it worked for him with the Madre Linda house.
One thing Kate can do to ease her grief is invite Joe to a gated park where she and Malcolm used to have sex. Joe resists for about 2.6 seconds before rolling on top of her, agreeing to her demand that there's no kissing. Vic watches them from a distance.
The next morning, Joe wakes up on Kate's couch and takes the opportunity to sneak into Malcolm's study. Earlier in the episode, Nadia was desperate to retrieve a love letter she'd written to Malcolm, whom she was sleeping with, and this is Joe's chance to get it back for her. He locates it behind a hideous oil painting of Malcolm himself just before Kate finds him snooping and kicks him out.
But he still wants to protect Kate from you, who's now texting to suggest that killing turns Joe on. He angrily rejects that, adamant that he's a good man, not someone who gets off on murder.
Joe follows Kate to the crypt where they'll inter Malcolm, and there he's confronted by Vic. The bodyguard finds Malcolm's signet ring in Joe's pocket, presumably slipped there by someone who bumped into him at the funeral or on the street. Vic starts to dial the police, so Joe brains him with a mausoleum vase.
During their struggle, Vic shoots Joe in the foot, hilariously hitting the void where his missing toes are. Joe eventually strangles Vic with his own tie and buries him with Simon and his gold-plated coffin. And no, he didn't enjoy that murder: "My dick's never been softer. I hated that." Oh, Penn, your voiceover work is better than ever this season.
Joe arrives home dejected at blowing his "I mean it this time, no more murders" vow. And it's an interesting question, isn't it? Could he have cleaned up his life if Malcolm's murderer hadn't come along? He did let Marienne go twice, and he'd avoided killing in Madre Linda until Love made the first move. Then again, Joe's proven over and over that a serial murderer can't change his spots.
You texts again, and at first Joe wants to lash out at this upending of his life, but he holds back, realizing that what you wants is a kindred spirit. He texts that killing Vic was exhilarating, and he crosses his fingers that you will want an in-person meeting so he can put an end to this.
As he waits for a reply, he watches Kate move around her flat, drinking straight from the bottle. She meets Joe's gaze across the distance as she burns the big portrait of Malcolm. Good for her! What a terrible boyfriend. And also RIP or whatever.
Joe's pulled away when Nadia shows up to retrieve her letter. He promises he didn't read it, but she says that would've been fine because it's very well written. Nadia's the best. Joe better not harm a hair on her smart little head.
He gives her a Joan Didion book and tells her that caring for the wrong people doesn't make us bad, only human. Too bad he's, you know, a prolific killer; the two of them have a good mentor-mentee relationship going on.
Also, his earlier gambit pays off, and you texts to ask for a meetup. Joe pumps his fist in victory, then tells you to leave Kate alone. "She's mine."
Afterward, Phoebe summons him to Sundry House, where the gang's all there with crossed arms and guarded body language as the police step forward to ask Joe some questions.
Bookbindings
"He liked corgis and soup." What a touching tribute Phoebe gave Malcolm!
Did you all clock that blond photographer in the paparazzi scrum at the funeral? She was also at Simon's opening, and she looked pretty darn interested in Joe both times.
No idea if this'll come into play later, but it's worth noting that the student Nadia spars with the most in class is the son of a newspaper owner who's spreading gossip about Malcolm and his murder. If there's one thing I know about genre fiction, it's that you don't introduce a new character for no reason.
Episode 4: Hampsie
The bored, beautiful rich are headed to Lady Phoebe's house in the country, which can mean only one thing: it's Agatha Christie time! Bad things are going to happen at this party.
Hampsie, as Phoebe calls it, turns out to be an eye-poppingly massive home. When Joe arrives, having sailed through his check-the-boxes police interrogation at Sundry House, we get an overhead vehicle exit shot straight out of Bridgerton.
As everyone mills around outside, Gemma totters up to Joe to be demeaning, racist, and all-around awful, and Joe voice-overs that if the killer has to strike again, they could do worse than Gemma. If we're keeping score, Roald also goes out of his way to make Joe feel small and unwelcome. Say what you will about Blessing and Sophie, but they treat Joe like he's beneath their notice, which is somehow better in this group.
At least Kate's tolerating him at this point, which is good since they've been assigned adjoining bedrooms. Kate insists that they won't be using the easy access for shagging purposes, but we'll see about that.
When Joe receives a note directing him to the portrait gallery, he assumes it's from you and grabs the garrote he packed in a hollowed-out book. Never leave home without it.
Netflix Penn Badgley
He arrives to find Phoebe in full seduction mode. He tries to shut her down gently, assuring her that she's beautiful, and she snaps, "Yes, I know. I'm a ten." The self-confidence of a queen right there!
Realizing that she senses something's off with her and Adam, Joe tells her that their problems might have nothing to do with her at all. This satisfies Phoebe, and she sends him on his way.
Up next is a croquet game that makes the Bridgertons' Pall Mall antics seem like child's play, with Gemma forcing one of the staff to use his body as a hoop. Kate heads inside in disgust.
Meanwhile, Adam pulls Joe away for a private chat, but it's not to reveal that he's the Eat the Rich killer. Nope, he wants to talk about marriage. He loves Phoebe, but he doesn't want to give up the secrets that make him feel alive. Then again, he's having financial troubles and Phoebe's rich. Shouldn't have bought that egg, my guy!
In the end, Adam decides to follow the money. In truth, Joe wasn't necessary for this whole conversation, but hey, he gives great listening face. Also, Adam lets it slip that Roald's the one who wanted to invite Joe. Iiiiiinteresting.
Back in their adjoining rooms, Joe overhears Kate ordering the private security guys hanging around the party to stay outside. Then she asks for Joe's help untangling her necklaces, which naturally leads to undressing. All that porcelain skin! Who can blame him? But they stop themselves from going any further just as Roald knocks to ask Kate for a pre-dinner swim.
When Joe wonders aloud why Roald hates him, Kate says he acts hard so non-aristocrats don't think he's soft. Hard? Are we calling Roald's psychotic jackass bullying "hard"? What Joe can't figure out is why Roald isn't that way with Kate. She works! She isn't heir to any fortunes! She's basically living impoverished compared to her friends.
Joe finds the answer in Roald's room: he's obsessively in love with Kate. His camera's full of shots of her taken with long lenses, including up-skirt photos and shots of her undressing. So Roald loves Kate. Malcolm cheats on Kate and ends up dead. Simon threatens Kate's career and ends up dead. It tracks. Also, watch out, Joe. Roald's not going to like some nobody professor touching Kate's neck.
A million undercurrents swirl at breakfast the next morning, with Kate quietly telling Joe how much she hates Gemma's behavior, then blowing Roald off for tennis. She also catches Joe watching Adam and asks if they both know what the other knows. Does Kate also know about the piss-play, then?
A frustrated Roald goads Joe into going hunting with him. Don't do it, Joe! Roald takes great pleasure in killing the pheasants, whereas Joe believes in gun control, which makes me laugh. Joe's such a good progressive about everything not murder-related.
Roald explains that he's been looking out for Katie since they were at a Rhode Island boarding school together. (Sidenote: really? Rhode Island? And Katie??). He's never approved of Kate's male companions. Then again, he says as he points his gun at Joe's back, most of them end up dead.
Kate saves the day by popping up to shoot a pheasant and walk with Roald back to the house. So, um, he was just trying to scare Joe here, right? Or was he actually going to plug him in the woods?
Roald tells Kate to quit playing with boys and to claim her place in the world. But Kate wants no part of it and insists that she's not like Roald and the rest. She says she doesn't have a good heart, but Roald protests, sounding more warm and human than he ever has.
Later as Kate and Joe dress for dinner, fussing with his cufflinks turns out to be a major aphrodisiac, and they undo all that dressing-for-dinner work by having sex. Joe realizes he's starting to have feelings for Kate. Poor woman. This never ends well. Also, Joe's a lot of bad things, but I will say that's he sticking with Kate's episode 3 request that they not kiss.
At dinner, the conversation turns to the poor — and remember that to this group, that's literally the rest of the world — as they casually, viciously discuss their superiority and lament that Rhys skipped out on the weekend to win votes for his not-yet-announced mayoral campaign.
Then they turn on Joe, with Gemma suggesting that the "bargain-bin Colin Firth" is the true Eat the Rich Killer. Kate tells them all to back off, and everyone's cruelly amused that Joe doesn't know the truth about her: she'd be first to the guillotine in a revolution.
At this point, the staff interrupts to announce that Phoebe's been "murdered," and everyone heads to the drawing room to pick up a "weapon" and find the killer. Kate takes the opportunity to come clean to Joe: her father's one of the most powerful and most evil men on the planet.
He's a corporate raider who covers up sexual assaults, sics police on protesters, and once falsified water reports so he'd earn £400 million — never mind that several kids ended up getting cancer. It's why she hides her vast wealth; she's trying to escape her family legacy and be a decent person.
And like that, Joe falls a little further. After all, he understands wanting to escape your past but backsliding with every little slip.
With that thawing of the ice, we barrel toward the end of the episode. First, Phoebe catches Adam in an intimate conversation with one of the staffers. Then Roald finds Joe searching his room for more evidence and tosses him out the damn window.
Thankfully, it's a short fall, and Joe's okay-ish. He limps back into the house, picking up his pace when he hears a blood-curdling scream. He heads straight for Kate's room, where he finds her holding a knife over Gemma's bloody body.
Bookbindings
Okay, look, murder is never the answer, but when it comes to Gemma, I don't not understand it, ya know?
Of course Phoebe has a collection of penis candles molded from her former lovers.
Speaking of throwing people out of windows, when's The Great coming back?
Episode 5: The Fox and the Hound
Seeing and being seen. That's what the first half of this season's been about. Yes, it means showing up at paparazzi-mobbed events and talking about who you're wearing. But it's also about who sees you, who knows you. And sometimes the people who truly see you aren't the ones you want or expect.
Malcolm saw his friends and punished them for it. Phoebe thinks Joe saw her truths through a haze of absinth. Marienne? She saw Joe.
But Joe doesn't quite see Kate yet. Her utter calm as she stands over Gemma's body leads him to bitterly conclude that she's you and has been manipulating him all along.
She refuses to let her father clean this all up for her — Understandable! She wants to stay out from under his thumb! — so he suggests they stuff Gemma's body in the trunk at the foot of the bed and move it to the game larder.
Then we come to the funniest stretch of these five episodes. Phoebe bursts into Kate's room and perches like a queen on the trunk with the body, and Joe and Kate try to hold it together as she tells them that she caught Adam with a servant. She's fine with his philandering and his pansexuality, but she worries that he's hiding a piece of his heart.
Joe encourages her to go talk to Adam about what he's hiding. Like, kink things. When Phoebe still doesn't get the hint, Kate tells her to scram so she and Joe can have sex.
Once she's gone, they lift the trunk, but the bottom breaks and out tumbles Gemma's body. New plan: Gemma's going out the window, and we watch from the parlor as she plummets past the glass while Adam bends to snort a line, landing with a thud.
Once they're in the larder, the comedy stops as Kate holds a knife to Joe's throat and accuses him of the same murder and manipulation he's been assuming she did.
Joe immediately comes clean: Malcolm's body was left on his table, and he's been trying to protect Kate ever since. He offers Kate half-truths about the killer threatening him over his past, including his bad marriage and the loss of his son.
He's already sweaty and disheveled from the fall out the window and the effort of moving the body, and the confession leaves his expression ravaged by shame, anguish, vulnerability. Is it a convincing act — or is it as real as anything can be for Joe? Either way, it's an exquisite performance from Penn Badgley.
Once they're back in the house, Kate realizes she left her engraved bracelet in the larder, so Joe heads back to retrieve it while Kate takes care of the mess left behind in her room.
Netflix Charlotte Ritchie, Penn Badgley
While Joe and Kate have been dealing with Gemma, Phoebe and Adam have been breaking up.
At first, Adam's confused about why Jonathan would encourage Phoebe to ask about his kink. But she offers to participate and runs through an outstanding list of options (pegging, feet, cake-sitting, that weird falling-down-the-stairs thing) before landing on golden showers.
She's well-hydrated and ready to go, but Adam's reluctance eventually penetrates her good, giving, and game spirit. He admits that his kink is about the shower provider being beneath him socially yet having power over him. Phoebe concludes that he doesn't consider them equals in their relationship, and she ends things for both of their sakes.
Afterward she makes a beeline to Kate's room and finds a crime scene. At this point, Kate has no choice but to fill her in. Phoebe, chilled out thanks to Ativan, says it's karma for Gemma having her driver run over pheasants for fun back in the day. God, that woman was awful.
From the hall, Roald overhears Kate say she thought Jonathan was the murderer there for a second, and that's all it takes. He was already on a tear about the good old days when the aristocracy was the law and could kill whomever they liked, and then a pissed (ha—sorry!) post-breakup Adam reminded him that Jonathan's sleeping with Kate.
He marches Joe inside at rifle-point to face justice. At first, Adam, Sophie, and Connie are amused at Roald's insistence that Joe's the Eat the Rich Killer, but when Roald triumphantly produces the bloody gloves and bracelet he found on Joe, the mood shifts.
Roald figures his Supreme Court justice uncle will let him get away with one little murder and sentences Joe to death, planning to hunt him like a fox.
Adam, still smarting from Joe's involvement in his breakup, tackles Joe, who knocks him out and takes off running, Roald on his heels. It's The Crown by way of Guy Ritchie, and Roald's enjoying it to a disturbing degree.
Joe hides behind a tree and leaps onto Roald, bashing his head into the ground. And as he lies there stunned, a third figure emerges from the trees to drawl, "Hello, Joe."
It is, as I feared, Rhys. He conks Joe in the head with a rifle, and Joe wakes up chained in Hampsie's dungeon. Rhys expects him to be grateful that Roald's trussed and ready to be posthumously framed for all the murders. After all, Joe's been the inspiration for Rhys' project.
Joe's alarmed to hear that Rhys has a project and leans in a little too far, going all crazy eyes about how glad he is to meet the real Rhys.
Oops. Rhys realizes Joe's putting on an act, just like he did after killing Vic. He tells Joe he's in denial about who he really is, which... yes. One hundred percent he is. It's what Marienne tried to tell him too, but Joe refused to hear it.
Rhys, on the other hand, has fully embraced that side of himself, and he's disappointed in Joe's reluctance. He kicks over a lantern, setting the flammables in the dungeon on fire. If Joe can escape, they can revisit the conversation back in London. If not, well, looks like his "frame the American" plan is back on track.
Side note: Rhys' accent has slipped here, right? It's not as posh, like he's sliding back to his childhood cadences?
Upstairs, Kate and Phoebe are shocked to find their high-as-balls friends all armed with medieval-type weapons. Kate eventually tires of waiting, grabs an axe, and marches off to sort things out.
Adam, meanwhile, wakes up in Phoebe's lap, and she strokes his hair as they exchange "I love you's." Awww, are they this season's Sherry and Cary? I hope they can make things work! Then smoke starts to fill the house, and the rich folk flee.
In the dungeon, Roald wakes up, and he and Joe start frantically pulling at their chains. Joe manages to get loose and hesitates — who can blame him? — before setting Roald free too.
Kate arrives to pull them both up through the gated exit in the ceiling, and Roald watches as she and Joe end up entwined on the ground. Then all three of them back away as the house burns. I mean yes, absolutely, eat the rich, but this is hard to watch. All those antiques! The art! The architecture!
Safely back in his flat, Joe watches news reports about the fire and Gemma's murder. He did get an apology from the group, although "there's not much to say after you extrajudicially sentence an innocent man to death," he says.
The one person he does want to see knocks on his door and nervously asks if he wants to come to the pub with her. But Joe knows it's dangerous to let Kate know any more about him, so he turns her down. She storms away mad and hurt.
But the truth is, Joe's already in a relationship with you. With Rhys.
Rhys, who's just announced his candidacy for mayor of London, promising that he's got big plans for the city.
Joe's got a promise too: "I'm coming for you."
The other part of the question about who really sees you is this: are you willing to accept it when someone holds up a mirror so you can see your own reflection?
Kate runs from it. Rhys keeps it hidden. And Joe shoves it away with both hands.
"If something doesn't grow, it rots," Kate says of Gemma. For most of that pack of feral elite, this statement is true. But what is Rhys growing into? And where will Joe be by the end of season 4?
I can't wait to find out. See you in a month for the back half of the season!
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