Wait, Is Love Quinn Alive in “You” Season 4?
*Major spoilers for You Season 4 parts 1 and 2 ahead!*
In You season 4, Joe Goldberg becomes Darcy College’s Professor Jonathan Moore, and he’s left every single detail of his former life behind — including his ex-wife, Love Quinn.
What started as a twisted love story for our two co-conspirators eventually ended in tragedy. In the season 3 finale, Love plots to *lightly* poison Joe with aconite — a paralytic — so they can talk through their marital woes. But things get out of hand (naturally) and when Love later tries to kill Joe, he instead injects her with his own lethal dose of aconite. He stages Love’s death to look like a murder-suicide (faking his own death in the process), sets their home on fire, and escapes Madre Linda, California, sans a couple of toes.
With that ending, we can assume that Love did not hop across the pond to London with Joe for season 4. But (!) the teaser for Part 2 of the Netflix series suggested that the character makes an appearance.
Blink and you might miss it, Love pops up very quickly in a Part 2 preview that plays after episode 5. At 0:23, she sits in a chair, an annotated copy of Rhys Montrose’s A Good Man in a Cruel World in hand, slight smirk on her face. No other context is given but, *chills.*
Is Love Quinn alive in You season 4?
Now that Part 2 of You season 4 has dropped on Netflix, we have an answer for Love’s unexpected appearance in the preview. Unfortunately, no, she is not alive. But let’s face it — given her particularly gruesome ending in the season 3 finale, the odds of her coming back to life were pretty slim. Showrunner Sera Gamble even confirmed her death back in October 2021. “She is lying there [dead]. I’m not trying to be ‘was there a parachute under that seat in the airplane?’ She is [dead],” she told Newsweek.
Instead, Love returns in Joe’s hallucination in episode 9. We’ve learned that — major spoiler alert! — Joe has been the “Eat the Rich Killer” this whole time, and Rhys as the serial murderer was a result of his personality disassociation. Rhys is a projection of Joe’s dark side, the parts of himself that he’s detached from so he could try to right his former wrongs and live a “quiet, academic life” in London. Rhys and Joe have never met — in all of the scenes where they are having a conversation, Joe is just talking to himself. Rhys became a figment of Joe’s imagination after he read his book and became obsessed with redeeming himself.
Joe never let Marienne return to Paris. He drugged her coffee at the train station, kidnapped her, and — yes — trapped her in a glass cage. She’s starving to death in a basement in London, and Joe has no idea where (because he was disassociating when he did all of the above). When Joe comes to the realization that Rhys is a hallucination, he must face the music and acknowledge that he’s a narcissistic stalker-kidnapper-murderer. He vows to free Marienne — but in the morning. He takes strong sleeping pills, and then falls into an intense dream state.
The nightmare begins when Joe seemingly returns to the cage to release Marienne, but the keycode is not working and she’s suddenly going into anaphylactic shock from the coffee he gave her — and Joe doesn’t know where the key is.
This is where Love comes in. In a string of hallucinations, Joe’s ex-wife appears, reading Rhys’s memoir in Joe’s bookstore-edition glass cage. She calls out his pattern of violence with women and reminds him that *everyone* he claims to love and protect ends up dead. Instead of the key, she hands Joe a gun. “Somebody does need to die for this to end for good,” she says. Then, a gunshot sound goes off and Joe wakes up. “I know what I need to do,” he says.
Watch Parts 1 and 2 of “You” Season 4 Now
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