‘You’ Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: “So I Married An Axe Murderer”

There’s barely time for mutual recriminations over Natalie’s body as You Season 3 Episode 2 opens — Joe didn’t cheat! Love found the box! “You signed a lease for our crime scene?!” — before they just have to get rid of the body. Joe immediately knows the body needs to be found, if it ever is, far away from Natalie’s GPS-enabled devices and car; they’ll bury her in the state forest. Love snits that burial wasn’t such a good idea in Candace’s case, which reminds Joe to ask: what did Love do with Candace’s body, or Delilah’s? It’s safer if he doesn’t know, she replies. When talk turns to Joe’s having used the Anavrin meat grinder on Jasper’s body in Season 2, Love decides she can’t handle it and takes off with the baby, leaving Joe to clean up. He texts Matthew from Natalie’s phone that she’s going to look at a property out of town, bags her up (bitching about the poor construction of trash bags, which: relatable!), sticks her in her own car’s trunk, puts on the hat and coat she left in the front seat in case of traffic cameras, leaves the car at a rest area, and inters her. Some of his romantic feeling toward Natalie dissipates when he goes to send “her” last text — that “marriage is a trap” — to her sister Lisa, and sees that Natalie had previously asked Lisa to convince her not to sleep with “the boring neighbor,” but anyway: she’s in the ground now, so, problem solved!

Back home, Love’s got new problems: when Love tells Dottie about the bakery, Dottie carefully informs her that “the Quinn family finances are in flux” at the moment, so Dottie may not be able to help Love with the lease. Love is horrified to think of the pressure this puts on her to make a bakery successful, in a town full of keto dieters, in a location where two previous food businesses have already recently failed…

…so it’s a good thing Love can turn Andrew and Jackson’s son’s birthday party into an impromptu pop-up event by bringing “joy-free” cupcakes! (When she hits up the local market for ingredients, flirting in the parking with college boy Theo, played by Dylan Arnold, provides a pleasant diversion for her.) Love’s even done the research to make the cupcakes lemon-raspberry, like Sherry’s wedding cake. But it seems as though Sherry has soured even further on Love since the dinner party. Love apologizes for having slipped out that night, explaining that Dottie was looking after Henry and has a hard out, to which Sherry asks if Dottie drinks to excess or takes pills to deal with Forty’s death; as the mother of twins herself, Sherry’s sure that losing one must feel just like losing both. Love, the twin whose life Sherry is heedlessly negating to her face, takes half a beat to absorb this extremely rude opinion before unveiling the cupcakes! Andrew and Kiki are excited until Sherry claims she doesn’t like lemon or raspberry, and her minions quickly follow her lead.

Before long, Sherry is wrestling cupcakes out of her twins’ mouths and scolding Love for spiking their blood sugar. Love gasps that they’re sugar-free, but Sherry spits back that there’s sugar in fruit, which the kids aren’t permitted to eat. (Forbidding children fruit is a level of abstemious helicopter parenting that can’t possibly be real…can it?!) Anyway, after Sherry’s hustled them out, Cary assures Love that it’s okay, and shows her the twins’ blood sugar levels on the app for VitalRing, Matthew’s next-level FitBit-ish device, a chunky ring users wear on their fingers — everyone in the neighborhood does! Joe and Love quickly realize “everyone” must have included Natalie, and that once Matthew figures out that Natalie is actually missing, he might check out her vitals and see where and when her heart stopped.

It’s possible they’re too late already, but Joe and Love bundle Henry into the car for a nice little family drive to Natalie’s makeshift burial site.

Love isn’t thrilled to see the state of Natalie’s face, not just decomposing but sunken, Joe having removed her teeth so that her body, if found, couldn’t be identified using dental records. Love bitterly makes sure Joe hasn’t put them in a hidey-hole Love might stumble across by chance, but Joe assures her he hasn’t; as to their location, he quotes her: “It’s safer if you don’t know.” The teeth aren’t the last desecration Natalie’s corpse is subjected to, as Joe apparently breaks her finger to remove the VitalRing; the ring itself seems to have been broken when Natalie fell, which may be good news for her murderer. Love plants it on the sink at the rest area, as though Natalie removed it to wash her hands, and then Joe drives them to a construction site: the foundation’s going to be poured the next day, so if they drop the corpse into the frame, no one will ever find it. Love is not thrilled to think of Joe driving around making mental notes of places he could possibly dump bodies should the need arise (I mean, some people notice new restaurants; Joe’s got his own concerns!), but Joe says he has to, because he married her. Once again, Joe can’t connect the fact that his biggest complaint about Love is that, in this one admittedly inconvenient respect, she is just like him, and this time Love is ready to fight about it. She hasn’t forgotten that Joe was just about to murder her when she stopped him by saying she was pregnant: “[Henry] is the only reason I’m alive. How do you think that makes me feel? I can’t trust you!” “I CAN’T TRUST YOU EITHER,” Joe screams back. He’s worked hard not to be the person he used to be (you know: also a murderer), but now he’s going to be burying bodies until he’s too infirm because if he doesn’t do exactly what Love wants him to, she’ll kill people. Love feels just as strongly that if she isn’t want he wants her to be, he’ll kill her.

It’s a lot to sort through, so it’s a good thing that Love’s closing line from “And They Lived Happily Ever…” was sincere: they have entered couples’ therapy, and Dr. Chandra (Ayelet Zurer) has been helping them talk through these issues. Granted, it’s not an entirely transparent process: no one’s saying a murder has occurred, the euphemism being that Love “broke a vase.” (Joe: “It was priceless.” Love: “It was cheap and tacky.”) They do, apparently, tell her most of what was said in this fight, though, including Love’s fear that Joe might kill her. And Dr. Chandra is just as insightful as Orna Guralnik, of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, who seems to have inspired her.

Dr. Chandra gets Joe and Love to confess their deepest fear: that anyone who sees the truest Love or Joe will leave them. Naming their common fear of abandonment is a vitally important breakthrough. They need to think of themselves not as opponents in a ring, but two teammates fighting for the same thing; she says that this will improve their sex lives, too…

…and she’s right about everything. Joe is moved by Love’s sweet play with Henry to make her his new/old “You” and fall in love with her again. They have the mind-blowing, “primal” sex Dr. Chandra promised, then renew their vows — this time, that each will do their best not to force the other into having to kill for them. Joe suggests that they construct a “safe space” in case of future crisis, and we see them build a new plexiglass case in the bakery basement…in which they each separately hide a key the other doesn’t know about. Joe talks himself in a job at the local library, restoring rare books. Love opens A Fresh Tart and tries not to be too intimidated by Stella’s sneers. The cement sets at the building site…

…just in time for Love to meet Matthew’s stepson, cute Theo from the parking lot; and for Matthew to call the cops about Natalie.

But the Quinn-Goldbergs have “got this. Together.” We’ll see!

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Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano was the co-founder of Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), and the co-author with Sarah D. Bunting of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She has also contributed to New York, the New YorkTimes Magazine, Collider, Vanity Fair, Slate, Mel Magazine, Vulture, Salon, and The Awl, among many others. She lives in Austin.

Watch You Season 3 Episode 2 on Netflix