Every season of You needs, well, a You. Wherever he goes, whoever he pretends to be, serial obsessive Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) always finds a new person to zero all the way in on. Season 3 sets us up to think its You would be Joe’s next-door neighbor Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus). But then Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) takes care of that. Season 3’s true You is Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle), Madre Linda’s kindly librarian and a doting single mother. Marienne is a new challenge for Joe. 

“We thought of her as, ‘OK, now we have to construct a character that Joe would fall in love with, that he can’t easily lie to himself about,’ ” showrunner Sera Gamble tells Tudum. “Not that Marienne is perfect. It’s that she’s really honest, and she’s trying really hard to be just a good person and a good mom.” 

It’s those qualities that draw Joe to Marienne — and Marienne into danger. You Season 4, Part 2 finds Marienne in a more precarious position than ever. You’ll probably wonder how such a cruel fate befell someone like Marienne. Like a nightingale at dusk, we’ll sing you the entire tale. 

John P. Fleenor/Netflix

What happened to Marienne in You Season 3? 

Joe first locks eyes with Marienne at his dream meet cute location: the library. But uncharacteristically for romantic fantasist Joe, it’s not exactly love at first sight. 

Marienne meets Joe while she’s working at the Madre Linda library, where she gives him a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (which takes its title from a line in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — remember this; it’s important later). 

It’s not long before Joe picks up a volunteer gig at the library, and turns his attention to Marienne. At first, she’s unmoved by the charm that’s worked on so many of the Yous that came before her. But a flirtation builds until Joe and Marienne finally share a kiss in Episode 6. Joe becomes firmly committed to Marienne, neglecting his marriage with Love. 

In true Joe fashion, he demonstrates his love for Marienne by killing someone close to her — like a cat dropping a dead bird at its owner’s feet. In this case, it’s Marienne’s controlling ex, Ryan (Scott Michael Foster), and Joe escapes suspicion by making it look like a mugging gone sideways.

Although Ryan is out of the way, Marienne remains worried she could be pinned for his murder and asks Joe to run away with her. But Love realizes her husband has been having an affair and lures Marienne to their home. Rather than murder Marienne, Love takes pity on the single mother and simply informs her that Joe is a cold-blooded killer. 

Marienne believes Love and flees the Quinn-Goldberg home. Unfortunately, Joe is right behind her. He ends his marriage the best way he knows how (poisoning Love and burning their house down) before following Marienne to where she feels safest: Paris.  

What happened to Marienne before You?  

A lonely childhood, a painful marriage and lingering fallout. Marienne spent her youth in foster care before marrying Ryan; they both were in the throes of addiction while their daughter, Juliette (Dallas Skye), was a baby. Marienne hit rock bottom when she ran a red light while driving high with Juliette, who was thankfully uninjured. Ryan got sober soon after — or, at least, claimed to — and used the car crash, as well as his clout, to get custody of Juliette.  

What happened to Marienne in You Season 4? 

According to Part 1, nothing but a relatively painless encounter with Joe. As we see in the Season 3 finale, Joe heads to Europe to find Marienne. Season 4, Episode 1 reveals that Joe finally spies her at an art fair in London. He recognizes her despite her new long blonde braids and artsy-chic wardrobe. Terrified to see him again, Marianne begs Joe to let her go home to Juliette in Paris. 

Joe, who loves nothing more than showing women what a good guy he is, lets her walk away. Then, when a crooked private investigator (Adam James) hired by Love’s family urges Joe to eliminate Marienne, Joe tricks the man instead. Joe steals Marienne’s necklace as proof he killed her. None the wiser, Marienne gets on her train back to Paris. 

OK, but what really happened to Marienne in Season 4? 

Marienne learns what we already knew: No one breaks it off with Joe that easily. Of course, Joe didn’t actually let his precious You head back to her own life in Paris without him. Joe may claim to be a good guy, but his darkness has now completely taken over. Season 4, Episode 8 reveals that Joe, in a dissociative state, drugged Marienne’s drink before she got on her train, abducted her and has been holding her in a re-creation of his glass cage for months. 

Marienne and Juliette have pet names for each other during family story time: Marienne calls herself nightingale, and Juliette is her chick. Now the metaphor of a nightingale and a cage has become literal, and Joe is the fox prowling for his prey.   

Set to the sounds of Halsey’s “Bells of Santa Fe,” Marienne is abandoned by Joe and slowly loses her grip on reality as the days go by and she’s trapped in the cage. 

For showrunner Gamble, the song choice here was intentional, as it also got her through particularly harrowing portions of the pandemic. “I feel this little excited feeling when I can put a song that is meaningful to me into a show,” Gamble tells Tudum. “After three seasons of throwing people in a cage, we wanted to do an episode that really gave you a sense of what it was like for time to go by in there. We also wanted to give Marienne a true voice, and showpiece, and time in the story that was really hers.” 

In a rare win for Marienne, she’s freed from the cage by Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), Joe’s star student. The women come up with a wild plan that will trick Joe once and for all. “Power to the women of color!” Gabrielle tells Tudum. “We’re never willing to be a victim of circumstance, and are going to go through hell and high water to make sure that we save and preserve ourselves. It’s born out of generational trauma, but it’s one of our greatest strengths.” 

How did Marienne and Nadia trick Joe?

First, they convince Joe that Marienne has lost custody of Juliette — and thus lost her will to live. Then, Marienne appears to have a severe allergic reaction to a drink Joe gives her. Finally, Marienne pretends to overdose on a bottle of pills Joe left in the cage. He leaves Marienne’s body on a park bench so authorities will assume her death was an accidental overdose. 

‘You’ Season 4 Ending ExplainedOnce again, Joe Goldberg has created a total bloody mess.

So, does Marienne die in You Season 4? 

Despite her apparent overdose, Marienne never dies. She takes enough beta-blockers to look dead. Once Joe abandons Marienne’s body, Nadia injects Marienne with a stimulant to wake her up. Alive and as well as can be expected, Marienne finally heads back to Paris and her little chick, Juliette. 

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” Keats wrote in “Ode to a Nightingale.” But how does the actor who plays Marienne feel about being the one to finally outsmart Joe and fly the coop? “It feels freaking amazing. It feels right,” Gabrielle says with a smile. 

Marienne ends the season in Paris, reading the news that Joe has once again rebooted (and improved) his life, this time in New York. Gabrielle doubts this latest turn of events “sits right” with Marienne. 

“I don’t know if she’s one necessarily for revenge, but she’s certainly one for justice,” she says. Gabrielle thinks death just might be “too easy of an escape” for a tormentor like Joe. “I think that he should be locked in a cage somewhere and have to wrestle with his demons internally,” she says. 

Does Tati Gabrielle return in Season 5? 

Yes, she does! Gabrielle appears in You Season 5’s ninth episode, “Trial of the Furies.” 

What happens to Marienne in Season 5? 

In a world as twisty as the world of You, a nightingale can do more than just escape — she can become the fox. In other words, Marienne plays a significant role in Joe’s downfall in the final season of You. 

After Joe’s überwealthy wife, Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), finally realizes exactly who she married, she recruits Nadia, who Joe framed for murder in Season 4, and Marienne, who’s been in hiding ever since she made it out of the cage, to help take Joe down once and for all. The trio give Joe a taste of his own medicine by kidnapping him and locking him in his beloved cage in the hopes of eliciting a confession. 

Of course, Joe is shocked to discover that Marienne is alive, but also, in classic Joe fashion, he refuses to accept responsibility for the damage he caused. “You are not a white knight, Joe,” Marienne emphatically tells him. “You are a fucking abuser.” 

“We’re finally bursting the bubble and seeing the real him as we hear Marienne castigate him, and Nadia condemn him for the life that he stole from her,” says You Season 5 co-showrunner Michael Foley.

Unfortunately, this reunion doesn’t yield the results the women were hoping for, so Marienne takes another approach: She has a heart-to-heart with Joe’s current paramour, Bronte (Madeline Brewer). By opening up about her experience with Joe, Marienne helps Bronte understand it’s not her fault that she fell for an abuser and turns her against Joe. This conversation pushes Bronte down the path that eventually leads to her (accidentally) shooting Joe’s penis off, as well as to his arrest in the series finale. 

With Joe incarcerated for the rest of his life, Marienne is free to live out in the open again as an artist. In fact, she even gains a new benefactor in Kate. 

Additional reporting by Chancellor Agard. 

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