Tonight I watched You Season 3 Episode 6. I won’t lie it was a challenge to live-tweet because it’s an episode of a TV show, it’s one story within a bigger story, a piece of a puzzle. But nonetheless, we did it!
You is kind of hard to explain. It’s complicated. But it all stems around Joe, the main character and as we get into Seasons 2 and 3, Love also becomes a main character. Basically, they’re sociopaths. They become obsessed with other people and then long story short, somebody ends up dead.
The story of this particular episode revolves around Joe getting to know his co-worker a little bit more. The episode begins with him in her house looking for clues and bits and pieces to help him understand who she is. As the episode goes on, he finds out more and more and ultimately, the two end up having feelings for each other.
To make matters more complicated, Love, Joe’s wife, has just cheated on him with the teenage neighbor and could be pregnant with his child. Fortunately, she gets her period and his thankfully not pregnant. A bullet dodged if you will. She’s had a complicated relationship with her brother and it’s continued even after he died. While he’s no longer around, she’s found solace in sending him text messages. In one of the scenes, she’s in a bathtub and she hallucinates that her brother, Forty, is there with her. In the end she comes to the realization that she has to give her brother up and focus her attention on Joe. This, at the same time Joe is mingling with his new crush, Marienne.
The episode ends with a conversation between Love and Joe about how to keep the neighbor away. In a previous episode, Love killed the neighbor’s wife. Anyway, Love’s idea is essentially to seduce the neighbor’s son, Theo, the one with whom she cheated on Joe. Joe thinks it’s a great idea but only because it means he can spend more time with Marriene.
When I was live-tweeting this, I tried to follow the basic principles of good storytelling. It’s not a whole complete story, so I will say it was challenging. But within the confines of the the one episode, the beginning was Joe looking for more information about Marienne, the middle and conflict were what to do about Marienne and the ending was him deciding that he was still going to be involved with her. Love went through a bit of a different battle in the episode, where the beginning was her struggling to come to terms with potentially being pregnant with someone who was not her husband, letting go of the unhealthy relationship with her brother and deciding she wanted to be happy with Joe.
Throughout the course of the show, I’ve found myself rooting for different people. I think in this episode, though, I was rooting for Love. While she’s certainly not an angel, I could see her struggle. She just wanted to be happy but that’s so hard to do when you understand how complicated her life is.
The underlying theme in this show, at least this season, is Love and Joe’s continued struggle. They both want to be with the other person or at least think they should want to be but always find something that gets in the way. And then, somehow work through it and crawl back to each other. I think this particular episode definitely drove that forward.
EXSM 3989 - Digital Storytelling Class Blog 