The first part of the fourth season of the Netflix Original show, “You,” aired on Feb. 9, and the second part of the fourth season aired March 9. For three seasons, the main character, Joe Goldberg, had been caught in what felt like an endless cycle of falling head over heels and obsessing over a girl until she was dead or he was tired of her.

From this point on, there will be spoilers for the fourth season of “You.”

Before starting the fourth season, I knew that the show would have to take a turn in order to keep watchers glued because another season of Goldberg finding and obsessing over a new girl would have gotten old really fast. 

The first episode started off strong, Goldberg was living in a different country under a different alias. As the watcher knew from the ending of the third season, Goldberg moved to a different country in order to find his previous love interest, Marienne, but circumstances changed and Goldberg got the opportunity to leave his previous life behind.

Starting over, everything seemed different. It seemed as if Goldberg was actually better than he was before. That was, until there was a dead body on Goldberg’s dining table after a night of partying.

When I first watched that scene, I was disappointed. It was just going to be another season of Goldberg saying the murder was just “out of his control.” As it turned out, the writers hit the watchers with the very first plot twist of the season early on. There was another murderer, and the murderer was invested in pinning Goldberg for the murder.

The change in direction for the show was possibly the best thing they could have done. Goldberg, trying to live a clean and new life, finds himself back in a life of betrayal and murder not because of himself, but someone else. Not to even mention that it was someone else who figured out who Goldberg truly is.

When the second part of season four came out, I was not sure what I was expecting. In the best way, what I was expecting definitely was not what we were given.

Halfway through the season, they had gotten to a point where it seems like Goldberg truly is getting better and that he does want a simple life with love. I truly thought that it was different this time, but the show decided to throw in an even bigger plot twist which absolutely blew my mind.

Who we believed to be the killer, a man running for mayor, Rhys, was actually a figment of Goldberg’s imagination. The real Rhys was an innocent man, and when Goldberg was searching to find where Marienne was being kept after finding out that the killer had been holding her captive, Goldberg killed the innocent man who he thought was the killer.

The killer did not disappear after Goldberg murdered him. That is when we learned that the killer was not Rhys, but the killer was, in fact, Goldberg. He had been imagining the entire season that there was another man, another man that did exist, but another version of that man had lived in Goldberg’s head. An erotomanic. Joe Goldberg was an erotomaniac.

The amount of foreshadowing that led up to that discovery is vast and dates back all the way to the first season of the show when the couples therapist told Goldberg that there were “two Paul Browns” (his alias at the time) living inside of him. There is the Goldberg who genuinely wants love and peace, but there is also the Goldberg who lives only to murder.

Other foreshadowing moments include when Goldberg played himself in chess and when erotomania first was brought up a couple episodes ago when Pheobe had gotten kidnapped by a delusional woman.

Another change in direction the show made is the relationships Goldberg has. The main love interest in season four was a damaged girl with a rich and potentially dangerous father. While Goldberg still seems to have an obsession for a previous love interest when he learns that she is in danger, he does slowly move on to the new girl, Kate. 

The relationship Goldberg has with Kate is different from his previous relationships. Every scene I watched with them together in the beginning/middle of the season was different from scenes of Goldberg with previous girls he had liked, or so I thought. After the biggest plot of the show, he starts to view Kate just like he did the others- romanticizing every single thing she does or says. The hope for Goldberg to live a clean life died, and the realization that he was never going to change came to life.

Overall, the direction the show took for the fourth season of “You” was arguably the best direction they could have taken. It is just Goldberg versus himself. With many plot twists and the most deaths, this season lived up to a majority of my expectations if not better than some of my expectations. After an attempt to rid himself of his dark side and virtually kill a killer, Joe Goldberg is now completely in touch with his murderous side, and I do not think he will continue to deny that part of himself anymore.