You Recap: Old Habits Die Hard
Just in time for Easter, Joe has been resurrected. Kate also has the glowy, relaxed disposition of someone who knows her husband will commit homicides for her. See, it just goes to show that suppression never works. You have to be true to yourself!
Kate wisely suggests that Joe burn all his “fiction” wherein he graphically details the murders he’s done. He says he will. Instead he stashes them in his human aquarium. I love the idea that, on top of everything Joe is guilty of (stalking, assault, multiple homicides, etc.), he is also an insufferable wannabe writer whose prose, you just know, is unreadably self-indulgent and bad. Burning his drafts would be like burning a book! He couldn’t possibly!
Joe, who has been rich by marriage since the start of season three, struggles with being seen as the person he is — a wealthy man who, despite constantly bitching about them, consistently surrounds himself with other rich people — when deep down he’s still that ragamuffin who killed his mother’s abusive boyfriend, bounced around the foster system, and then wound up being abused by Mr. Mooney, who forced Joe to sleep in the freezing book cage. If only Bronte knew his humble past! Joe yearns to be known for who he truly is: a guy who loves books and saving women and committing six murders per calendar year.
Bronte makes an enemy out of me by dragging a chair off the street into Mooney’s — Joe and I scream in unison: bedbugs! — and is shocked to discover that Joe actually plans on spending time in the store. She thought she’d have it to herself, because, duh, she’s a grifter who is surely set on robbing him blind. Joe is too busy flirting with her and fantasizing about her needing rescuing that he cannot see what is right in front of him. She complains about the cost of living, Joe offers her small raises, and she says, “You can’t just throw money at everything.” Not at all surprised she wound up locking herself in the human aquarium on her first day at work; pretty surprised she did not already know how to crack a lock with a hairpin.
Joe would be paying closer attention to Bronte if he weren’t so distracted by a crisis straight out of Big Little Lies: His doe-eyed son punched Reagan’s daughter, Gretchen, in the face at school in an allegedly “unprovoked” attack. Reagan called the cops, and if she presses charges, Henry will have to leave this very fancy school. Kate and Joe are summoned to the office, where Joe is face-to-face with an eerily prescient administrator (Michelle Hurd, f.k.a. little Jenny Humphrey’s boss on Gossip Girl — fun!). She quickly uncovers the obvious: Joe experienced violence as a child and Henry’s volatile early years have left him with some unresolved issues. Joe is not really interested in that feedback. His son does not need therapy! His son has zero problems even though his birth mother died under violent circumstances and he was abandoned by his birth father for several years only to be airlifted out of the only home he’d ever known, and plunked down into a life with the aforementioned abandoner and his new wife. All Henry needs now is to be PROTECTED and LOVED and GIVEN A BUNCH OF HARDCOVER CHAPTER BOOKS.
Joe brings Henry to Mooney’s so that Bronte can flirt with Joe via his son. (Don’t you hate when people, like, sexualize children by referring to them as “flirts” or whatever? He is not a “lady-killer” or a “baddie,” he is a kid with issues, lol.) Henry tells Joe that he heard Gretchen say “your mom is a killer,” which Gretchen heard from her mom. Joe takes this to mean that Reagan exposed Love’s dirty secret in front of her 8-year-old. He is horrified and says as much to Kate, who is planning a dinner as a peace offering. Naturally, Joe thinks the best solution to this problem is to murder Reagan. He yearns for the meat grinder. But to appease his wife, he agrees to try Operation Charm Offensive.
Dinner goes about as badly as you’d expect, complete with a handful of surprise guests. Reagan and her husband, former NFL player Harrison, who has suffered “one too many concussions,” invited Maddie, who for reasons unclear is dressed like she’s playing a Pink Lady in a community-theater production of Grease; Maddie brought a plus-one nobody knows; Kate invited Teddy, whose husband allegedly exists but maybe will never appear onscreen?
The big news from the night is that Reagan wasn’t talking about Love when she said “his mom’s a murderer.” Reagan thinks Kate had Uncle Bob killed. It’s something their father would have done, Reagan points out, and that “killer instinct” is what made Kate their dad’s favorite. “Pretty convenient that Bob had a sudden rush of depression!” Though Teddy claims to have seen and destroyed the security footage of the aforementioned suicide. (Later, he will tell Kate there was no such footage; do we think he’s telling the truth?) Henry responds to all of this by running out from the kitchen to throw a knife at Reagan’s head.
Other important revelations from the dinner: Maddie is a Type 1 diabetic (if I learned anything from The Baby-Sitters Club, that means it would be very easy for Joe to kill her and make it look like an accident, or alternatively, if he doesn’t want to kill her, it would make her a high-maintenance hostage); Reagan resents Kate for inheriting not just the CEO position but also the Hamptons house. I looooved her delivery of “eat a dick, Joseph,” not to mention her very Social Network laptop-smash-style threat about “coming for everything.”
Joe kicks everyone out. He is appalled by Kate’s extremely reasonable assessment of Henry’s need for therapy, and he has vastly overestimated Kate’s appetite for murder as a solution to all their problems. I do worry about what that means for their long-term compatibility. Just feels like the sort of thing you really want to be aligned on as a couple, you know? You can see Kate getting with the program re: Joe will absolutely be taking people out for the rest of their lives. I want to feel sorry for her, but she did marry him knowing he’d already killed a bunch of people. When do you think it will dawn on her that, in choosing Joe, she did the most embarrassing thing she could have done: married someone just like her dad?
Meanwhile, Bronte the bookstore waif is uncovering the human aquarium. Maybe she can read books, but she cannot read vibes — like, how can you not feel all the ghosts down there?! She mistakenly IDs this torture prison as “fucking mecca.” And then she accidentally traps herself inside.
Joe finds her and ultimately frees her to fire her. She claims to have been down there because she knows those rare books are valuable and was hoping to sell one. I find the behavior of this woman, whose every instinct should be telling her that she is very close to getting killed and disappeared, very odd. Maybe don’t critique the terrible murder fiction of the rich guy with the cage that locks from the outside while you are still alone with him in the basement? Joe screams out his true dark past at her; she likes him more than ever. Jesus Christ. I am still hoping there is a longer game being played here because otherwise she’s just a dumb-dumb.
Joe has decided that Reagan needs to be kidnapped, interrogated, and killed. He’s going to loop Kate in, okay? Just, like, later! It’s easier to apologize than get permission.
So he stalks Reagan at work. But before he can attack her, somebody else does: It’s Harrison, doing a whole role-play thing where he assaults her at the office and then they have sex on Kate’s couch. Joe says to himself, “Not sure you’ll survive watching your evil sister-in-law get fake-raped by her golden-retriever husband.” Joe locks Harrison in the storage closet, knocks Reagan out cold, and brings her to the aquarium. I know this isn’t the point, but her eye makeup looks fantastic. An early clue that Reagan wasn’t Reagan, no? Reagan doesn’t really strike me as the shimmery-smoky-eye look type. (And why even introduce twins if you aren’t going to do a twin mix-up?)
Joe thinks he’s got it all under control. He’s installed cameras at Mooney’s and a new lock on the basement door. He’s typing away on his Corona typewriter: no comment. (Bronte’s biggest crime will be encouraging Joe’s fiction.) He’s rehired Bronte and set her up, free of charge, in the apartment above the shop, and because she has not one iota of survival instincts, she accepts — even though she read Sherry’s book Caging (Bring Shalita Grant back for an encore performance, I beg!). She also says she doesn’t have sex with married men … yeah, I’m sure, girl.
Back on the home front, Joe decides to come cleanish to Henry about “Mommy Love,” saying she did “bad things” because she was “sick.” I am genuinely curious if they just completely cut out the friends from Madre Linda that raised Henry for all those years, no questions asked?! Not that we needed more proof that these two are psychos, but that’s a choice. Joe also consents to Henry going to therapy. Too bad one of our favorite therapists is in prison!
Kate tells Joe that she’s made a decision re: killing people, which is, “We’re never doing anything like that ever again.” Joe is very disappointed; Kate, in turn, is very stressed out. Joe’s response to this, privately, is to work on an “ironclad” cover story for dealing with Reagan.
Just one problem: Reagan is out and about. As Joe says to himself in horror: “You caged the wrong twin!” Longtime readers of these recaps know I believe You is at its best when it goes full crazy, and getting to a place where Joe has to scramble because he accidentally put the less-evil twin in his human aquarium is right on the money. Let’s get psycho with these psychos!
In other news: Kate is doing a catch-more-flies-with-honey thing by nominating Teddy for Bob’s old board seat. I’m intrigued by Teddy’s insistence that he’s so ride-or-die for Kate, like she’s such a hero, even though I’m pretty sure she never mentioned him last season. Is there a grudge there after all? Something to keep an eye on!