Tear Jerker / You (2018)

While the show's premise is mostly played for horror, there are still plenty of sad moments, too.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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In General

• No matter of bad character traits of Benji, Peach, Beck or Forty, they still were children of their parents. Even if their parents are on some degree Abusive Parents or Parental Neglect. Beck had parents and two siblings. Peach had mother who tried find out what really happened to her daughter. And Benji, at least had a mother who was worried about him when she had no contact with him. None of them ever got to know what really happened to their children and Never Got to Say Goodbye. Also, Dr. Nicky lost his entire family, who now think he is a murderer. Joe's actions have destroyed entire families.

Season 1

• If you think about it, Beck's whole life is this, from start-to-finish. Let's review.
  • Her father was an Addled Addict. They love each other very much but their relationship was forever strained after he overdosed in front of her as a child.
  • At some point in her childhood, her uncle gropes her. When she tries to tell her dad what happened, he doesn't believe her.
  • Soon after he finally gets sober, her father abandons her and her mother. Hurt and angry, she decides her dad is dead to her.
  • Years later, her dad gets back into contact, and she finds out he's taken up with an utterly condescending and insufferable woman who hates her, and constantly insinuates that she and her mother are to blame for her father's past drug abuse.
  • While in college, she makes a "best friend" who is happy to shower her in gifts and take care of her... but is also a possessive, controlling Alpha Bitch who constantly makes her feel like crap, manipulates her concern for her welfare, and is, unbeknownst to her, a Stalker with a Crush.
  • In grad school, she has a relationship with a guy who lies to her and degrades her self-esteem, as well as cheats on her constantly.
  • She finally meets a sweet, attentive guy who adores her and shares her interests, only for things to go south when her best friend dies, and she cheats on him with her therapist, who took advantage of her emotional vulnerability. Soon after she and the guy work things out and get back together, she finds out he's not who she thought he was at all. In fact, he's a murderer...
  • ...and he locks her in a glass cage in the basement of his workplace when she finds out, determined to make her love him. She plays along, hoping to buy some time, but is utterly terrified and wondering how the hell she got here.
  • She finally breaks out of the cage, and it looks like she might make it... but she doesn't, and her "Prince Charming" strangles her to death. He posthumously publishes her work, and she's mourned and remembered as a talented writer who was murdered by her therapist at a young age... and no one knows the truth. The end.
• Karen's heartbroken but dignified exit when Joe breaks up with her, after he's been cheating on her with Beck. Though from a different point of view, it's probably good that she ultimately got away as she did, being otherwise unharmed by the murderous sociopath.
• The story Beck writes while in the cage — the last thing she ever writes. Elizabeth Lail's delivery just seals it.
  You used to wrap yourself in fairy tales like a blanket. But it was the cold you loved. Sharp shivers as you uncovered the corpses of Bluebeard's wives. Sweeter goose bumps as Prince Charming slid one glass slipper over your little toes, a perfect fit. But by the schoolyard, real princesses floated by you on fall winds.
  You saw the gulf between you and the rich girls, and vowed to stop believing in fairy tales. But the stories were in you, deep as poison. If Prince Charming was real, if he could save you you needed to be saved from the unfairness of everything when would he come? The answer was a cruel shrug in a hundred fleeting moments.
  The sneer on Stevie Smith's face when he called you a fat cow.
  Uncle Jeff's hand squeezing your ass in the Thanksgiving kitchen.
  The accusation in your father's eyes when you told him what happened.
  From every boy masquerading as a man that you let into your body, your heart, you learned you didn't have whatever magic turns a beast into a prince.
  You surrounded yourself with the girls you'd always resented, hoping to share their power, and you hated yourself. And that diminished you even more.
  And then, right when you thought you might just disappear, he saw you. And you knew, somewhere deep, it was too good to be true. But you let yourself be swept, because he was the first strong enough to lift you.
  Now, in his castle, you understand Prince Charming and Bluebeard are the same man. And you don't get a happy end unless you love both of him.
  Didn't you want this? To be loved? Didn't you want him to crown you? Didn't you ask for it?
  Didn't you ask for it?
  Didn't you ask for it?
  So say you can live like this. Say you love him, say thank you, say anything but the truth.
  What if you can't love him back?

Season 2

• Joe later encounters his mother with another son who she treated well as how she should have treated him. Joe walks up to his mother and asks her if she ever hated him. She said no, and said the opposite, always, but could not put up the time and effort to raise him. She did beg him to come with her and her new son and start things a new, but he refused. If he did not, he probably would have turned out better, if slightly.
• The death of Forty. He just wanted to protect his sister from an insane murderer — a man Forty considered his friend — completely unaware that she was a monster, too.
  • His words to Love: "You are just as broken as I am. You're just a much better liar." He then tearfully asks her if she really thinks so little of him and his intelligence that she thought he didn't know that.
  • During the above, he briefly holds his gun to his own head.
• The fate of the Alves sisters. Delilah finally exposed Henderson as an abusive predator, only to be kidnapped and murdered soon after. And Ellie, a fifteen-year-old, has to go on the run to avoid being placed into CPS.
  • Ellie's whole life thus far has been truly heartbreaking. Her father died and her relationship with her mother was so fraught that she ran away to go and live with Delilah. She then almost gets raped by Henderson (only saved by Joe dosing Henderson's drink beforehand), and just when it seems she and Delilah find some common ground, Delilah is murdered. Even worse, Love set up a plan to let Ellie take the fall for Henderson's murder, have her put in the system and through the trauma of being an accused murderer (with the endgoal of using her family's influence to poison the investigation and give Ellie blackmail money for life). For all his faults, even Joe sees how horrible this would be for the young girl and tells her to leave town. Unlike Paco, who gets a sort of good ending last season, Ellie is left all alone with no-one in the world to help her except the man who messed her life up so badly.
    • In episode nine, Ellie breaks down in Joe's apartment and confesses tearfully that she believes that Delilah abandoned her, just like their mother did.
    • During said breakdown, Love looks on sadly at Joe comforting Ellie. As crazy as she is, she does genuinely feel guilty for taking the girl’s sister from her.
• Candace's PTSD flashbacks. Her death at the hands of Love is even worse considering in her final moments she was just trying to comfort her and offer her support after she was trying to expose Joe to her, not knowing that Love was in on it the whole time.

Season 3

• Bordering on Heartwarming, Forty's reappearance as a spirit in Season 3 when he gives Love advice and reassures her that he will always be there for her. It serves as a really touching and well-deserved proper send-off for the character, showing that despite his flaws, Forty was a really kind-hearted person.
• When Joe and Love find out that Henry's outbreak of measles was due to their neighbor Gil being an antivaxxer, they lock him in the glass cage as they dig up dirt on him, only for him to kill himself by the end of the episode. Love frames him for Natalie's murder and Joe forges a suicide note and leaves him hanging from a noose in his own home for his wife to find. Even if he did endanger his neighbor's child, you've got to feel for Gil's wife coming home and being greeted by the sight of his hanging corpse.
• While she's become increasingly impulsive and insane and ultimately attempts to slit Joe's throat open, Love's death is a pitiable moment for her. Joe injects her with a lethal dose of aconite, which Joe describes "burns through her system" and putting her in "total fucking agony". Love drops and cries out in pain as Joe taunts her with how he figured out her plan.
  • Even after how brattish and psychotic she turned out to be, it's jarring seeing Joe so cruel to the woman he was so madly in love with. No apologies, no "shh, it'll be over soon", no tears, no remorse whatsoever. Just his Tranquil Fury lecturing as she painfully writhes on the floor in front of him.
  • The reading of Love's "suicide note" is underscored perfectly by Taylor Swift's "Exile". She and Joe were kindred spirits, but were also extremely flawed and toxic people to say the least. Their journey together was always going to end violently.
  • Joe ultimately has to leave Henry with Dante and Lansing now that Love is dead and he has to fake his own death, but also because he knows Love was right in her dying words.

Season 4

• Nadia ends the season with her boyfriend Edward killed and framed for his murder. The poor girl is too afraid to defend herself and is sent to prison, likely for life.
• The real Rhys Montrose. A flawed but still well-meaning man who honestly wanted to help the people of London as mayor, brutally tortured to murder by a psychopath who created an entire "rivalry" between them to excuse his own crimes. The poor guy died with no idea who Joe was or why this was happening.
• Katherine realizing that rather than being a strong independent woman making it on her own, her father has been controlling everything on her life. Every job she's had, he got her, he made sure she "won" the bidding war for her apartment and even silenced a sexual harassment lawsuit against Malcolm that Katherine had no idea about. Katherine is rocked that rather than having built her life on her own, her dad has been controlling her all this time.

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