These Tiny Details In You Season 2 Hinted At Love’s Secret All Along

You Season 2 was full of wild twists and turns throughout, but there was one major shock that stood out among all the others, because it pretty much changed everything. Warning: Spoilers for You Season 2 follow. While fans already knew Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) had some serious stalker-killer tendencies, few expected his love interest of the season, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), to also have no issue doing dark deeds for the sake of love. However, despite Love seeming like she would end up as just another one of Joe’s innocent victims, there were actually a handful of clues Love was a killer in You Season 2 all along — you just had to know where to look.

It wasn’t necessarily Love’s outward behavior that gave away any hints about her dark side. “She is definitely not somebody who brandishes the facts,” Pedretti told Harper’s Bazaar about her character on Jan. 11, 2020. However, while Love might’ve been unreadable to the other characters (and most viewers were probably screaming for her to run for cover from Joe, for that matter), there were definitely a few signs that alluded toward her inner darkness. Now that fans have seen the episodes, they’ll realize these Easter eggs were hiding in plain sight.

1. The Season 2 Poster’s Tagline

The tagline on the Season 2 You poster aptly says: “Meet your match.” Before jumping into the season, it would be understandable to assume the phrase was referring to Joe’s ex Candace (Ambyr Childers), who set out to take him down at the end of Season 1. Now, it’s much clearer this actually alluded to Joe and Love’s equally dark and twisted natures.

2. Love’s Narration

Much like Beck’s brief narration stint in Season 1, Love’s inner monologue took over for a hot second in the first episode of Season 2. However, while Beck’s descriptions served as a funny reaction to an awkward hookup with Joe that showed how differently she viewed the world than he did, Love’s style of narration was a lot more similar to Joe’s.

Whenever Joe finds a new target, he acts like he knows the woman better than she knows herself. This is mirrored when Love brought Joe (whom she still believed to be Will, at this point) into Anavrin to cook him chicken, saying in her head, “Let me tell you a little bit about yourself, Will Bettelheim. You’re not a snob, you’re just old fashioned. You like things that are real, made right by people who care. You like strong flavors; gimmicks don’t seduce you. What seduces you is the real thing.” If that’s not a page right out of Joe Goldberg’s creeper book, I’m not sure what is.

3. Love’s Pursuit Of Joe

Love wasn’t at all demure in pursuing Joe. The first time they met, her opening line was to ask Joe if the peach she was holding looked like a butt (which isn’t exactly a typical conversation starter between strangers). Then, after Joe got a severe sunburn from falling asleep in the sun, she showed up on his doorstep and insisted on taking him on a tour of the Los Angeles food scene.

Then there are their “coincidental” run-ins. Sure, fans found out Joe was behind at least some of their meetups, but at least one instance (when they saw each other at the DMV) could have totally been staged by Love. If you think about it, Love’s boldness when first meeting and getting to know Joe could totally suggest she, like Joe, was willing to take drastic measures in the pursuit of a partner.

4. The Juxtaposition Of Cooking And Killing

Episode 2 had one of the most stomach-churning montages in TV history, featuring scenes of Joe butchering the body of the man he’d just killed interspersed with clips of Love cooking up a delicious meal. Looking back on this scene, it’s clear the show’s writers weren’t just trying to ruin viewers’ appetites; they were also sneakily helping fans associate Love’s cooking skills with Joe’s body butchery, hinting at her true nature.

This connection is further explored in Episode 3, when Forty stood on a table in the middle of the room at Henderson’s party and drunkenly preached about the concept of “Chekhov’s gun” (or Chekhov’s knife, as he called it), a concept that suggests if an author (or, say, a TV series) draws attention to something, they should eventually reveal why that thing was worth the attention.

“Sure, she’s cutting an apple right now, but the audience is going to be subconsciously terrified for the ‘human apple,’” Forty said. Since there’s no context to explain why Forty was discussing this rule with partygoers, and Love is often in the kitchen dealing with knives, there’s reason to believe this moment served as a clue to Love’s dark ways.

5. The Fuzzy Au Pair Memory

Early on in the series, Love told Joe about her childhood nanny’s sexual abuse of Forty when he was a minor, and then her subsequent suicide. However, in Episode 8, Forty told Joe he actually killed the au pair, but also admitted he didn’t remember the incident. The different stories could have tipped audiences off that they weren’t getting the full truth about the situation, even possibly hinting to fans that Love played a more sinister role in the whole thing.

6. Love’s Husband’s Death

You know Love’s late husband, James, who apparently died from a mysterious illness before Joe came into the picture? Well, there’s a fan theory that Love was actually behind his death. First of all, James didn’t share Love’s desire to start a family. Because it was so clear family meant a lot to Love, it’s totally plausible that she was angry with him for this.

Also, since Love works in a grocery store, she could have access to potentially poisonous herbs. Plus, since she’s a chef; slipping poison into her hubby’s food wouldn’t have been a hard feat. And finally, it seems Delilah may have caught on to Love’s possible kill. Referencing Episode 6, Reddit user inthacut12 made an interesting observation:

“When Delilah has her big board of names and pictures and stuff when she’s working on her article about Henderson, the camera pans to a paper of an article talking about James (Love’s dead ex-husband). It said something about him being sick.”

Totally innocent people don’t usually end up on crime investigation boards, so it seems Delilah had been connecting some dots before her untimely death. Perhaps that’s another reason Love killed Delilah in the final episode — to save her past actions from being discovered.

Love is going to be an even bigger part of Season 3, so keep a close eye on her, because there will likely be even more subtle hints about what she’s truly capable of.