NetflixIn just a couple days, Joe Goldberg is at it again.
You will debut its second season on December 26, and in case you haven't had time to rewatch season one of the Netflix (formerly Lifetime) drama, we've got you covered (with a little help from the streaming service).
Netflix released a little recap video of season one with Joe (Penn Badgley) catching you up on his "love" story with Beck (Elizabeth Lail), which resulted in the death of her ex-boyfriend, her best friend Peach, and herself, after she started asking too many questions about Joe and his own past, and Joe had to get rid of her.
You can watch that quick little video below, but let's get just a little bit deeper ahead of season two, which has Joe heading to Los Angeles to escape his past in New York. And it's not just the murders he committed he's running from, but also the murder he didn't end up committing.
Part of Beck's many questions had to do with Joe's ex-girlfriend, Candace, who he thought he had killed before he even met Beck. As a surprise for us all, Candace then showed up at the very end of season one, and she's out for vengeance, so Joe's hoping a trip across the country will save him from whatever she's got planned as well.
Meanwhile, he's also got at least one new and beautiful woman to set his sights on, though he's a little more hesitant this time, after what happened—or rather, what he himself actively did—last time. So that means that this time, his relationship with the new "you," also known as Love (Victoria Pedretti), might start off a little differently, or at least Joe's going to do his best to make us think things are different this time. It's genuinely hard to tell.
Joe met Beck in the bookstore where he worked. She read the right kind of books, and was clearly flirting with him. She didn't wear a bra and she used a credit card—classic, extremely specific signs of a woman trying to get attention, you know—so he took that as a go ahead to stalk all of her social media, track down her home address, and masturbate outside her window while she had sex with her boyfriend. And that was just in episode one.
Over the course of the season, he examined all the various parts of Beck's life both to decide if they were "good" for her and to use them to make her fall in love with him, which she did. They broke up after her best friend died (because he killed her), but found their way back to each other, just in time for Beck to start wising up to the fact that Joe might not be so good for her after all.
When Beck discovered evidence of Joe's crimes, she had to die too, though she did give him the great idea to frame her therapist for the murders.
Now, after discovering that Candace is still alive and pretty pissed off, Joe has moved to Los Angeles, a place he deeply hates. He works at a grocery store, has a couple interesting new neighbors, and is making friends with people at work, including Love. Love comes complete with several very LA friends, including Gabe, an acupuncturist, and Sunrise, a mommy blogger.
We're going to go ahead and bet that not all of Love's friends and family will make it out of the season alive, but hopefully Candace has something deranged up her sleeve as part of her quest for revenge. Or at least hopefully her quest is for revenge, because somebody's gotta take this guy down.
For everything we know about season two, keep on scrolling down, and have a good final two days before Joe returns to stalk again.
Season two is heading to the other side of the country for some light stalking in Los Angeles instead of New York. Will people in New York be better at having curtains? Only time will tell.
What we do know is that Joe is not a Los Angeles fan in any way. He's gonna hate it, and that's going to be fun. In fact, where the vibe of season one was very much dependent on New York, the vibe of season two is sort of based on how much New Yorkers hate LA.
"There's a very particular romantic feeling that comes with being in New York as a young person, especially without a lot of money. You're young, free, you're struggling and you're trying to find a kindred spirit. Los Angeles is a completely different vibe," EP Sera Gamble told TVLine. "I've lived here since I was 16, and one of the classic truisms about living in LA is that you're surrounded by former New Yorkers who f–ing hate it here. So we started the writers' room for Season 2 by being like, "Joe moves to LA and he completely hates it. Let's talk about how much fun that is."
Since Beck is...indisposed, Joe will now be setting his sights on a girl named Love Quinn, played by Haunting of Hill House star Victoria Pedretti.
Love is an "artistic" aspiring chef in LA working as a produce manager in a high-end grocery store, and she's not interested in social media or branding and much more into leading an interesting life. She's in grief when she meets Joe, and "can sense he too has known life-changing loss." EP Sera Gamble told EW that Love "embodies the best of Los Angeles," while Joe hates the city and not much is going to change his mind on that.
Love has quite the variety of friends. Melanie Field plays Sunrise, a stay-at-home lifestyle blogger, while Marielle Scott plays Lucy, a literary agent. Charlie Barnett plays Gabe, Love's oldest and closest friend and confidant who's an acupuncturist and psychedelics aficionado.
Carmela Zumbado plays Delilah Alves, an investigative reporter who lives in the same building as Joe. "Delilah becomes dangerously invested in her new neighbor, Joe Goldberg, who seems to be hiding something." Oh, he's definitely hiding something.
Adwin Brown plays Calvin, Joe's pleasant new boss at the trendy LA grocery store/cafe/bookstore Anavrin (it's Nirvana backwards). "Working at a bookstore with Joe...what can go wrong?" asks the show's Twitter account. Love also works at the store, as does her brother Forty, played by James Scully. He's confident, opinionated, and privileged, a charming and razor-sharp bully. He's working through a 12-step program, relying on his sister for support and attention, but "it never takes much of a shove for him to fall back off the wagon."
Joe's ex-girlfriend made a surprising appearance at the end of the first season, after we were left to assume Joe had killed her, and clearly Joe also thought he had killed her. He didn't, and Ambyr Childers was promoted to series regular for season two. It's not clear if she has followed Joe to LA or not, but Gamble told THR that she'll have "bigger stuff" this season, and if she's there to torment Joe in any way we are here for it.
Ortega, who starred in Disney Channel's Stuck in the Middle and as young Jane on Jane the Virgin, will play a young con artist named Ellie who likes to act and appear older than her years. She grew up in the big city with minimal supervision and must take care of herself and do whatever she needs to to make some cash, including scamming Joe Goldberg, apparently.
The casting of comedian Chris D'Elia felt like a surprise, until we read Deadline's description of the character: "Henderson, a designer-hoodie, black Ray-Bans, expensive sneakers-wearing famous comedian with a 'hard-life-lessons man-of-the-people' thing working for him." Sera Gamble also describes him as an "uberfamous comedian and known good guy."
Perfect, honestly.
Gotham's Robin Lord Taylor will recur as Will, a personable guy who deals with "unsavory sorts" as part of his job and finds himself in a bad situation. Aside from Forty, he's the only main character there are still no photos of, which might mean something or it might mean nothing.
Just because Joe has framed Dr. Nicky and moved across the country doesn't mean Beck and Peach's murders (and Benji's and....) couldn't come back to haunt him. EP Sera Gamble reminded THR that Peach's family has hired an investigator and there's still probably evidence in her house.
"If you look at every act of violence that he does in season one, that is potentially something that could come back and bite him," Gamble said. "And Dr. Nicky is in prison and he is ardently protesting his innocence."
Gamble couldn't promise John Stamos will return, but said the writers have been "talking a lot about the character."
Season one deviated from Caroline Kepnes' book in a few small ways, most notably by keeping Candace alive. Season two will be a mix of staying with the book and following that Candace story somewhere new.
"There's a lot of great story in the second book that we're going to be able to do, but in our way," Gamble told TVLine. "Even though some of the changes we made in Season 1 seemed small at the time, they were fundamental. Every little change we make to a character is a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane in Season 2."
In that same interview with THR, Gamble described Joe as a "very interesting, particular kind of guy who thinks that he is—what's the word for it? Maybe 'woke.'"
"He thinks he really understands women. He thinks that he is such an incredible ally," she continued. "I think that can be one of the most dangerous positions of all when you're entitled and when you're not entirely self-aware about why you do the things that you do... So I don't know, we're having a lot of fun being subversive with the story, and that will continue."
And we will continue to remind you that Joe is a serial killer, just for those of you who keep getting too distracted by Penn Badgley's face to remember that.
You's second season premieres on Netflix this Thursday, December 26.