This article contains major spoilers for the first episode of You Season 3.

We all know the drill now. If you followed You, the sleazy Lifetime-turned-Netflix thriller about a serial stalker who just can’t help but kill people he becomes obsessed with (and others he just doesn’t like very much), you know what to expect. Joe Goldberg, the certified creep with a dangerously charming baby face played by Penn Badgley, finds a new waifish young lady to “fall in love”, obsessively stalks her for a period of weeks to months, enters into a relationship with her, and then when things start to go wrong, he kills her. Or try to do it, in the case of last season’s paradigm shift finale, where Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) confesses that she is pregnant with their child before he has the chance to crash her. knife in the throat. But even the final moments of this episode, in which Joe takes a peek at his new suburban fence and focuses on his next unfortunate target, tease a version of a familiar narrative for the formula of You. What this new season presupposes: what if it wasn’t?

If you followed You The promo material for Season 3, you know most of it centers around Joe and his new wife’s impending child, or Joe’s new object of obsession, sitting, like Lolita, in a lawn chair in her. well-kept garden, book held open on knees and face obscured by oversized sun hat. We know how it will turn out: Joe’s affection for love will wane, as his new “you” takes over his mind, he will romance her, it will go wrong, then someone will die. . And that’s pretty much how most of Season 3’s first episode unfolds.

Joe and Love have moved to Madre Linda, a California suburb populated by the fitpo version of Stepford’s wives, run by the “momfluencer” Sherry Conrad (a fabulously irritating Shalita Grant), who forces women to compete for her affection while husbands wear Patagonia vests and a grill. In other words, Joe’s book version of Hell on Earth. Love is also unconvinced, missing her net of support in Los Angeles and constantly exchanging verbal blows with her terrible mother, who takes over the babysitting duties of their new son Henry, whom she and Love. continue to call “Forty,” after Love’s late twin brother, and much to Joe’s dismay. The unknown neighbor turns out to be Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus), a real estate agent and wife of a surveillance tech CEO, who takes both Joe and Love under her wing, giving Love advice on how to manage the city’s plastics all in secret. tempting Joe into an affair.

But let’s not forget the big surprise at the end of Season 2, which sets the stage for the entirety of Season 3: Love is just as obsessive, and has as many violent tendencies as Joe, perhaps. even more. It was her saving grace at the end of this season, allowing her to persuade Joe to marry and leave LA for good together, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. So when she finds out that Joe and Natalie have seen each other (thanks to Joe’s horrible box of stolen items from each of his crushes, in which he hid, among other disgusting things, a pouch of coffee with ” NATALIE “clearly written on him, the idiot), she takes matters into her own hands. At the very end of the first episode, Natalie shows Love around a vacant storefront that she wants to rent out and turn into a bakery. But Love follows her into the basement, grabs a handy ax, and kills her.

Ohh, did you think it would be like every time ?? Nope! From there the show can go anywhere, and boy does it. The Bait and Switch in this first episode is a masterstroke on par with the big reveal from the end of the previous season, taking our expectations and smashing them to mush before pulling their teeth out and burying them in the middle. Woodland . That doesn’t mean Joe can’t find another person on whom the moon is, or that Love doesn’t either. And that certainly doesn’t mean the end of all killings, because, well, let’s be real. You Season 3 is a Mr and mrs smith– a comedy of manners, as two serial killers try to blend into the society of the rich, the kind that has Vanity Show articles written about their divorces, while proposing ever more absurd means of getting rid of bodies, playing the concerned citizens as more and more people “disappear”. Is season 3 filmed You from a show so bad it’s good to a show that’s just plain good? Maybe, but we can’t wait to see more anyway.