Camellia Peebles
The best character You ever produced holds up a peach and asks a man if it looks like a butt. This is how Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) enters the show, and it is worth pausing on, because it is the opposite of how every other woman enters Joe Goldberg’s orbit. The others are seen. Joe (Penn Badgley) spots them across a bookstore, decides they are his, and begins the slow architecture of stalking that the show has trained us to recognize as its engine. Love is not seen. Love clocks him first. She catches him looking, and instead of becoming his prey she walks over, peach in hand, and makes the first move. In a series built entirely on a man selecting and hunting women, Love Quinn is the one who selected him back. That is the whole reason she was the only worthy ending the show ever had, and the whole reason it killed her.
Love was Joe’s only true match, and I mean match in the most complete sense: not his equal in charm or his equal in damage (though I daresay she exceeded at both), but his counterweight, the one person in the show’s run who was doing to him what he does to everyone. She is a killer too. She kills to protect the thing she has built, which is the first and most important way she differs from him. When Joe’s obsession with their neighbor Natalie threatens the family, Love does not agonize; she removes the problem, fast and without ceremony. Her violence is centripetal. It pulls inward, toward the home, toward keeping. Joe’s violence is centrifugal, always flinging him outward toward the next woman, the next city, the next self. He kills to acquire. She kills to hold on. And a show smart enough to build those two engines and set them against each other in a suburban kitchen should have been smart enough to know it had already found its ending.
It is worth being precise about what makes Love the show’s finest creation, because it is not that she is good. She is not good. She poisoned her first husband, James, with aconite, meaning only to paralyze him long enough to talk him out of leaving her, but misjudged the dose and killed him. Read that again, because it is the key to her whole character: she did not want him dead, she wanted him to stay. Her monstrousness has a coherent, almost unbearable want at the center of it, and the want is the thing hidden in her name. Love wanted love. She wanted a family, a person who would not leave, a household she could keep sealed and safe and hers. Everything she does, including the killing, proceeds from that single legible desire, and it makes her more human than Joe by a wide margin, because Joe’s want is not a want at all. It is an appetite that consumes its object and moves on. Love is tragic. Joe is just hungry.
The show even names this, if you are paying attention to the Quinn family’s cruelties. Love and her twin brother are named for tennis scores. Forty, the favored one, the golden boy their parents doted on, is named for the score on the cusp of winning. Love is named for zero. For nothing, for the scoreless. She spent her entire life as the child who was not chosen, and the whole of her adult violence is the overcorrection of a woman who was named nothing and refuses, at any cost, to be nothing again. When Forty dies in the second season, shot by a police officer while trying to expose Joe and save his sister, Love loses the one person who ever loved her without conditions, and she doubles down on Joe, on the family, on the sealed suburban house, because it is all she has left of the one thing she was never given. You could build an entire tragedy out of a woman named zero trying to become something. The show had that tragedy in its hands.
And then came Season 3, which is the season where all of this was true and available and the show flinched anyway. Joe and Love move to Madre Linda with their infant son, Henry, and the marriage frays exactly the way it had to, because Joe cannot be kept and Love cannot stop trying to keep him. He fixates on the neighbor, then on a librarian named Marienne, running his same tired cycle. She kills to protect the family, sleeps with a besotted younger neighbor named Theo out of sheer starvation for attention, and slowly loses her grip, not because she is weak, but because she has bet everything on domesticating a man who was never tameable. This is the tragedy the season keeps almost telling. Love was too far inside her own insanity to see the obvious thing, which is that Joe is exactly as untamed as she is and that two untamed things cannot build a house. She thought they were soulmates. He thought the excitement was over. She wanted to keep him; he wanted his hunger back. Nobody could have saved that marriage, and a marriage nobody can save is the most honest thing the show ever wrote.
The finale stages it perfectly and then loses its nerve. Love has spent the whole season cultivating aconite in her garden, playing the long game, out-planning Joe the entire time, and this matters: she was the smarter one. At dinner she coats the handle of the carving knife with the poison, and Joe, touching it, goes paralyzed. And here the show reaches for its most cowardly device. Joe, we are told, had noticed the aconite growing in her garden, researched it, and taken adrenaline from a neighbor’s stash before dinner in anticipation of exactly this, so that as the paralysis takes him he is already counteracting it, and when the moment comes he injects Love with a lethal dose of her own poison instead. Love dies. With her last breath she tells him they are perfect for each other but bad for their son, which is the show admitting, out loud, in the mouth of the woman it is killing, that these two were the true pairing, that she saw him more clearly in death than he ever saw her. And then it kills her anyway.
Understand what happened there, mechanically, because it is the whole problem. Love did not lose because she was outmatched. She lost because the writers needed Joe alive. The conveniently acquired adrenaline is not characterization; it is a life raft thrown to a protagonist the show could not afford to sink. Joe is made omnipotent in that kitchen, gifted a last-second foreknowledge the plot requires and does not earn, because the alternative is that the smarter, more human, more compelling of the two monsters wins, and the show ends, and there is no Season 4 to sell. Love was sacrificed on the altar of the franchise. The most interesting character on television was killed so the least surprising one could keep touring.
Because that is what You became after her. Joe severs a couple of toes, manufactures the confession and evidence necessary to make Love the final scapegoat for the town’s murders, burns the house, and flees to Paris, apparently having produced all the confirmation anyone needs, and the show follows him into a second life and then a third, new city, new obsession, new set of victims who exist to be selected and hunted in precisely the pattern we had already watched several times over. Every season after Love is the show on tour, trading tension for tourism, restaging its one trick in prettier locations. Joe stops being a character and becomes a mascot, the charming killer you are invited to root for again and again because the show has run out of anyone strong enough to stand across from him. Love had charisma; Joe has voiceover. The baby, Henry, becomes a prop with a diaper, handed off to neighbors and retrieved when the plot requires stakes it has otherwise forgotten. The show that once had the nerve to make its protagonist marry his equal loses the nerve to let her win.
The correct ending was there in the Madre Linda house, and it was not subtle. Everyone should have died at that dinner table, or Love should have won it outright, Joe finally out-schemed by the one person who was always a step ahead of him, the hunter caught by the only woman who was hunting back. Picture the show that ends with Love standing over Joe, the family she killed to protect reduced to her and the baby, monstrous and triumphant and utterly alone, a woman named zero who finally scored. It would have been bleak and complete and true. Three seasons was always the right shape: Beck, one bridge, Love, and then the dark curtain. Instead the show chose the version where nobody who matters wins, because the one who mattered had to die so the one who didn’t could catch a flight.
I keep returning to her last line, that they are perfect for each other but bad for Henry, that he will know what Joe is, because it is the most self-aware thing You ever said, and the show buries it in the same scene where it proves it has learned nothing. Love understood them both. She understood that she and Joe were the same species and that the sameness was the doom. She understood, dying, more than the show understood in killing her. Victoria Pedretti played a woman who wanted only the thing her name promised and was denied it by her parents, by her brother’s death, by a husband who could not be kept, and finally by a writers’ room that needed her gone. Love Quinn deserved to win, or deserved to burn the whole house down trying. What she got instead was a hoarded vial of adrenaline and a show that stepped over her body to keep going. She was the best thing You ever had, and killing her is the exact moment it stopped being worth watching.
