‘You’ Season 4 Part 1 Explains How Joe Goldberg Became a Professor
You Season 4 picks up in the aftermath of Joe Goldberg faking his death. The last fans saw of Joe, he was living in Paris, searching for Marienne. However, season 4 takes place in London, with Joe working as a professor. Luckily the new season explained Joe’s move and how he got hired to teach.
[WARNING: This article contains spoilers for You Season 4 Part 1.]
Joe Goldberg teaches at a university in ‘You’ Season 4
You Season 4 Part 1 picks up with Joe Goldberg working in London as a professor under the name Jonathan Moore. Joe’s new look and career path suit him. Though he never went to college himself, Joe is incredibly well-read and smart enough to know when to let his students carry the class discussion.
He also assigns literature that is different than the “usual canonical, vaguely racist men that drink,” as his student Nadia puts it. “The people who decided what was important were wrong. The ones who assign those writers are lazy,” Joe tells his student, musing that he is good at “professor-ing.”
How did Joe Goldberg land a job as a university professor?
It’s hard to argue that Joe is a good teacher and he enjoys that England is full of literary people. The real question is, how did he get the credentials to get hired? Through flashbacks, You Season 4 explains that Joe’s hunt for Marienne finally yielded results.
While in Paris, Joe learned that she was attending an art conversion in London. Marienne took Love’s warning to heart and believes that Joe is dangerous.
Trying, as usual, to convince himself that he is a good man, Joe lets Marienne go after confronting her. He then encounters Elliot Tannenberg. It turns out that Love’s father hired Elliot to find Joe and kill him. Instead, Elliot gives Joe a new identity, complete with a solid credit score and work visa.
However, Elliot needs everyone to think Joe is dead, so he demands that Joe kill Marienne. In an anxiety-inducing scene, it seems like Joe is going to go through with it. Instead, he steals a necklace from Marienne so that he can convince Elliot she is dead. He sends Elliot a photo of the necklace as proof and the pair part ways.
‘You’ creators have wanted Joe to teach for a long time
After Joe’s miserable experiences in Los Angeles, he finds himself enjoying London more than he expected. Joe gets along well with his students and even describes teaching as “fun.”
It turns out that You author Caroline Kepnes and showrunner Sera Gamble have been hoping to put Joe in this setting for quite some time. “We’ve known for years that we wanted to eventually put him in a university,” Gamble told Entertainment Weekly.
“It’s also fun because for the first time, really, he’s talking about the books he loves so much and getting the correct level of respect that he never really got when he was a bookstore manager.”
You Season 4 Part I premieres Feb 9, 2023, and Part II March 9, 2023, only on Netflix.
