You Recap: Working Out the Kinks
Even though Joe says he should know better about how affairs can go sideways, given his love of literature, he’s too blissed out to care. I love that these two are writing what you know has got to be the purplest, most insufferable prose and that they believe they’re being even a little bit subtle with the subtext. (Gosh, do you think Bronte can tell that Joe’s protagonist, Ezra the vampire, is actually HIM?)
Joe thinks that an upshot of Kate being so busy at work — now that Reagan is out of the way — is that Joe has plenty of time to cheat on her. Win-win, LOL. But Joe doesn’t know that, behind his back, Kate is doing what she obviously should have done before she and Joe got hitched: investigating Joe’s past. I want to root for Kate, but I struggle to believe that the Kate we met in London would not only have had Joe’s bad history scrubbed from the internet but also would have insisted the scrubbers involved not tell her what they found. She really said, “I want to marry this man; snatch his child from the loving arms of these non-psycho Californians and raise him as my own; and tie our legal, professional, personal, and financial fates together, all while sticking my fingers in my ears and singing ‘la, la, la, I can’t hear you!’ over the sounds of his victims’ screams”? WHY?
Joe dotes on Bronte, playing the modern knight with a grocery delivery and a massage. When she chases the masseuse into the street to tip her and learns the tip was already “paid by Joe Goldberg,” Kate, who is hiding in the bus shelter, overhears and runs home to sob to Teddy. It’s very funny that we’ve never seen her cry this hard about Joe killing people, but now that he’s a cheater, she is in absolute pieces. It’s very Britta coded. Teddy demands the long-overdue Truth About Joe. Kate tells him what she’s learned about Marienne and Love. She helped sell the PR cover for these stories and accidentally duped herself. Teddy wisely tells Kate she is not safe. Kate insists they are safe as long as Joe doesn’t know they know. This strategy WOULD make sense if Kate stuck to it for more than .02 seconds, but, literally, the next time she sees Joe, she calls him out for everything, so what was the vision here?
Bronte has left Joe a draft of her latest story in which she fantasizes about being all tied up, etc. Does she want him to put her back in the human aquarium? He claims to be scandalized that a feminist could be into that sort of thing. Honestly, I am so bored with this debate (in the culture, not just in this show). Asked and answered! That said, I do think it’s funny and in character for Bronte to think the whole point of feminism is for her to be “trusted to know [her] own sexuality.” Girl, we are fighting for our lives out here! Again, it all feels like such blatant Joe-bait that I have to believe she is doing it on purpose.
It’s time to close the bookshop early so they can get kinky upstairs. It’s all going great, but Joe’s incessantly buzzing phone takes her out of the moment. It’s Maddie with an alleged emergency.
Maddie has been pretending to be Reagan with Reagan’s nearest and dearest; as you might expect, it’s really wearing on her. Just as I wonder if she will have to do this forever, Maddie, it turns out, has the same question. She’s too committed to the bit; Reagan is haunting her, and she worries what it will do to her soul. I’m curious about this show’s commitment to making Reagan someone who uses the word cunt so frequently. She’s not the British one! Is it just to show us that she’s really evil? Poor Gretchen is going to be even more traumatized than Henry when all this is over. Harrison has no idea what’s going on. His many concussions are really doing a lot of work to sell his story line.
Anyway, Maddie can’t take it anymore. So she meets Joe in her best Reagan-undercover cosplay (love her hood) and says they need to accelerate the timeline because she’s losing track of who she really is. She’s too undercover; it’s just like on The Americans! Joe, perhaps unwisely, shares the details of the plan: In a month, “Reagan” will go to the Phillippines, where she will “rent a boat and become lost at sea.” Joe’s friend in Manilla can take care of it. I laughed at Maddie’s incredulous response: “Who? You don’t have friends.”
Joe is ready to pick up where he left off with Bronte. But back at the office is a note on the typewriter: “I’m sorry. I’m leaving town. Thank you for everything. XO, Bronte.” The literary-dirtbag take on the classic Post-it breakup. Bronte is fully moved out of the apartment. Her number is out of service. Has Joe been … dumped? Or did Bronte get TAKEN. Of course, Joe’s fantasy scenario is that Clayton is responsible for this disappearance, so he gets to work baiting Clayton into giving him the intel he craves. But meanwhile, he has to go home to his fuckin’ wife and kid —the son he allegedly loves so much — where Kate is too busy trying not to be killed to act like everything is fine.
Joe finds out that Kate is hiding a giant knife in their bed. He concludes: “This can only be proof that my wife does not trust me.” Yeah, you don’t say!
He asks Kate what has changed. Buddy, you murdered her uncle. Kate, providing a catharsis for me personally, screams, “Joe, fuck your writing! Stop acting like a victim!” She accuses him of killing his first wife and “fucking your shopgirl.” Again, I thought her whole plan was to stay safe by not letting him know what she knows, but I guess we are improvising. Joe cannot gaslight her into backing down. I do think this show has maybe hit capacity on the number of times we can use the word gaslight. Kate acknowledges she is not exactly a victim and so she promises the divorce will be amicable.
Joe learns that Clayton is out of town and breaks into Clayton’s place. At this point, he must acknowledge that he is getting too old for this. Also, Clayton has a photo of himself as his laptop background. Kill me! Anyway, Clayton is in Atlantic Beach. His gun is missing. Joe is getting a call from Bronte, who is using a pay phone just to beg Joe to forget about her. Obviously, if she really wanted him to forget about her, she wouldn’t have called, so the whole thing screams “trap” to me. But Joe pushes forward, chasing Bronte to the Laurel Diner, where he finds a waiter who tells him she is headed to the Sandbox.
So Joe breaks into this musty beach house. Bronte jumps him and tases him. Love that for her! When he is back online, she says that he scared her and gives him a whole speech about how she is NOT Joe’s to save. She says she bailed on their relationship both because she felt like a “trope” (the other woman) and because it was “too real.” Because Joe is Joe, he gazes dreamily into the eyes of the woman who just (allegedly) tried to disappear from his life without so much as a conversation, only to tase him the minute she saw him again and tell her they could be together for real now that he’s getting a divorce.
Joe explains the crumbling status of his marriage to his young shopgirl, the only one who really GETS him. So much for not being a cliché, LOL. They dance and talk about trust and happiness; things escalate, and Bronte says she wants to be tied up. Maybe they do belong together.
Over at Reagan’s, Kate manages to make the twin crack. Maddie has this huge argument with herself/her split personality/Reagan’s ghost in the bathroom mirror, as one does. Kate is very sympathetic. She brings Teddy up to speed and keeps saying she’s going to contain this. She sounds like a deluded egomaniac. Teddy wants to go to the authorities and also knows that, if/when this gets out, his credibility will be shot to shit. It’s time for Kate to experience what he has always known: “Complicity has consequences. Maybe you should lose everything.” Honestly, fair!
Joe and Bronte’s reunion is interrupted by the unwelcome (to both of them … or IS it?!) arrival of CLAYTON. Clayton and Bronte are arguing about Clayton’s dad — Who do we think that is? Didn’t Beck have a brother? Did we ever meet him? — and Joe comes in. Clayton is rough with Bronte, so Joe kills him in cold blood, as he is wont to do. Just one catch: The gang from that reading is here, and they are live on TikTok! “Our friend Clayton is dead and Joe Goldberg fucking killed him.” And then the friend cheers, “We fucking got him, Louise.” Joe, aghast: “Did you catfish me?!” Me, triumphant: Thank GOD.