Well, this is another possible “iconic” Near Pure Evil protagonist. This series is quite long so this proposal will be as well, but I’ve put a lot of work into it and would appreciate your thoughts. Batman129 was initially working on this proposal but he decided to retreat from Wikia as a whole and allowed me the privilege to work on it in his stead.
This is somewhat a unique case because Joe flat-out does not qualify for NPE status for most of the first 4 seasons. There are points where he almost seems eligible for IH/IA status (though leaning heavily towards the former), but I have some doubt on this due to Season 5 reframing much of his previous behavior in a more vile light. However, at the end of Season 4 Joe starts discarding redeeming qualities like he’s on morality’s The Biggest Loser and ends the show with only a few, none of which are very strong preventions.
What’s The Work?[]
You is a 2018-2025 Psychological Thriller series which aired its first season on Lifetime before being moved to Netflix. The series follows a bookstore owner in his late twenties at the start of the series, Joe Goldberg. Seemingly a charismatic, intelligent and sensitive individual on the exterior, Joe is in fact an obsessive stalker who latches onto young intelligent women with emotional troubles and discovers everything about their life before he “removes” the issues in their life through kidnapping, blackmail and murder.
Who is the Character? What has He Done?[]
Background[]
Joe Goldberg was born the bastard child of a beleaguered and abused mother and a violent and alcoholic father. His father frequently abused both his mother and Joe, which resulted in her hiding a gun in the closet to one day get rid of him. When his father’s abuse continued to escalate, Joe took it upon himself to dispose of him. Unable to care for her son properly (Which Joe speculates to in fact her being scared by her son’s tendency towards violence though he’s not a very reliable narrator), his mother turned him over to a group home and effectively abandoned him.
There, Joe was subjected to vicious bullying before meeting a Nurse in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend, which caused Joe to attempt to violently intervene. When she stopped turning up to work, likely having been killed by the boyfriend, Joe blamed himself. After this, Joe tracked down his mother, discovering that she had “started over” and had another son that he didn’t even know existed.
In his teens, Joe was taken under the war of a former soviet prison guard and bookshop owner, Mr. Mooney. A harsh disciplinarian, Mooney would often lock Joe in a glass cage (which Joe later refashioned for kidnapping and storing bodies) with rare antique books and kept him there with little food or water for days.
We are not given concrete information on when Joe’s stalking/murder habit began, but a few years before the series began, Joe became obsessed with a young singer known as Candace, who he found was cheating on him with a music producer which he then murdered by shoving off a building before Candace left him (with the series initially given a false lead that he killed her). Joe did in fact believe he had killed her, as he had kidnapped her and taken her to a spot they frequently went together under the delusional belief that she would take him back. Joe accidentally knocked her unconscious and believed he had killed her and buried her in a ditch, only for her to come to later.
Season 1[]
At the start of the series, Joe meets the young college professor and writer Guinevere Beck and becomes obsessed with her, watching her from the window of her apartment, including during intimate acts like sex and masturbation (which he masturbates at the site of). Stalking her to a poetry reading, Joe saves her from being killed by an oncoming subway train after she falls down the tracks (with some fans speculating he pushed her down there), and steals her phone to read her text messages. Afterwards, he kidnaps and murders her fuckbuddy Benji, deluding himself into believing that he was a roadblock to her happiness and he is doing what’s best for her, while posing as Benji on text messages and social media to claim he went on a deranged bender.
During this time, Joe also becomes more closely affiliated with a young boy named Paco, who is facing an abusive step-dad in Ron, who is violently argumentative and cruel to his mother Claudia. Joe takes a liking towards the boy, allowing him to take home books from his store and offering him food so he doesn’t go hungry.
Using this leveraged position, Joe starts dating Beck and meets her friends that he is contemptuous towards, growing increasingly suspicious of one of her friends, Peach Salinger. During a party, he steals her laptop and discovers several nude photos of Beck, and that she is sexually obsessive towards her (Joe does not see the irony). When Peach fakes ODs on sleeping pills, Joe decides that she needs to be out of the picture, crudely attempting to kill her with a rock during a jog in Central Park. Peach survives, but doesn’t know that Joe did it due to him ambushing her before she could see him.
Around this time, Joe realizes that Paco is planning something to get rid of Ron, who has escalated to physical violence, and the latter crudely slips Ron sleeping pills, which makes Joe pump his stomach before being beaten by him.
After meeting Peach after she’s discharged from the hospital, Joe discovers she plans to have Beck fly with her to Paris, and then tracks her down to her estate outside the city. He sneaks into the estate and avoids detection after Peach unsuccessfully attempts to coerce Beck into sex, before encountering her, killing her and framing her death as a suicide.
Distraught by her friends’ death, Beck goes to therapy, which angers Joe, causing him to use a false pseudonym for the same therapist, Dr. Nicky, and discuss the relationship in coded terms, which also leads him to believe that Beck is cheating on him with the doctor. Beck gradually discovers Joe’s controlling behavior, culminating in her breaking up with him when she finds him stalking her. During this relapse, Joe seems to briefly realize he’s been too controlling and has a temporary relationship with another inhabitant of his apartment building, Karen. Claudia relapses on drugs and overdoses, leading Joe to take her and Karen into his bookstore’s basement so she can detox.
Around this time, Joe begins cheating on Karen with Beck again before breaking off his relationship with the former. Claudia also begins dating Ron again, much to Paco’s anger.
When Joe calls out Candaces’ name in his sleep, Beck grows increasingly suspicious. Joe initially puts her fears to rest, but Beck is still suspicious and after remembering Paco speak about hiding books in the tiles on the ceilings in the bathroom, Beck discovers a box of momentos that Joe has kept of his victims, including Benji’s teeth and phone. Unfortunately, Joe discovers this, placing her in the glass cage and claiming that his murders and stalking were just and necessary for her well-being before offering her a typewriter where she pens a memoir that is clearly about him.
When Ron has an altercation with Paco and has clear intent towards violence, Joe finds them and kills Ron before disposing of the body in front of Paco, informing him that “love matters over all else.”
Beck successfully convinces Joe to let him out, claiming her manuscript had implicated Dr. Nicky in his crimes appeals to Joe’s ego, before stabbing him and attempting to flee. Paco discovers Beck screaming at the crest of the stairs, but refuses to open the door, before Beck attempts to open the door with a rack of keys but fails, with Joe strangling her to death. Afterwards, Joe frames Dr. Nicky for his crimes. Joe sees Claudia and Paco off as they move to California before being confronted by Candace, who is certain he’s a killer and wants to see him taken account of.
Season 2[]
Prompted to move to California to avoid suspicion, Joe assumes the name “Will Bettelheim” and kidnaps the man who was working on getting the fake name and identity for him. Joe meets his apartment building manager Delilah Alves and her younger sister Ellie before applying to work at the cafe/”bookstore” Anavrin, where he meets Love Quinn and her brother Forty who work at the store due to it being owned by their parents.
Joe becomes smitten with Love, unable to dig up any information on her social media. He eventually attempts a tour of LA, where she reveals her husband passed away and they shortly after being dating. In truth, Joe had been stalking Love the minute he saw the store before even applying and had chosen his apartment location and had a telescope installed to stalk her. After killing a man that the real Will had owed money, Joe hallucinates a vision of Beck, which causes him to break down crying from guilt as she tells him that he destroys everything he claims to love.
Joe discovers that a popular comedian that Forty has some affiliation with, Henderson (the current sole PE of the series), met with and then drugged and raped Delilah and now has his sites set on Ellie. Joe attempts to scan his apartment for evidence during a party but is unable to find anything, eventually having Will hack into the security system and discovering his sex dungeon and photos of tied-up women there. These sadly aren’t admissible due to a complete lack of context towards photos, meaning Joe screwed up the whole scenario worse. which he opts to use when Henderson is alone with Ellie and attempts to drug her, putting the same drug in his drink that Henderson put in hers before dragging him down to the dungeon and attempting to get him to record a confession of his crimes, which causes Henderson to deflect to childhood trauma before Joe pulls off his mask in a rage. Henderson attempts to escape, but Joe throws him down the stairs and breaks his neck by mistake, before Joe frames it as a suicide. Having eventually gotten a passport for Will, Joe lets him and allows him to flee to the Philippines
Joe discovers that Candace has begun dating Forty in an attempt to get closer to him, and convinces him to write a film based on Beck’s book that Joe cobbled together from her manuscript, The Dark Face of Love. Around this time, Delilah also discovers Joe’s glass cage in his storage facility, which prompts Joe to kidnap her before assuring that he’ll get her a card to leave town with and won’t kill her.
To accomplish his task of writing his film, Forty drugs Joe and fakes a kidnapping and then locks him and Joe in an apartment which he doesn’t allow the latter to leave without access to a safe code. Joe has a series of insane hallucinations which give Forty creative inspiration, causing Forty to believe that Becks’ unnamed boyfriend (in truth Joe himself) was the one who truly killed her. Joe considers killing him before Forty reveals that he had killed an older woman that had raped him as a child, causing Joe to empathize with him.
After returning to the cage, Joe finds Delilah murdered, causing him to be terrified with the thought that he murdered her while he was blacked out. After investigation, Joe is left with the belief he did do it, and cries to her in her cage before Candace discovers the location and locks him in. While Joe keeps a key in a secured position, he tosses it out of the cage and accepts punishment before Love comes in and kills Candance and reveals she killed Delilah due to her being an obstacle to her love. She also killed the woman who raped Forty as a teenager and convinced him he had done it before having her wealthy parents cover it up. Joe convinces her to open the door and attempts to kill her before she reveals she’s pregnant with his child, causing Joe to spare her.
At a wedding for Loves’ friends, Forty claims that Joe is dangerous after discovering he is a murderer, before Love and Joe rush to Anavrin. Outside, Ellie is confused. Joe tells her her sister is gone and won’t be back but offers her money to flee to somewhere else and will continue sending her money. He rushes inside the building, where Forty pulls a gun on him before being killed by Delilah’s ex-boyfriend Officer Fincher, who had followed Ellie there.
Joe moves with Love to the suburbs, miserable but willing to live with her for his child’s sake and promising to put a rest to his old ways before immediately becoming obsessed with another woman.
Season 3[]
With his child Henry born as a son instead of a daughter, Joe plays the part of a husband but is secretly distraught and unsatisfied. He becomes obsessed with his next-door neighbor Natalie, being invited over for drinks with her and nearly cheating on Love before restraining himself.
Love becomes suspicious that Joe is involved with Natalie and discovers a box of her belongings, including a bloody tampon. Natalie has offered to buy her a lease for a bakery, and Love agrees before having her follow her into the basement and killing her with an Axe. Joe is forced to dispose of the body near an estate that Natalie owned. Joe and Love’s relationship briefly reconciles afterwards, resulting in them building another cage in the bakery basement.
After their son is found sick with measles, Love discovers that her neighbor Gil hadn’t vaccinated his children, which causes her to knock him unconscious with a rolling pin and have Joe drag him to the bakery basement. Joe and Love attempt to find dirt on Gil they can use so that he won’t reveal what they did or the existence of the cage to the rest of the neighborhood. At this time, Joe has applied to work at a library and becomes increasingly obsessed with a librarian named Marienne Bellamy, who is a recovered drug addict who lost custody of her child despite her former husband also being a drug addict who has only pretended to recover.
Love finds dirt on Gil, which is that his wife had paid to cover up his son raping numerous people. Gil didn’t actually know this had happened and hangs himself in shame, which prompts Joe to come up with a cover story by dragging Gil’s body to his house and writing a letter claiming that he had an affair with Natalie and killed her before hanging himself.
Joe goes on a retreat with several other men and a hypermasculine meathead named Cary, who he nearly kills by throwing off a cliff in rage before discovering he survived and breaking down in tears due to feeling acceptance by other men.
Joe begins stalking Marienne more and breaks into her home, discovering her past, and confronts her ex at the library, which angers Marienne before he makes up with her and then makes out with her.
In the meantime, Natalie’s husband Matthew had been surveilling the entire neighborhood in an attempt to find the murderer due to not believing the official story. His adoptive son Theo knows this and tells Love about it, which causes Love to ask about leading Theo on, which Joe agrees to so he can continue obsessing over Marienne. Joe discovers the home of her husband and attempts to spike his morning protein shake with drugs, but discovers that he’s been taking those drugs the whole time anyways and had faked his recovery.
When Love brings up to Joe the possibility of swinging due to her friend and Cary’s husband Sherry bringing up the idea, Joe is ecstatic due to seeing it as a way to destroy their marriage without it being directly “his fault” and begins coercing Love into it through manipulation, rejecting her attempts to connect with him, pretending to be jealous over her flirting with Theo, and attempting to make her feel insecure and boring. Love agrees, and Sherry and Cary come over. When Love suspects that Joe is thinking of someone (though she doesn’t know who), she pulls him aside to speak to him, inadvertently having left the door open and letting Sherry and Cary know about her murdering Natalie, causing them to dash to attack them before being defeated and locked in the cage.
Joe then proceeds to track down and kill Ryan after it becomes clear that custody won’t go in Marienne’s favor, brutally stabbing him to death. When Ryan dies, Joe claims that he and Love had agreed to separate and he would take Henry with him and he can be with Marienne, before being informed Love had accidentally beat the shit out of Theo. When Joe drives to dispose of the body, he discovers Theo is alive and drops him off at a medical center
Love discovers that Joe had disposed of Ryan’s bloodied shirt in Henry’s diaper genie and puts together that he had killed Ryan and was cheating on her with Marienne. She calls Joe to have dinner with him and talks about it before Joe proposes a divorce. Joe grabs a knife to kill her, but Love reveals that she had killed her ex-husband that had seemingly died of illness, because she laced him with too much aconite. She then reveals she got the proper dose on Joe, and had expected him to pick up the knife so the paralytic can travel through his skin. Unable to move or speak, he can only watch as Love calls Marienne over and explains that Joe had lied and that he had killed Ryan. She considers killing Marienne but spares her when she sees her daughter, telling her to run far away and have nothing to do with Joe.
Love goes to kill Joe but finds him walking again and he injects her with a lethal dose of aconite. He reveals he knew about her growing the poison with nightshade and countered the paralytic with adrenaline pills from Cary’s stash. He pours gasoline all over their house before ripping off two of his toes, taking Henry with him and burning the house down. He writes a falsified testimony from Love claiming she went mad and killed him in a murder-suicide, leaving Joe to flee and place Henry in the custody of a gay couple as surrogate parents. Travelling the world, Joe now desires to track down Marienne.
Season 4[]
This season is done in a deliberately out of order chronology due to much of it being based upon numerous plot twists. I will make this simpler and present it in chronological fashion.
Joe finds Marienne, who flees from him due to knowing he’s fucking insane. He then meets a detective known as Elliot Tannenberg, who plans to kill him but lets him off if he teaches in England under a false name, which Joe agrees to. He seemingly backs off on Marienne, but he in fact doses her with an anesthetic and then takes her into a small house under the claim that he can convince her to love him. She refuses, leaving him to lock her in a cage in an abandoned building adjacent to a mediocre Indian restaurant, eventually cutting off food to her and leaving her with the tablets of the pills she was addicted to to tempt her to relapse. During this time, Joe becomes obsessed with an author and activist known as Rhys Montrose, who he develops a dissociative personality for that acts as a counter to him, allowing him to engage in his previous activities while Joe’s main personality believes he had given them up.
Joe begins teaching at a university under the name Johnathan Moore, meeting an art gallerist known as Kate Galvin who is the girlfriend of his colleague and neighbor Malcolm Harding. Joe becomes ingratiate with high-english society, meeting Rhys Monstrose physically only once but repeatedly hallucinating seeing him and believing he had some relationship with him. After a night of partying, Joe wakes up with Malcolm dead. Due to his dissociated personality, Joe doesn’t know he did this, and is soon texted by his alternate personality, who has sent delayed messages towards him so he doesn’t realize their existence. The killer soon becomes coined as the “Eat The Rich Killer” due to targeting wealthy individuals. Joe believes the killer is in Kate and Malcolm’s social circle and begins investigating, blacking out on a bench and murdering pretentious arthouse douchebag Simon Soo. Joe is forced to kill Vic, the bodyguard of socialite Lady Pheobe after he believes that he murdered Simon, and begins dating Kate.
Phoebe invites Joe to her mansion, where he becomes suspicious of the socialite Roald. Another socialite, Gemma, is found dead in the building, Roald chases Joe believing him to be the murderer and attempts to kill him before being incapacitated. Joe’s alternate personality kicks in and he hallucinates Rhys, who announces he is the killer and Joe’s stalker.
Joe!Rhys chains himself and Roald to the catacombs and orders Joe to kill Roald so he can frame him for the murders. Joe refuses, narrowly escaping with Roald before hearing of Real!Rhys’ run for mayor.
Joe!Rhys blackmails Joe into framing Dawn Brown, a stalker of Pheobe, for the Eat the Rich Killer killings. Joe!Rhys also orders Joe to kill Tom Lockwood, Kate’s estranged sociopathic tech billionaire father (and future PE candidate). Tom orders Joe to kill Real!Rhys due to him being a threat to his profits and holds knowing his true identity over his head, which Joe agrees to, falsely believing that he’s the killer, and also hearing that Marienne had been kidnapped.
After killing Real!Rhys, Joe realizes that he was the killer the whole time as Joe!Rhys returns after Real!Rhys dies. During this time, Joe’s student Nadia has grown increasingly suspicious of him and eventually discovers the cage, pleading to save Marienne by concocting a scheme where she fakes her death, as Joe would continue to be obsessed with her if he believed she was alive. Joe believes Marienne to have died of an overdose and leaves her on a bench.
Joe decides to track down Tom Lockwood after learning of the extent of his sociopathy and that he had steered his daughter’s course for success her entire life against her will (to the point of tracking her periods), having to kill his bodyguard in the process. Having determined that he’ll never be able to stop killing people as long as he’s alive, Joe throws himself off a bridge but is found regardless, with him confessing to Kate of murdering people but not the full extent or cruelty of his crimes. Claiming to be reformed, Joe shows himself a liar when he reveals he knows that Nadia had been tracking him, killing her boyfriend and framing her before flying out to New York with Kate wiping his criminal record clean. The mirror on the high-rise reflects Rhys personality, showing that Joe has fully embraced his murderous nature.
Season 5[]
Okay, this is the point where he really goes off the rails. Reunited with his son, living with Kate who has attempted to retool her business towards more charitable ends and with near-unlimited wealth. Joe also learns that under the classification system used by gay men, he is an otter (between a twink and a bear), as told by Kate’s nice sibling Teddy. Joe has managed to not indulge in his murderous habits for 3 years solely out of pragmatism, but soon starts relapsing. He purchases back his old bookstore, where he employs a young woman named Bronte, which in fact revealed to be a former student of Becks’ known as Louise Flannery, who is part of a group that suspects him for murder later, and intentionally getting into his graces.
Joe discovers that Kate’s sisters Maddie and Reagan and mentor Bob are planning to vote her out of the company. Overcome with murderous impulses, Joe takes to writing violent fantasies of murdering Bob before murdering him for real when Kate reveals he knows about her covering up Rhys’ death.
After Reagan makes clear her plans to kick Kate out of the company after Henry attacks her daughter. Joe proposes killing her but Kate refuses. In truth, Joe has already kidnapped who he believes to be Reagan and then locked her husband Harrison in a broom closet. When she awakens in his cage downstairs at Mooney’s, she reveals that she is actually her twin sister Maddie, who had an affair with Harrison. Joe intends to let her out if she meets his demands, but she refuses. Kate agrees to Joe’s help short of killing people, which causes Joe to propose to Maddie she pretend to be Reagan after seeing Reagan do the same with her.
Kate finds dirt on Reagan with embezzlement, but Reagan reveals she knows that Joe killed Rhys and Bob and wants to force her to resign or will expose Kate. Joe kidnaps Reagan and places her in the cage with Maddie, forcing one of them to kill the other and replace them while he claims the other went missing. Arguing with each other, Maddie eventually opts to kill Reagan and live as her. When Kate is not happy with Joe for doing this, he becomes enraged and believes their marriage is beyond saving, embroiling himself further in his growing obsession with Bronte and having sex with her.
Kate learns of the affair, growing increasingly suspicious of Joe with Marienne’s disappearance and Love’s death. Bronte skips town, with Joe traveling her down to a beach house in Atlantic Beach. When Maddie is unable to keep up the rise, she admits to killing Reagan. Joe finds Bronte and after having sex hears her and her “ex-boyfriend” Clayton being physically violent, which prompts him to kill him. Bronte’s friends rush in to reveal this was part of a trap they had set to catch Joe killing someone on camera. Joe is bailed out of jail by Kate’s lawyers on manslaughter charges, which included sneakily handing custody of Henry to her.
When Henry is taken, Joe follows him with a tracker in his book, nearly killing Teddy in the process before being escorted away. More and more comes to light on speculation on Joe’s previous actions, which prompts Joe to blackmail Maddie to agree to get him an interview with a talk show host, where he attempts to redeem his image. When Joe goes down to Mr. Mooney’s basement, he’s unable to keep his cool and has a panic attack from trauma and starts bawling when he was supposed to keep calm.
Bronte has begun to develop a bizarre attachment to Joe, claiming Joe did to protect her which causes his image to be redeemed and for her to ba target of virulent misogyny online, causing a man to attempt to kidnap and rape her. Joe knocks out the man, dragging him to the room and letting Bronte do what she wants with him. She decides to let him go free but be surveilled, only for Joe to ambush and kill the man regardless.
At this time, Kate agrees to release Nadia from prison if she helps her, causing Nadia to reveal that Joe killed numerous of her friends. Meanwhile, Harrison discovers Maddie isn’t Reagan. Joe nearly kills him before he and Maddie reconcile, prompting Joe to frame him for Reagan’s murder. After a phone conversation, Kate herself decides Joe must die.
Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two images.
Joe attempts to start a new life with Bronte, but discovers Kate drained his bank account, prompting him to decide to kill her. Joe tracks her down only to discover she used a body double and is sedated and placed in a cage where he is told he must either confess or be suffocated to death with carbon monoxide, though they actually plan to kill him regardless. Marienne returns to see him and shittalk him, and attempts to dissuade Bronte and show her that Joe truly is evil in a heartfelt speech. Downstairs, Joe attempts to gaslight and get pity from Nadia fail, prompting her to get so enraged that she reaches a very Death Note Matsuda style breaking point where the young naive one decides they need to have the psychopath they looked up to before they knew better be killed painfully by being shot. Kate restrains her and plans to kill him herself but it’s revealed that Joe had stitched a key into his arm and pulled it out to unlock the door (Wow another Death Note reference Light Yagami and Joe both like holding shit in their arm as an attempt for a final back up plan that doesn’t work.) They beat the shit out of each other before Maddie, who had been let out due to Harrison making a false confession, lights the building on fire not realizing Kate is inside. As they choke on the fumes, Joe confesses to the murders since he knows that he’s gonna lose anyways and Kate sends them via text message and contemplates if he deserves this before Bronte goes back to the building, with Joe lying to her and claiming Kate had started the altercation, leading her to carry him out the building.
Bronte in truth had taken Marienne’s message to heart and “rescued Joe” so she could get final answers on Beck(she is also unaware Kate got a confession) by leading him to a closed off location, hiding a gun. They drive towards the border of Canada as Joe prepares to forge a new fake identity and crash at an unoccupied rental house, wherein Joe wants to ensure that he gets to concile Henry one more time and assure him he’ll find a way to get back to him.
Bronte sets the plan into motion and pulls a gun on Joe in the bedroom and forces him to remove every part he added from Beck’s book. Joe is still delusional enough to believe he can save her, but when he gets a call from Henry through Will, he snaps completely when Henry outright calls him a monster and says he wants nothing to do with him. Joe has a meltdown and questions why he has become this person, and no matter what he does, things fall apart every time he tries to “love”. While Bronte feels sympathy towards Joe briefly, she calls out his self-pitying rant and attempts to call the police. Joe decides to abandon his notion of a helpless romantic, assaulting Bronte and trying to track her down and kill her. He believes he succeeds in drowning her, but police arrive. Joe runs off but Bronte reveals she pretended to drown and holds him at gunpoint. In a final desperate act, Joe attempts to goad her into killing him to escape legal punishment and corrupt her in the process, but she shoots him non-lethally in the dick so he will have to live with what he’s done for the rest of his life. Joe is sent to prison for life, where he will be perennially lonely and refuses to take responsibility for his actions, claiming he’s simply a product of society and it’s everyone else’s fault. Also Kate lived for some reason which is kind of dumb.
Heinous Standard?[]
Joe is literally The Ultimate Evil of the entire series. The Lockwoods have more reach but Joe has minimal resources until near the end of the series and gains and begins using them for his serial killing habit. He’s killed 18 people, tortured people, kidnapped people and locked them in a cage for weeks to months, heinousness is clearly not any type of an issue here.
(Fake) Mitigating Factors?[]
This is going to take a while to get through because Joe is a very complex character and has received an unfortunate amount of Draco In Leather Pants from the fanbase. As such, we’ll go down the various delusions that Joe exhibits one by one.
Loved Ones?[]
Joe proclaims that all of his actions are done out of love for the women he is enamored with, but in truth Joe doesn’t truly love any of his “Yous”, he is simply obsessed with them and enjoys feelings like a romantic hero by sweeping them off their feet and the feelings of power he gets from having them in his vicinity. He’s outright called out for this by numerous characters, including Beck at the end of the first season. When Joe’s relationships take a turn for the worse, which they all inevitably do due to his abusive and controlling nature, he’ll often end up making an attempt on the woman’s life when they discover his true nature. Even when he doesn’t, he’ll grow tired of them refusing to live up to his expectations of a perfect submissive partner who will give permission towards his murder sprees, as shown by Love and Kate, who he both cheats on and later tries to kill.
Joe also has affiliations with Paco and Ellie, who he gives numerous pet the dog moments towards. However, several characters point out that he doesn’t really view these children as independent entities but as extensions of himself and that he helps them to feel good about himself. He hardly mentions them after the seasons they’re in or tries to track them down even though he easily could. Even his son Henry, who I will argue later he does have genuine care for, is partially an extension of himself and projection of his own emotional traumas so his son can avoid them. Kate explicitly calls Joe out as seeing Henry as an extension of himself in Season 5.
Extremism?[]
Joe often claims his victims were parasitic assholes who deserved it and were ruining the lives of his various “Yous”. However, while some of them were unpleasant people, this doesn’t mean they all unilaterally deserve to die and Joe often exaggerates the threat posed by them. Joe doesn’t commit these actions out of genuine morality but because he views it as a way to get closer to the women he’s obsessed with, who as we have stated, he does not genuinely love and who he often kills when they figure out too much about him. Additionally, Joe often commits the same acts as these people if not doing worse than them, further showing that his supposed claims of taking them down is driven by hypocrisy. During his stint as the “Eat The Rich” killer, he shows his hand to not be driven by a disdain for classism when he frames the working-class Nadia for his crimes.
Joe also views himself as a protector and savior of women against horrible abusive men, but Joe is worse than anyone he claims to be fighting against, as he exhibits every single one of the pathetic misogynist traits he rails against with more fervor than practically anyone. He doesn’t view women as people, he views them as trophies and an idealized perfect image of someone that will unconditionally worship him.
Pet The Dog?[]
Joe has a handful of Pet The Dog moments but most are subverted. He lets Doctor Nicky go even after he discovers he’s been having sex with Beck, but he subverts this by framing Nicky a little while after. His moment towards Will is never subverted, but it ties into him caring for him, which we’ll discuss later. He also refuses to plant evidence on Matthew and spares Theo and drives him to a hospital in Season 3, but it’s fair to assume that Season 5 Joe would not make these same types of decisions in the light of his escalating madness and cruelty, and he makes none in the season itself.
Remorse?[]
Joe shows remorse towards his actions pretty consistently through Seasons 2-4 even as he continues lapsing back into poor habits. He hallucinates Beck and breaks down crying at the site of her and her strangulation marks, but his recognition of himself as a bad person never actually lasts. He returns back to his habits in the end of Season 3, and reveals when he kidnaps Marienne that his remorse is hypocritical, as he views it as him “changing and growing” even though he’s a literal serial killer that has murdered people and is currently holding her hostage. Joe is horrified when he discovers the truth about himself being the Eat The Rich killer in Season 4 and even attempts suicide, but afterwards he takes his survival as a sign that he should embrace the murderous side of himself and that his actions are not ones which he should be ashamed of.
Even towards Season 5, he briefly shows regret as he nearly chokes to death, but immediately returns to gaslighting Bronte. When faced by his own son calling him a monster, Joe concedes he might deserve it before concluding that he should have never trusted “love” to begin with and tries to kill Bronte. He then feigns remorse in an attempt to goad Bronte to shooting him, but it’s transparently false and also demonstrates that he doesn’t actually have moral agency problems (we’ll get to that). At the end of the series, he fully refuses to take responsibility for or regret his actions, blaming himself as a victim of society.
Moral Agency?[]
For a good period in Season 4, Joe develops a dissociative personality. Regardless of him deliberately doing so to separate both sides of himself previously, Joe’s main personality at the time isn’t really acting with full moral accountability since he is literally split in two. However, before and after this Joe is fully acting on his own accord.
Joe clearly has some temptation towards his murdering and stalking, but he recognizes they’re wrong and just justifies them to himself as morally righteous in order to validate his delusions. He falls back into old patterns due to his moral weakness and refuses to take full accountability and turn himself in. When he takes a “final step” in Season 4, he goes back to killing people when it fails.
Finally, the scene where he begs Bronte to shoot him most clearly shows that agency isn’t an issue. He outright acknowledges that she should kill him for his crimes and that he recognizes they’re wrong, and when she refuses he attempts to convince her that she’s just like him. His refusal to own up to his wrongdoing isn’t born out of insanity but willful delusion, similar to Light Yagami.
What Prevents Joe from Being Pure Evil?[]
There are three points I’d like to go over here that I think prevents him from getting that red lock, even at the peak of his depravity.
Tragedy?[]
As previously expounded upon, Joe has a quite traumatic background, being raised by an abusive father, his mother abandoning him when he killed him, being ruthlessly physically harassed in a foster home, being given the impression that a woman was killed at a foster home because he refused to step in to stop her abusive boyfriend, and then being abused by Mooney and lacked in a cage with no food or water for days on end.
These tragedies still clearly affect Joe, as they inform his compulsion to be provided unconditional love regardless of any of his actions and drive his savior complex that he must be a “protector of women”. Even in Season 5, he has an uncontrolled emotional breakdown when he remembers his imprisonment from Mooney and starts bawling and weeping despite it outwardly making him look worse to the interviewer. In his final unhinged motive rant, he demonstrates that he is still clearly driven by this desperation for affection, which prompts Bronte to feel some degree of sympathy for him.
However, I don’t think this goes remotely too far in making him too tragic. His actions of murdering dozens of people is not at all justified or proportional to what he went through, and his obsessive stalking and sexual obsession towards women (to the point of masturbating to them) is a result of his selfish obsessiveness and possessiveness that goes well beyond what his tragedy would justify. He also is shown to attempt to use the tragedy to garner sympathy from others, such as trying desperately to get Nadia to pity him or refusing to take responsibility for his actions when he finally is given the life sentence, and it’s ultimately shown that he does not deserve love in light of his actions. His rant to Bronte is also downplayed in sympathy since Bronte recognizes this pity is exactly what Joe wants others to feel and she refuses to let it cloud her bringing him to justice. I don’t think it’s nullified completely and it is given a fair amount of screentime, but it is heavily, heavily bit down on and deconstructed by the series.
Loved Ones?[]
So, Joe does partially view Henry as an extension of himself and abandons him twice, but he also clearly does have genuine care for him. He’s terrified at the thought of him having measles, he demonstrates clear affection towards him, he tries his best to emotionally assure and concile him when he starts being closed in on. You could say that he just views him as a vessel, but he cares too much for his well-being, and he’s genuinely devastated when Henry rejects him to the point of being brought to tears.
Additionally, he still has affection towards Will after he leaves. He let him go to the Philippines even when he posed some threat towards him and he could have killed him, and when he speaks to him again in Season 5, it’s revealed he helped pay for Will’s house and is on friendly speaking terms with him.
Finally, he cares for Mr. Mooney. When he had a stroke, he made sure to visit him consistently and while he missed him dying, this was only because he was forced to flee New York. Despite Mooney’s abuse of him, he still speaks of him fondly even in Season 5 and buys the bookstore back due to his appreciation of him.
Standards?[]
Joe also has some standards, though these are partially hypocritical. He never rapes anyone, even when he easily could, and he absolutely would not have a child be one of his “Yous” and is generally disgusted by pedophilia. He’s disgusted by Henderson to the point of being brought to the point of rage at his presence.
However, Joe is still a predator and refuses to honor his victim’s autonomy. He stalks them and often views them naked and sometimes masturbates to them, and he repeatedly kidnaps and physically injures them. However, it’s still clear that he would never go the point of sexually defiling them and would never have sex with someone who was underage and didn’t consent.
Batman129 didn’t agree with me, but I also think his standard against harming children holds up somewhat. He does frame Nadia and kill her boyfriend, who is roughly 20, but while a university student isn’t a full-grown adult, they’re not the same as a ten-year old and Joe never goes after children, to the point of pointing it out. Even when Paco is inconvenient, he doesn’t try to physically harm him. Also, while I don’t think he “loves” them per se, he does show a fondness towards children and their well-being and is shown having book-reading hours with them, even if this is partially an extension of feeling bereaved by his own childhood.
Verdict?[]
Yes, this guy is a huge fucking piece of shit. Genuinely one of the most impressively terrible protagonists I’ve ever seen.