I’m stumped and irritated after Episode 3 of You Season 5 and an entire 120g of Cadbury’s caramel chocolate. I didn’t like this episode. Many minute details were exposed and explored, but to put it together into a chunk of text while in a chocolate coma…
The beginning of the episode attempts to throw the audience off. We are immediately met by Joe at his typewriter. I guess the writers want you to be on the edge of your seat, thinking what’s real and what’s not. And admittedly, it got me. However, the reality is that Joe is at his typewriter, writing out the situation he’s in to help himself figure out how to handle this Maddie situation – short story short, he scuffs it, and she’s onto him. She realises that Reagan was right about Kate and Joe.
Maddie and Joe are at a stalemate for most of the episode, but by the end, Joe has a plan for how he and Maddie can work together.
This is after Joe tells Maddie that Reagan knows she was having an affair with her husband. Maddie panicked so much that she said dying is less scary than her sister. It is also shared with Joe that Gretchen is Maddie’s biological daughter, not Reagan’s – Reagan forced Maddie to be a surrogate donor for her. Maddie now fears that Harrison is a dead man walking and that she’ll never see her biological daughter again.
Joe ends Episode 3 by asking Maddie, “How would you like to become your sister?” He gets this idea after seeing something Reagan is doing by the end of the episode. I will mention what she is doing at the end of the article.
Still, all a bit of a yawn fest if you ask me.
Kate and Joe are working independently of each other right now as their marriage is experiencing a blip. Again, this episode exaggerates that Joe wants Kate to accept him entirely, but she doesn’t.
Speaking of Joe and Bronte, they go to a charity sale together to pick up a bundle of romance novels for Mooney’s. Following this, Joe offers to walk Bronte to this open-mic night. They go in together, and Bronte runs into Clayton, her ex, to whom she owes much money. He outs “Bronte” as Louise, and more importantly, she steals from him for months.
So… Joe must discover, “Is Bronte/Louise genuine? Or is she using me?” After some vulnerability from Bronte, she convinces Joe that she’s being genuine, and he tells her that she is safe with him—all of her is safe with him.
Joe finds acceptance in Bronte. Therefore, right on cue, Kate rejects Joe, and he has a new obsession. After their conversation, he goes down to his typewriter and writes about his fantasy with her while he tugs himself off. Classic Joe Goldberg.
Regarding Kate rejecting Joe, he pleads for Kate to embrace all of him and let him be her protector, her knight in shining armour, her everything—he’s pleading for his masculinity. He wants to protect his family, regardless of his unethical methods, and he wants to be the man of the house.
But because Kate says no, Joe immediately goes to bed, pulls up Instagram, stalks Bronte, and stalks Clayton. He questions whether he can protect Bronte from Clayton and believes she would accept him for it.
And that’s when his phone beeps and it’s Reagan pretending to be Maddie on Instagram Live, admitting she has been having an affair with her sister’s husband, and therefore is handing her portion of the business over to her sister, Reagan.
Kate begins to panic about losing her seat on her company’s board. That’s when Joe runs to Maddie and asks her the question.
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