S03.E01: And They Lived Happily Ever After

[Door County Cherry]

Airs 10/15

Quote

After a delivery room surprise, new dad Joe struggles to connect with his infant child, but he has no trouble at all fostering a new infatuation.

 

Edited October 15, 2021 by dubbel zout
added episode description

[eXiled]

Still an insane, hypocritical douche bag, Joe? Glad to see that hasn't changed. I've missed you so, so much!

Every time Love or Dot called that kid Forty, I cringed. Forty Senior was ... a lot, so his namesake has plenty to live up to.

Suburban hell looks good on our friendly neighborhood psychopath.

Edited to add: Why does everyone know his name is Joe Goldberg? What happened to Will Bettelheim?

Edited October 15, 2021 by eXiled

[Spartan Girl]

Wow, that escalated quickly.

I don’t know who I feel sorry for more: baby Henry for crapping out on the parental lottery, or Natalie for getting killed all because Joe was stalking her. Yeah she kissed him and didn’t have any qualms about cheating on her own husband, but she still didn’t deserve to die.

Joe, you took the wrong message away from Gatsby. He projected his ideals on a woman who wasn’t at all what he wanted her to be and it destroyed him.

[dubbel zout]

LOL at Joe stalking Natalie with a baby strapped to his chest.

I loved the librarian's "White people are crazy" eye roll as Joe left.

Sherry the Momfluencer is a hoot. Such a humblebragger and so passive-aggressive it hurts.

Henry is ADORABLE.

It's nice they had the remembrance for Mark Blum at the end.

[gesundheit]

42 minutes ago, dubbel zout said:

I loved the librarian's "White people are crazy" eye roll as Joe left.

Sherry the Momfluencer is a hoot. Such a humblebragger and so passive-aggressive it hurts.

Adore Sherry. I hope we get a lot more of her!

I worry that the librarian is not long for this world and/or will become the new You.

[Spartan Girl]

In fairness, Love’s murderous rage wasn’t helped by the fact that Natalie had the audacity to chum up to her after she tried to sleep with Joe.

I don’t think Joe being so upset about getting a boy instead of a girl was about being afraid of repeating the past. Maybe that’s part of it, but a bigger part was that a daughter contributes to the image of himself as a White Knight for protecting all broken women. He can lie to himself all he wants, but he hasn’t changed.

[skotnikov]

Michaela McManus is stunning. 

[Cementhead]

2 hours ago, skotnikov said:

Michaela McManus is stunning. 

My husband & I just finished watching Aquarius which she was also in and he commented on how pretty she is.  Coincidentally, Ambyr Childers who played Candace last season, was also on Aquarius.

Fingers crossed that Netflix hasn't royally screwed up this series on us because I've lost count of how many of my must-see shows have been really disappointing this season, to the point that I just stopped watching them altogether.   This episode was a good one.

[DearEvette]

Whoa.  Just when I thought Love couldn't get any worse.  She does.  I mean, sure your husband is obsessed with your neighbor who herself isn't too concerned about marriage vows,  but does that mean you have to lure her into a basement and axe murder her?  When your psycho stalker husband is right there and is more deserving?  She is am impulse killer.  I know it is kinda cool to see Joe trapped with someone as bad as he is, but I wish she had a higher moral ground to be the one to finally take him down.  But she is just as awful so I can't find it in me to root for her over him like I want to.

Also I am not gonna lie.  Yes, Sherry and her crew are just the sort of people I despise.  But they are hilarious with it.  Shalita Grant does that vapid, superficial character so well.  She was the lone reason I watched S3 of Search Party which was chock full of incredibly unlikable people.  And I already see her being a bright spot here as well.  I hope she doesn't get killed by Psycho #2.  But I think the odds are even Love will make good on the stab in the eye thing given her lack of impulse control.

Henry kid is super cute.  I loved how he was just babbling away in the library.

Now that Natalie is dead who will Joe become obsessed with?  I vote on the Librarian.  She works around books and we've seen her in two scenes already and she doesn't seem to be part of the rich people social scene.  So her presence has to be important.

 

 

[preeya]

On 10/16/2021 at 9:22 AM, skotnikov said:

Michaela McManus is stunning. 

At first I didn't recognize her, then it came to me. Seal Team & The Village was where I knew her from.

Edited October 19, 2021 by preeya

[BeckyThatcher]

Why not just put a bright shiny bow on the gleaming new wood and red axe?
 

I’m going to just pretend that it was a directorial choice to show that Love saw the axe as beckoning to her, a light in the dank cellar of her heart- not that the props department had to make a quick run to Ace Hardware.

I also want their entire kitchen and the neighbor’s grill. 

[AllyB]

On 10/16/2021 at 2:48 AM, Spartan Girl said:

In fairness, Love’s murderous rage wasn’t helped by the fact that Natalie had the audacity to chum up to her after she tried to sleep with Joe.

I don’t think Joe being so upset about getting a boy instead of a girl was about being afraid of repeating the past. Maybe that’s part of it, but a bigger part was that a daughter contributes to the image of himself as a White Knight for protecting all broken women. He can lie to himself all he wants, but he hasn’t changed.

My ex husband went off the deep end when he learned our baby would be a boy. He kept going on about how he could parent a girl but would fuck up a boy and used it as an excuse to relapse into his addictions. It took me 9 years to figure out why it really bothered him so much.* He's a massive misogynist and on some level considered a girl to be controllable and someone who really only exists to bolster men. Whereas boys are real people who don't exist to support him and he didn't want to have to parent someone he couldn't control. I think some of that is true of Joe too. Women exist to be perfect for him and men are a threat to that. So he can envision having a perfect pliable daughter but Henry might stand up to him and thwart him in ways he can't imagine. It was why he convinced himself that Henry hated him.

*I left him when my son was a newborn and he only has carefully controlled supervised contact.

[Chaos Theory]

Been unusually busy this weekend so I just got a chance to watch the first episode.

Initial thoughts:

~ I really like that Joe was disappointed that the kid wasn’t a girl.  Usually it goes the other way.   Trailers had the name ahead of time but I love having the middle name being “Forty” and “Grandma” (I will probably have to eventually remember her name) keeps calling him Forty in large part to piss off both Love and Joe but also because Forty was her favorite child and she is still mourning  him.   So everyone is slipping and calling the kid Forty.

 

~ I really like that Joe has a spooky  serial killer basement but in this case he is using it to restore old books he is selling and sending the profits to Ellie.

 

~.” I’m in the trenches with someone who jokes about stabbing someone in the eye but is actually perfectly capable of it.”  I adore how Joe sees Love’s faults but still thinks he is the hero of the story.

~  Kind if disappointed Natalie was killed off so soon because having her flirting/sleeping with Joe and being a genuine friend to Love was an intriguing idea but having Love’s jealously get so far out of hand was a good way to start the story.

 

~. Can stalking be a father/son activity that Joe and Henry do together?

~  Glad the show acknowledged even with Joe’s ball cap of invisibility, it is hard to stalk with a baby on his chest which is basically a chick magnet.

~ I really should start looking at everyone’s Facebook and Instagram pages before I attend parties.  

~ “Is he flirting with me or asking  me to join a Fight Club”

 

Edited October 17, 2021 by Chaos Theory

[preeya]

14 minutes ago, Chaos Theory said:

Can stalking bring a father/son activity that Joe and Henry do together?

Could it be another Dexter scenario?

[Maysie]

When Joe got in the car to do his first stalking of Natalie my husband said “and here comes the baseball cap.” I guess the ball cap makes Henry invisible too.

[scowl]

Am I getting this right? Joe has a hot wife and a beautiful home, he doesn't have to pay for anything, he doesn't have a job and there's no pressure to get one, yet he believes the situation is "suffocating" him? Does he sit around the living room thinking, "I could be stalking a woman right now!"

[Spartan Girl]

1 hour ago, scowl said:

Am I getting this right? Joe has a hot wife and a beautiful home, he doesn't have to pay for anything, he doesn't have a job and there's no pressure to get one, yet he believes the situation is "suffocating" him? Does he sit around the living room thinking, "I could be stalking a woman right now!"

Pretty much. As it has been established many times before, Joe lives for the chase. He loves the idea of a happily-ever-after, but the real things are too flawed for his liking. He longs for someone to see “the real him” but when he finally gets her, she repulses him. He’s quick to judge people for being phony sexist assholes while failing to acknowledge he’s the biggest phony abusive misogynist of them all.

[scowl]

In so many romcoms the characters live in unexplained nice houses, they live middle class lives even if they work retail or in factories if anywhere, and they spend most of their time on the screen in romantic adventures. He ended up in exactly this situation... but married with a baby. What a nightmare!

In the first season he even referred to himself as a character in a romcom which was funny, but apparently that's really how he sees himself, the ultimate romantic character in a movie, and all these sad men with wives and girlfriends just don't understand true love like he does.

[Door County Cherry]

10 hours ago, AllyB said:

It took me 9 years to figure out why it really bothered him so much.* He's a massive misogynist and on some level considered a girl to be controllable and someone who really only exists to bolster men. 

Such an interesting perspective.  Thanks for sharing.

Now it kind of makes me wonder what Joe would have been like as a parent.  Would she have been his new obsession...at least temporarily?  Would it have made Love jealous?  

[EarlGreyTea]

I can't believe they killed off Natalie so soon! I thought for sure she would be around all season. Nice twist. Also, was it just me, or did she and Love have crazy chemistry? I thought for sure she'd try seducing Love, too.

Was that....a used tampon in Joe's box o'things?

Edited October 18, 2021 by EarlGreyTea

[Door County Cherry]

12 minutes ago, EarlGreyTea said:

Was that....a used tampon in Joe's box o'things?

1. Yes.  It's one of Joe's favorite objects to put in his box.  He did it with Beck too. 

[chick binewski]

On 10/15/2021 at 8:05 PM, dubbel zout said:

It's nice they had the remembrance for Mark Blum at the end.

They dedicated tonight's episode of Succession to him as well.

I'm sorry McManus won't continue to serve as a counterbalance to the mean girl blogger. She had the charming detached observer thing going. She's also a better actress than what I remember from SVU (but they also gave her character terrible dialogue if memory serves). 

[tennisgurl]

On 10/15/2021 at 7:04 AM, Spartan Girl said:

Joe, you took the wrong message away from Gatsby. He projected his ideals on a woman who wasn’t at all what he wanted her to be and it destroyed him.

Yep, its such classic Joe. He reads all of this classic literature and acts all superior because of his love of books, but he never actually gets what the books are really about. He reads Don Quixote and thinks its about the heroic last voice of chivalry in an uncaring world and not about a guy fighting made up enemies because he thinks he's the hero and not a lunatic, and he reads The Great Gatsby and sees it as a romantic story about a man who will do anything for the woman he loves, and not a tragic story of a man who destroys himself chasing an impossible dream of a perfect life with a woman he puts on a pedestal who he hardly knows. Joe is very much the hero of his own story, even if he's the villain in the one we're watching. 

I admit I thought that Love would kill Natalie, but not so soon. Like many of their victims, Natalie was clearly a very flawed person (cozying up to Love after almost hooking up with her husband) but she certainly didn't deserve to die, especially not for the crime of being stalked by Joe and getting in the way of their creepy psycho marriage. Love and Joe in suburbia is pretty much what I imagined it to be, Joe is silently screaming because he hates everything here (although Joe hates most people and places he goes) while Love is trying to make that perfect life she has always dreamed of, even if she has to axe murder a few people to have it, and poor Henry has really won the bad parenting lottery. Poor kid, he's such a cute baby. I can imagine that some part of Joe is worried about being as bad of a dad to a son as his parental figures have been to him, but I think the bigger part is that Joe loves "protecting" women from the "bad men" of the world, being the "good guy" that he is, which he would have loved to do for a daughter, but Joe tends to see men as mostly threats to himself and "his" women who need Joe's protecting, or as obstacles in the way of Joe's happy ending. He thinks he wont get that "I have to save her from the cruel world" high from a son. 

I am worried for the librarian, I recognize her as Prudence from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and they seem to be setting up a connection between her and Joe so I doubt she is just some background character, I am concerned that Joe might be in the market for a new You. 

[dubbel zout]

8 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

 I am concerned that Joe might be in the market for a new You

I feel like Joe is always in the market for a new You. 

[Bobcatkitten]

Maybe Natalie will live in the basement as a hostage for a while, ala boyfriend dude of Beck I can't remember his name. 

[legxleg]

That twin mommy blogger is amazing, another Peach in the making 🤣. 
 

i was totally shocked at the end - I thought Joe’s new obsession would last all season again! I think it’s smart they switched it up though, and I’m very curious how the rest of the season will go.

 

also, when did Joe have time to make such an extensive stalker box? He met the woman once! Although I guess he’s been watching her for awhile before then. I guess he could have been going through her trash like a creeper to get stuff like the tampon 🤢

[Jack Shaftoe]

Me halfway through the episode: "Hey, Natalie, Kindles are awesome! I hope you die."

Me at the end of the episode: "I was kidding!".

Love has an early lead in the "who is the worst person on this show" race. I am looking forward to Joe's response.

[Jillybean]

On 10/17/2021 at 10:12 PM, EarlGreyTea said:

I can't believe they killed off Natalie so soon! I thought for sure she would be around all season.

MM was listed in the opening credits as a guest star so I figured she wasn't long for this world.

On 10/18/2021 at 2:38 AM, chick binewski said:

I'm sorry McManus won't continue to serve as a counterbalance to the mean girl blogger. She had the charming detached observer thing going. She's also a better actress than what I remember from SVU (but they also gave her character terrible dialogue if memory serves). 

She was quite terrible on One Tree Hill IMO. Better on The Village, and I liked her just fine in this.

[Anela]

I keep hearing that this season is too political. It was fine, when he was just a regular super-judgmental serial killer. 

Joe tearing up at his baby not hating him, was sweet. 

That's a beautiful neighbourhood, but I wouldn't want to spend time with most of those people. 

[Tattooeddancer]

I know I’m late to the party, but I heard something in the background in the last library scene that made me laugh.

”sir, were not a pawn shop. We don’t negotiate late fees.”

I don’t know about California, but I live in Omaha NE (not LA but not tiny by any means), and you can absolutely negotiate your late fees. It’s almost like the librarians hate collecting them.

[kassandra8286]

On 11/4/2021 at 9:02 PM, Tattooeddancer said:

I don’t know about California, but I live in Omaha NE (not LA but not tiny by any means), and you can absolutely negotiate your late fees. It’s almost like the librarians hate collecting them.

I was recently told by a librarian in SoCal that eliminating late fees is becoming a trend. So I cracked up at that line also.

My memory of season 2 is so fuzzy - where are they living now? Are they still in: the LA area?

Edited November 10, 2021 by kassandra8286

[Anela]

I live in Ohio, and they have a holiday thing where you can give them food products for the hungry (canned, boxed) for $1 each, and eliminate your fees. Otherwise, they're strict with fees. They only eliminated them once, when my mum died, and they knew her. 

[Joimiaroxeu]

Heh, karma indeed. L'il Forty is likely on a countdown to kill daddy eventually. Or mommy. With his genes, that kid could make Damien from The Omen look like an amateur.

If Sherry the momfluencer knows what's good for her she'll stay in her lane wrt Love and/or Joe. The life she saves may be her own.

So what's the likelihood Forty isn't Joe's kid and that's why they're not bonding?

Who gives their neighbor a jumbo box of condoms, even as a joke? She was trying too hard.

Guess I have to read Tender is the Night now.

FFS, Love. Already? And lol, my money would've been on Sherry to be the first murder.

[Atlanta]

On 11/5/2021 at 12:02 AM, Tattooeddancer said:

I know I’m late to the party, but I heard something in the background in the last library scene that made me laugh.

”sir, were not a pawn shop. We don’t negotiate late fees.”

I don’t know about California, but I live in Omaha NE (not LA but not tiny by any means), and you can absolutely negotiate your late fees. It’s almost like the librarians hate collecting them.

I used to work in a library and fees are a pain to deal with. Many times I'd wipe them out or give people an extra renewal if the book wasn't on hold for someone else.

[Scarlett45]

On 10/17/2021 at 8:04 AM, AllyB said:

My ex husband went off the deep end when he learned our baby would be a boy. He kept going on about how he could parent a girl but would fuck up a boy and used it as an excuse to relapse into his addictions. It took me 9 years to figure out why it really bothered him so much.* He's a massive misogynist and on some level considered a girl to be controllable and someone who really only exists to bolster men. Whereas boys are real people who don't exist to support him and he didn't want to have to parent someone he couldn't control. I think some of that is true of Joe too. Women exist to be perfect for him and men are a threat to that. So he can envision having a perfect pliable daughter but Henry might stand up to him and thwart him in ways he can't imagine. It was why he convinced himself that Henry hated him.

*I left him when my son was a newborn and he only has carefully controlled supervised contact.

I could see this. For men with that thinking, women aren’t real people, are never a social or physical threat, so they are easy to have affection for, they think of them the way “normal” people think of their pets- they may love them but they are always “beneath them”.

A boy grows up to be a man who is a physical and social threat. I have seen this in some abusive families where the boys are beaten but not the girls (although all the kids are emotionally and mentally traumatized by the experience). 
 

I kind of love that Love is more unhinged than Joe. 
 

Little Henry is so cute! Those cheeks I die. So squishable. 

On 2/5/2022 at 4:46 PM, Joimiaroxeu said:

So what's the likelihood Forty isn't Joe's kid and that's why they're not bonding?

I think that would be too easy and lazy writing. 

 

On 10/15/2021 at 3:37 AM, eXiled said:

Edited to add: Why does everyone know his name is Joe Goldberg? What happened to Will Bettelheim?

Now that Candace is dead and gone why not use his real name? He used the fake name because he was running from Candace. 
 

 

[paramitch]

(Oops, wrong thread! Nothing to see here. See you in Episode 2!)

Edited June 21, 2023 by paramitch
oops