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These You Clues Suggest Marienne Comes Back In Season 4
Viewers will have to wait until March for the second part of the season.
Spoilers ahead for You Season 4 Part 1. After becoming obsessed with Marienne in Madre Linda last season, Joe Goldberg followed her all the way to Europe during You Season 4 — and of course, it’s not exactly a happy reunion. Joe first spent months searching for Marienne in Paris, but moved to London once he learned she was attending an art fair there. When he finds and chases Marienne down, she’s sure he is going to try to kill her. “You’re a murderer, Joe,” she says, tearfully. And, well, she’s right! But Marienne makes it out of this particular encounter alive, as Joe doesn’t actually want to hurt her.
“You’re wrong about me,” he responds. “You know what? I’m gonna prove it to you.”
Indeed, when confronted by a hitman hired by Love Quinn’s father, Joe is instructed to kill Marienne because she’s the only person who knows he’s still alive. However, he decides to rip the locket off her neck as “proof” that he’s done the job instead. After she safely returns to Paris and her daughter, Juliette, Joe pines from afar. “I do miss having someone out there, someone worth watching,” he says in one of his classic Joe monologues. “A puzzle worth solving — you. But missing you won’t bring you back.”
The first part of You Season 4 follows Joe (er, Jonathan Moore) as he tries to solve the mystery of the Eat the Rich Killer. Despite not being a big fan of his new friends, he does fall for one of them: Kate Galvin. But with Kate in the picture, is Joe’s former flame still on his mind? Will Marienne come back in You Season 4 Part 2?
It seems pretty likely. Tati Gabrielle, who plays Marienne, recently opened up to InStyle about how Marienne becomes her “most grounded self” in Season 4. “She gets to drop the librarian act and drop any filters that she was putting on in order to fit into Madre Linda and to stay under the radar while working toward getting her kid back in her custody battle,” she said. “She’s freer this season, much freer. I think we get to see her in her rawest form, in more ways than one.”
That definitely sounds like a longer character arc than the few scenes we get with Marienne in Part 1, suggesting there’s likely more on the way. But that’s not the only clue in favor of Marienne’s return in You Season 4. Early during Joe’s professor era, he hosts a class discussion about Ted Chiang’s Hell Is the Absence of God, and the students’ back-and-forth seems to parallel Joe’s fraught relationship with Marienne.
“It’s not redemption if it’s done for selfish reasons,” Nadia says about the short story, though her argument could just as easily apply to Joe. Remember the Marienne flashback? “You looked at me with so much fear,” Joe monologues. “I couldn’t stand it. I let you go to prove to you I’m not that man. I would never hurt you.” Sure, he was protecting Marienne — but he was also protecting his sense of self.
As Joe counters, “Does it matter, if he’s doing good?” It’s the kind of question that could be answered with a bookend moment in Part 2, paving the way for Marienne to return and decide for herself whether Joe can be redeemed.
