You’s Showrunner Explains Joe 2.0 & Season 4’s Murder Mystery Pivot

There’s a murderer on the loose in the first part of You Season 4, and for once, it isn’t Netflix’s resident serial killer Joe Goldberg. At the beginning of the season, Joe (Penn Badgley) is in London and creates a new identity as college literature professor Jonathan Moore. But when the serial murderer — aka the Eat The Rich Killer — targets his new cohort of spoiled, rich, drug-addled socialites, Joe loathes to find himself in the middle of a murder mystery.

“It's a classic beloved literary genre,” You showrunner Sera Gamble tells Bustle of the Agatha Christie-inspired whodunnit season. “We have this incredibly literary protagonist. He loves books. And there was a sort of irresistible meta aspect to putting him in a story that he immediately recognizes. This happens to him a lot. He's like, ‘Oh, I'm in the part where the romantic hero runs through the rain to get back with his beloved. Now he's like, ‘Oh, great. I'm in the lowest form of literature.’”

Over five episodes, Joe/Jonathan attempts to uncover the killer’s identity, and, in the process, reluctantly protects “some really clueless douchebags,” like Adam (Lukas Gage), the black sheep of a wealthy American family. It’s an uncomfortable situation for Joe. “Now he has to be in close quarters with exactly the people he hates the most,” Gamble explains. “It isn't that his opinion of somebody like Adam has changed, it's that his position has changed. He can't walk away. He actually has to protect them.” Especially since they’re friends of his new love interest, Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie).

The more the killer strikes, though, the higher the stakes become for Joe, whom the killer starts to blackmail. His new friends are growing suspicious too. As with any whodunnit, everyone is a suspect — including Joe.

But it seems as though Joe genuinely wants to stop killing and disposing of dead bodies. It’s a stark contrast to his “dark counterpart,” — spoilers ahead — who’s later revealed to be Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), a dangerous man who’s always one step ahead of him. And, for the most part, the season positions Joe as a hero, making many viewers wonder if this could signal a redemption for Joe.

Below, Gamble breaks down Part 1 of Season 4, including Lukas Gage’s golden shower, that Cardi B reference, and whether Joe really has changed.

In previous seasons, Joe was always the stalker and the hunter. Why does Part 1 flip that on its head?

It felt like a really great way to torture the sh*t out of our main character. He wants to leave behind his old ways, and he also wants to balance the karmic scales a little bit for himself. So we wanted to put him in a story where he couldn't just walk away. He had to actually engage with somebody who was doing the worst stuff he used to do, but having more fun.

Joe takes on this entirely different philosophy as Jonathan. Do you want fans to think there's redemption for Joe?

I never think about what I want you to think. That will make a writer crazy. What the writers in the writers' room do is talk about what we're trying to explore by telling the story, and then you get to come out any way that makes sense to you. Part of the fun is that each of us will see it a little bit differently, but the starting point is that Joe believes that he is on a road to redemption. So you can imagine that, over coffee in the morning and on any news cycle, the writers are having conversations about some man who has done something terrible, there were some consequences for him on some level, and he's on what we like to call the redemption tour. It was a theme we were eager to explore because we all had strong opinions about the “redemption” of bad men.

Did Penn believe Joe changed? Were there any conversations with him regarding this “better Joe”?

One of the first questions Penn asked me when we were talking about him coming to play Joe was, “Are we going to redeem this guy?” Because as people know, he had very strong feelings that Joe was horrible. He really had to take a minute to decide if he wanted to live inside this character. And at that point, I said, “We have no agenda to redeem him. And if we get to tell the story for long enough that this would come up, that'll be a real discussion.”

Can you imagine a world where we're at the end of the season, we just have no more story to tell because Joe's now perfect? He's just petting puppies, and he has a little ice cream cart. Where we get him to is a little more challenging, a little more complicated.

What can you tease about Rhys?

The fun really starts when you know who the killer is. Figuring it out and having to investigate a bunch of shady individuals is fun for a while. But we were happy to do half a season of that and then really get into who this killer is and what is going on with them. That's the heart of the show. You could subtitle the title, “What the Hell with Joe Goldberg?” The point of the show is to dig in there. Now we have given him this dark counterpart. I cheekily call it the Serial Killer Buddy movie. Not that Joe wants to be in that movie, but he's been forced into that movie.

Lukas Gage's character, Adam, has a kink that his girlfriend Phoebe learns about. How does this affect their relationship moving forward?

We have a lot of different kinds of sex on the show in general. Joe is very judgmental about a lot of things, and we take a lot of pleasure in hearing Joe's honest thoughts, but we're very clear that kink shaming and sex shaming is not really on the list. The purpose of the golden shower scene is to illuminate in an amusing way that Adam keeps secrets and the key to this character is in why he keeps secrets like that. And Phoebe's not stupid. She feels that, she understands that, and she's what Dan Savage would call GGG — good, giving, and game, meaning if your partner wants it, like, maybe try it. Start from a default position of saying that you're curious about whatever they're into. But unfortunately, the barrier between Phoebe and Adam has nothing to do with any specific kink. It has everything to do with the core of their relationship.

Does Marienne make an appearance in Part 2?

Well, one hopes not because he let her go. I will say there are other kinds of flashbacks in the second half, so maybe you'd see her. But Joe's main problem is Rhys going into the second half of the season.

Are there Easter eggs that allude to any big twists in Part 2?

First of all, I always assume that the audience is smart, and they've watched at least as much TV as I have, so, a certain number of people are going to figure out what's going on. In Episode 1, they'll figure it out, and then the idea is: watch and see if you're right. We'll reward you either way. Yes, there are a lot of Easter eggs.

Probably more than any previous season, it will reward a rewatch because even getting to the end of Part 1, you can go back through and watch this character and know that they're the Eat The Rich Killer. But in general, the throughline of the entire season that we understand as soon as we see Marienne in Episode 1 is that Joe is determined to prove her wrong. And everything that happens to him this season is because Marienne is the first woman that he's ever fallen in love with that he can't dismiss, he can't make an excuse, he can't make her wrong. And so he has to take a hard look at himself and try to change, dare we say.

Whose idea was to put the Cardi B song [“I Like It”] in Episode 1, and how did that happen?

I think we can take credit for that one, just in that we were throwing out a lot of different ideas, and I remembered that she and Penn have a lovely Twitter friendship. She had pitched an idea where she'd be in the show, and I was like, well, in the meantime before we figure out how to make that come true, at least we can have her voice in the show. And I say this with so much love and respect for that song, it’s perfect to chop up a body to.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.