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| “ | Hello, you. | „ |
| ~ Joe Goldberg's phrase when he finds the next woman he sees as "The One", and his most famous quote. |
| “ | Through the killing part is much easier now that I am honest about it. | „ |
| ~ Joe Goldberg embracing his killing tendencies.
|
Joseph "Joe" Goldberg is the main protagonist of the Netflix thriller series You.
He is a serial killer who had a rough past; he later becomes obsessive about women and tries to get into relationships with them. However, this affects everything, leading Joe to continuously escape his past for different women. However, Joe's dark mind corrupts the love he truly wants, turning him into a lunatic hellbent on killing people.
He is portrayed by Penn Badgley in his first villainous role. He was also portrayed by Gianni Ciardiello, Aidan Wallace, and Jack Fisher as a youth.
Personality[]
Joe is an obsessive man who develops nefarious feelings for innocent women and fills them with a desire to date them and be loved by them. He is incredibly selfish when it comes to this, as he is willing to hurt and even kill others to do so. He would lock people in his iconic glass cage and keep them captive if it would benefit his mission to woo his love interests, showing a large lack of consideration for other people. Ultimately, getting and staying in a relationship with these women has thus far never worked out, either because they lose interest in him or discover his crimes.
Joe is deeply afraid of being arrested for his crimes and goes to great lengths to prevent that from happening. He murdered Beck by brutally assaulting and strangling her to death when she learned of his murders of Elijah Thornton, Benjamin Ashby (Benji), and Peach Salinger.
That being said, Joe is shown to have boundaries and limits that he tries not to cross, even if it would benefit him to do so. This includes harming children or their parents, even being willing to leave the USA forever and start a new life in Mexico to prevent killing Delilah, Ellie's guardian and older sister, being a needed measure to keep himself out of prison, and taking Theo Engler to the hospital to save his life despite the latter having information that could lead to his arrest. Joe also tries to not harm people he deems good or moral, which led to him refusing to go through with a plot to frame Matthew Engler for his wife's murder even though it would protect him from legal troubles.
Joe is protective of children and goes to great lengths to ensure they are okay. When his neighbour Claudia and her son were being abused by Claudia's boyfriend Ron, Joe discovered that Ron, as a parole officer, was threatening to take custody of Paco away from Claudia by reporting her past drug addiction to his "connections" if she ever left him. In order to protect them, he murdered Ron. He also protected Ellie Alves when she was being groomed by Henderson and ultimately saved her from being molested by drugging Henderson as he was trying to roofie Ellie.
From season 2 onward, Joe claims to feel remorseful about his crime, want to become a better person, and does seem to adjust his behavior from the first season, even letting one of his captives go and, at one point, surrendering to Candace's attempted citizen's arrest on him despite having the ability to escape with a spare key to his cage, which Candace had trapped him in. He also works hard to put a stop to Henderson's crimes against children as a way of atoning for his sins. That being said, aside from the situation with Candace, it is unclear if Joe's attempted redemption is genuine or motivated by self-interest. It should be considered that in order to save himself, he did place Will Bettelheim in grave danger when he offered him to Jasper, a psychopathic lunatic from the mafia who was trying to hunt him down to gain a owed debt.
Biography[]
Joe is born in September 19th, 1988 and in his childhood, he was subjected to neglect and abuse by his father. Eventually, when he was nine years old, he heard his father attacking his mother, as he thought she had been cheating on him (which she was). Joe found a gun in the cupboard and shot his father. His mother taking the blame, Joe was put in a group home and adopted a few years later by Ivan Mooney, the owner of a bookstore in Manhattan. Mooney would physically beat him and lock him in the basement in order to teach him a sick lesson, scarring the boy, warping his mind, and destroying whatever real sanity he had left. Eventually, he took over the bookstore.
Sometime before the story began, Joe was dating a woman named Candace. The relationship seemed happy enough, but Joe caught Candace cheating on him. Driven further into insanity, Joe killed the man, and Candace disappeared shortly after that.
One day, a young woman named Beck caught Joe's eye. Instantly obsessed, Joe begins stalking her while plotting the best way to enter her life and be her ideal boyfriend. He lies, steals, assaults, kidnaps, and even murders in order to form his idealised relationship with Beck. Eventually, Beck finds out that Joe has been stalking her, which leads to Joe turning on the very woman he claimed to love and eventually killing her.
In season 2, Joe has become a bookstore clerk at the Anavrin, has fallen in love with Love Quinn, and later learns that she is not so different from him. He also has to deal with Candace returning to his life, as she wants to ruin Joe after he thought he killed her. Joe befriends his neighbor Ellie Alves and wants to protect her from comedian Henderson, who is revealed to be a pedophile who sexually abused Ellie's sister, Delilah, when she was a child.
In Season 3, Joe and Love have a child whom they name Henry. Joe loves Henry more than anything and even gave him up in the end after realizing he was not a fit parent for him and was backed into a corner where if he stayed with his son, he would go to jail and Henry would be sent to a group home. To prevent that from happening, Joe faked his own death and left Henry with his actually decent-hearted friend Dante and his boyfriend Lansing to raise as their own child.
In Season 4, after killing Love and framing it as a murder-suicide, he pursues Marienne. But upon seeing him, she immediately realizes that he killed Love and killed others as well. She rejects Joe and is fearful of him. A fixer working for Love's father, Ray, makes a deal with Joe due to being fed up with cleaning the Quinn family's dirty laundry. He provides him with a new identity to start over as "Jonathan Moore." Joe accepts, but upon being told he has to kill Marienne since she knows he's alive, he instead steals her necklace and uses it as proof for "killing" her.
However, Marienne's rejection of him caused Joe to "separate" from his inner darkness and form a split personality that embodied all of his worst traits: misogyny, pettiness, obsessing and fixating, etc. This personality, however, is that of a complete psychopath who enjoys sadistically tormenting people as a result of being unregulated by whatever "Good" Joe has within him. When his split personality is able to fully manifest and break off from Joe's main personality, his first words to Marienne are "I'm not Joe." Joe's dark alter ego then orchestrates and commits a series of murders in an effort to convince Joe to finally accept his inner darkness completely. Having become obsessed over Rhys Montrose due to similar upbringings, but with Rhys having managed to better himself in the end, the darker personality decides to use Rhys's appearance as a hallucination form for him to converse with Joe and manipulate him into trusting him as the "real" Rhys Montrose. At the same time, "Rhys" would take over their shared body and murder people in Rhys' elite and affluent friend group making Joe believe that someone was trying to frame him and begin stalking him after learning of his true identity. Joe would imagine "texts" from his "stalker/blackmailer" and Rhys without realizing they were part of a complex self-manipulation.
Victims[]
- Raphael Goldberg - Shot dead in defense of his mother. (Pre-Pilot, flashback scene in P.I. Joe)
- Elijah Thornton - Pushed off a ledge. (Pre-Pilot, flashback scene in Candace)
- Benji Ashby - Purposely inflicted with an allergic reaction. (The Last Nice Guy in New York)
- Peach Salinger - Shot dead, death framed as a suicide. (Amour Fou)
- Ron Williams - Stabbed in the neck in defense of Paco. (Bluebeard's Castle)
- Guinevere Beck - Strangled. (Bluebeard's Castle)
- Jasper Krenn - Stabbed in the stomach in self-defense. (Just the Tip)
- Henderson - Accidentally thrown down stairs, cracking his skull. (The Good, The Bad & The Hendy)
- Ryan Goodwin - Pushed off a second story car park and then stabbed four times. (Red Flag)
- Love Quinn - Injected with a fatal dose of aconite. (What is Love)
- Malcolm Harding - Stabbed in the chest because of his split personality. (Joe Takes a Holiday)
- Simon Soo - Stabbed in the chest because of his split personality. (Portrait of the Artist)
- Vic Bailey - Strangled with his own tie in self-defense. (Eat the Rich)
- Gemma Graham-Greene - Stabbed in the chest because of his split personality. (Hampsie)
- Rhys Montrose - Choked to death. (Good Man, Cruel World)
- Hugo McNamara - Stabbed in the ankle, then in the neck. (The Death of Jonathan Moore)
- Tom Lockwood - Suffocated to death with plastic bag. (The Death of Jonathan Moore)
- Edward Owen - Stabbed in the neck. (The Death of Jonathan Moore)
Total: 18 (14 direct kills, one indirect kill, three kills by proxy)
Quotes[]
| “ | Bro? You waste of hair. | „ |
| ~ Joe to Benji, responding to the latter on calling him bro. |
| “ | For the love of Christ. | „ |
| ~ Joe to himself on Beck stating she's glad they are friends. |
| “ | Touché, bi**h. | „ |
| ~ Joe to himself on Peach's statement on runner's high. |
| “ | Impossible. Benji was too lazy to run his own business, let alone haunt mine. | „ |
| ~ Joe to Karen. |
| “ | Now, do I believe Love has Ellie's best interests at heart? Nope. | „ |
| ~ Joe Goldberg. |
| “ | Hard to be invisible with the greatest lady magnet in the history of the species strapped to you. | „ |
| ~ Joe on his kid, Henry. |
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Joe's actor, Penn Badgley, was not nearly as adept with social media as his character.
- Joe Goldberg is a textbook case of Yandere (especially in season 1), which is a Japanese term for someone who is initially kind, sweet, and gentle, but at the same time brutal and deranged in nature. "Yandere" is derived from the Japanese words yanderu, meaning insane or sick, and deredere, meaning affectionate or loving. Simply put, a yandere is someone who is lovesick—someone who has been driven to insanity by extreme obsession or love, thus resulting in abnormal behaviour, if not violence.
- While the series version of Joe Goldberg is psychotic and obsessive, he does show some empathy and humanity for himself; the book version of Joe is very heartless and more selfish. Though Joe begins to become more like his book counterpart in the Season 4 finale.
- Despite Joe having an alternative personality, this never happens in the books, nor is it set in London. This plot twist is arguably similar to Fight Club, where the Narrator has an alternate personality in a plot twist.
- He is almost similar to Dexter Morgan in the TV series Dexter.
- Because the fifth and final season is set in New York again, it has been indicated that Joe may face the consequences for what he has caused. The teaser has Penn Badgley implying that Joe might once again encounter the people he has wronged in the past, which would include (as featured in the video) Marienne, Dr. Nicky, Karen, Paco, Henry, Ellie, the Conrads, The Englers, and Nadia, possibly seeking revenge.
- Dr. Nicky was imprisoned for life after Joe framed him for his murders of Benji, Peach, and Beck.
- Sherry and Cary were locked in a glass cage by Joe and Love.
- Matthew and Theo Engler both almost got their lives ruined. Matthew blames Joe for Love's murder of Natalie, and he left Joe to die when Love was planning to kill him so he could exact revenge. But since Joe escaped, Matthew may want revenge, especially since he also blames Joe for Theo's near death experience with Love in the near end of Season 3.
- Ellie wants to avenge her dead sister Delilah, who was murdered by Love, and she blames Joe for bringing her into their lives. Although Delilah was partially avenged with Love's death, Ellie may still blame Joe.
- Marienne would somehow take measures to ensure Joe wouldn’t get away with his crimes after reading about his newfound lifestyle with Kate.
- Nadia was framed by Joe for his murders of Rhys and her boyfriend Edward.
External Links[]
- Joe Goldberg on the You Wiki.
- Joe Goldberg on the VS Battles Wiki.
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 Villains
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Secondary Villains Minor Villains | ||