Hey, You (fans). I know it's been a long, hard quarantine without any new You content, but now is our time. Sort of. You author Caroline Kepnes teased Joe's newest obsession in a recent interview promoting her new book, You Love Me, and while the TV adaptation has made some pretty drastic changes to Joe's story, something tells me that this new victim will have more in common with her on-screen counterpart than we might think.
Season 2 of You marked a major departure from the book series, most notably — spoiler alert — turning Love into a killer and ending with her and Joe happily moving into the suburbs to raise their family. Season 3 of the show is expected to pick up where Season 2 left off, with Joe living with Love and their baby in the suburbs. Kepnes' books, however, saw Joe go to jail and receive a pay out from Love's family to leave town. The third book, which hits bookshelves April 7, finds Joe settled in a small town by himself.
So already the difference between You Love Me and Season 3 of You is huge. But, just because the Joe from the book and the one from the show are currently living very different lives doesn't mean that we can't learn anything about Season 3 from the plot of You Love Me. In fact, Kepnes told The Hollywood Reporter that she gave the showrunners an early draft of the novel, and teased that there would be "similarities."
The most obvious similarity will be the suburban setting. "You're going to see Joe living in a place similar to where he lived in the book," the author teased. This will provide an entirely new challenge for Joe, whose previous hunting grounds were major metropolitan cities. Moving from cities notoriously full of singles to a suburb full of young families is a pretty big change, especially when you consider how it might affect Joe's pool of potential stalking victims.
Kepnes was vague about any other narrative parallels, but if Joe from the book and Joe from the TV show are living in similar suburban utopias, then it stands to reason that their suburban obsessions will also be similar. In You Love Me, Joe pursues Mary Kay, a married woman with a teenage daughter. "I wanted him to go up against someone with a functioning life," Kepnes explained. This description aligns pretty well with Joe's Season 3 victim, Natalie (Michaela McManus). Joe's on-screen obsession will be his next door neighbor, teased in the Season 2 finale and described as a married "professional and social success" with "a secret life."
Mary Kay and Natalie might not be the same character, but it sounds like they'll share similar qualities that attract Joe in the first place, namely that they're established women with careers and solid personal lives — completely different from Love and Beck. Another similarity between You Love Me and You Season 3 fans can probably count on: Joe's creepy kidnapping room. The glass cage where he keeps rare books and the occasional prisoner/dead body may be gone for now, but Kepnes made sure to write Joe a new secret hideaway. "He has to have a this secret place to put someone just in case," the author told THR, admitting she even toured houses with basements to get a feel for Joe's new kidnapping lair.
You Season 3 is currently in production, and I, for one, cannot wait to see Joe's terrifying new prison. I hope it's baby proofed.
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Image: Beth Dubber/Netflix