Episode 1 functions as the narrative’s “VP3”—a third volume of a man who has already burned through two identities (the bookstore clerk and the suburban husband). The episode is masterful in its use of the “unreliable narrator” trope, not merely as a plot device, but as a mirror for the audience. Joe insists he is no longer a killer; he has retired to London to teach literature and stalk a new muse, Kate. Yet the framing betrays him. The camera still lingers on keyholes; his internal monologue still dissects human beings as though they are texts to be edited. The episode asks a haunting question: If a wolf moves to a city of sheep, does it stop being a wolf, or does it simply become more patient?
The episode’s setting—a dilapidated English manor hosting a party of grotesque aristocrats—is a direct allegory for Joe’s psyche. The manor is rotting under its gilded wallpaper, just as Joe’s morality is rotting under his tweed blazer. The murder of Malcolm, the obnoxious poet, is the inciting incident that shatters Joe’s delusion of normalcy. Significantly, Joe does not commit this murder. For the first time, the audience watches Joe wake up to a corpse he did not create. This is the “VP3” pivot: the show transitions from a study of a serial killer to a study of a serial killer’s conscience. you s04e01 vp3
In conclusion, You S04E01 is not about London or love; it is about the limits of self-reinvention. Joe Goldberg believes that by changing his accent, his city, and his profession, he can outrun his shadow. The episode argues the opposite: the cage Joe built for his victims has always been a cage for himself. By forcing him into the role of the detective rather than the killer, the episode disorients both Joe and the viewer. It is a brilliant, uncomfortable prologue to the season’s second half, reminding us that for a man like Joe, there is no “holiday” from the self. There is only the next rationalization, and the next victim. Episode 1 functions as the narrative’s “VP3”—a third
The structural brilliance of S04E01 lies in its inversion of the series’ formula. For three seasons, Joe was the apex predator, the active agent of chaos. In London, he becomes the prey. The introduction of the “Eat the Rich Killer”—a nemesis who photographs Joe’s crimes and blackmails him into playing detective—forces Joe into a defensive crouch. This is the episode’s central irony: Joe, the ultimate control freak, loses control of his own narrative. He cannot kill the rich because he is hiding among them; he cannot expose the killer because to do so would be to expose himself. Yet the framing betrays him
In the sprawling, gothic landscape of You Season 4, Episode 1, titled “Joe Takes a Holiday,” the series performs its most radical sleight of hand yet. By relocating Joe Goldberg from the claustrophobic basements of American suburbia to the rarefied penthouses of London’s literary elite, the show trades a slasher aesthetic for a drawing-room mystery. However, beneath the veneer of British politeness and artisanal cocktails lies the episode’s true thesis: that geography cannot cure pathology. For Joe, or rather “Professor Jonathan Moore,” exile is not a punishment but a euphemism. It is a desperate, failing attempt to rebrand psychosis as sophistication.