Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is back in the first teaser trailer for season four of you. Actually, make that Jonathan Moore. Having faked his death at the end of season three, that’s the alias Joe will use after he moves to London. How he obtained it has yet to be revealed, although there are a few possibilities as to how he could have done it.
In season two, Joe steals the identity of Will Bettelheim (Robin Lord Taylor), a criminal who specializes in creating false identities. Joe eventually let Will go after the latter developed Stockholm Syndrome, leaving him free to create new identities that Joe needs in the future. Of course, the same season also notes that building a bulletproof fake identity for yourself takes years, so chances are Joe has “borrowed” someone else again.
No longer the “amiable bookstore manager in New York or the store clerk in LA or the loving husband in the suburbs,” Joe is now a professor. As part of his new identity, Joe now has a beard and mustache, a common way of disguising yourself in fiction after adopting glasses. However, he still has his trusty black baseball cap.
Using his signature voiceover, Joe says he’s undergone a bit of refinement over the pond, allowing him to “bury the past, if you will.” He says the days of unrequited love and desire are over (viewers have heard those words before) “while my typical extracurricular activities remain strictly professional.” Joe says that about a shot of one of the new characters, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie).
Hello you
The shot of Kate with Joe lurking in the background combined with the voiceover makes it seem like she’s Joe’s new “You” this season. Marianne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle), Joe’s last love interest from season three, also returns. The last time Joe had two You’s in a season, one of them ended up dead. Of course, Gabrielle is billed under the lead role, unlike Michaela McManus, so she may not have anything to worry about.
In the trailer, Joe says that this time he will focus on academia and instruction on a shot of Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), another new character. It’s possible that Joe takes on a more mentoring role for her, as with Paco (Luca Padovan) and Ellie (Jenna Ortega). While Hickman is considerably older than Padovan or Ortega when they were on the show, a student-teacher romance may be on the horizon.
The teaser introduces some additional new characters and ends with the following voiceover quote:
“Unfortunately, with friends in high places, usually others come and try to climb that social ladder. Some may fall, or should I say ‘pushed’ to their social death. The question is: by whom?”
Looks like we’re about to get a lot of suspicion between rich ne’er-do-well, which hasn’t really been unheard of on the show so far. Since Season 4 is split into two parts, fans and viewers will need to put two different dates in their calendars to find out what happens next. Part one will be released on February 10 and part two on March 10 this year.