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Marienne’s Fate In You Season 4, Explained
There was a twist — but not quite the one viewers were expecting.
Spoilers ahead for You Season 4 Part 2. Since the new season started in February, viewers wondered how Marienne would return to You Season 4. After all, actor Tati Gabrielle told InStyle that her character would enter “her rawest form” this season — so her safe and (relatively) uneventful ride home to Paris in the first half of the season seemed like it couldn’t be the full story.
The second batch of episodes more than delivered on Gabrielle’s promise, of course. As it turns out, Marienne never actually left London. Several fan theories, like this one from Redditor rawviews1818, posited that Marienne might have actually been killed by Joe because she was never explicitly shown on her train home. Fortunately, her fate wasn’t quite so final.
In Part 2, it’s revealed that Joe drugged the drink Marienne was holding as she was preparing to board her train home. But he didn’t kill her, he kidnapped her to resume their relationship, then locked her in one of his signature cells in the middle of his season-long psychological breakdown.
Joe became so unwell, in fact, that he forgot where he was even keeping Marienne. Fortunately, Nadia found Marienne and saved her from starving in her cell. Then, the pair brainstormed a way for Marienne to return home to her daughter Juliette — who Marienne used as motivation to stay alive in the isolating cell.
Plan A was for Nadia to drug Joe with ketamine and allow Marienne to kill him once and for all. However, Nadia got held up on the way to Marienne’s cell. This forced Marienne to enact Plan B: take pills that made her heart beat so slow, Joe would think she was dead.
When he found Marienne seemingly lifeless, Joe didn’t take bloody measures to dispose of her body, like he did with his other victims. In this case, he actually wanted Marienne’s body to be found so that her daughter wouldn’t wait for her mom to come. To that end, he placed Marienne on a nearby park bench and waited for someone to find her.
Unbeknownst to Joe, Nadia was that someone. She revived Marienne and, by the end of the You Season 4 finale, Joe’s latest would-be victim was seen back in Paris with her daughter — making her one of very few people to survive knowing the real Joe Goldberg.
As for Marienne’s future on the show, Gabrielle recently told BuzzFeed that Marienne “would definitely want to facilitate [Joe’s demise],” if that ever happens.
“That’s just the type of person that she is,” she said. “If she sees that justice is not being brought, then I feel like she’s one to initiate it. But I also think that because Marienne does have a really big capacity for empathy, I don’t know that she’d necessarily revel in watching somebody suffer. I think just the knowledge of it would be enough.”
Justice is definitely not coming for Joe by the end of Season 4, of course — in fact, armed with the empire Kate inherited from her dad, it seems he’s more unstoppable than ever. But it’s exciting to know that Marienne is alive and, just maybe, dreaming of taking Joe down.
