How Did Love Quinn Die in You?
*Major spoilers for You seasons 1-3 below.*
In You, season 3, Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn leave Los Angeles for suburbia, but life in the Silicon Valley outpost doesn’t work out so well for the murderous duo. Although Joe and Love tried to hide under the guise of blissful marriage and parenthood, lies and betrayal soon spiral into countless kidnappings and killings — as it so often does for these two.
Parts 1 and 2 of You season 4 have debuted on Netflix, and in this latest installment, Joe settles in London, adopts the persona of Professor Jonathan Moore, and mingles among the city’s elite. You might be wondering where Love is, and if she joined her co-conspirator across the pond. But, ICYMI, Love died at the hands of Joe in the season 3 finale.
Let’s rewind a bit. Throughout the third season, Joe and Love have extramarital affairs — Joe with Marienne, the Madre Linda librarian, and Love with Theo, the college student next door. But Love bludgeons Theo with a fire extinguisher when he discovers that she and Joe trapped influencer Sherry and her husband Cary in their plexiglass cage (although, Theo survives the attack). Meanwhile, Joe plans his great escape with baby Henry, Marienne, and her daughter, Juliette.
Soon enough, Love discovers their affair and realizes that Joe killed Marienne’s ex, Ryan, out of jealousy and obsession. She confronts Joe during a *tense* dinner of roast chicken and reveals that she killed her first husband, James, with a lethal dosage of aconite after he asked for a divorce. But she claims that the high dosage was accidental (...) and she didn’t mean to kill him. “I just wanted to stop him,” Love explains. “Keep him in one place long enough so we could talk it through.”
This leads her to her next point. Love discloses that she’s *also* poisoned Joe with aconite, just as the paralytic takes effect and he slides to the floor. (She’s been growing the poison in their garden this whole time, FYI.) After a confrontation with Marienne, Love advances toward Joe with a knife, but he injects her with his own lethal dose of aconite first. Anticipating Love’s strike, he prepared the injection beforehand and took adrenaline — the poison’s antidote — to regain movement.
Love dies and Joe leaves Henry on the doorstep of his library coworker, Dante. He returns home to stage Love’s death as a brutal murder-suicide and sends a suicide letter, presumably written by Love, to the Madre Linda Homeowner’s Association. He cuts off two of his toes (cooking one into a pie...), then, with the gas stove turned on high and their wedding album engulfed in flames, he sets the house on fire. Joe is presumed dead, thanks to the toes he left behind.
“In the end, it worked,” Joe narrates in the final moments of the episode. “There was just enough half-charred evidence to tell the tale, including the remains of two human toes, which were DNA tested. RIP, me.”
“Love’s farewell filled out details a burned-out crime scene couldn’t,” Joe continues. “The rest of Joe Goldberg’s body was never found, but it was presumed butchered or worse.”
She died, he ends, as a “bit of a folk hero, more famous even than Guinevere Beck.” But we haven’t seen the last of Love yet. ICYMI, Love makes a special appearance in Part 2 of You season 4...
You Might Also Like
