‘You’ Season 3 Episode 8 Recap: “Swing And A Miss”

Once the polyamory question has been raised, no one’s just going to forget about it, but the Quinn-Goldbergs are wading in cautiously. In You Season 3 Episode 8, Joe is reading a book about it, the better for him to manipulate Love: his research indicates that opening up a shaky marriage will lead to disaster — his dream outcome, of course — but since he and Love both know their marriage isn’t especially solid, he has to keep talking up polyamory, but not so aggressively that she will think trying it was his idea and not hers. He tells her about compersion: “Vicarious joy from seeing a partner have joyful sexual relations with another.” He asks leading questions about how adventurous she was with James, her first husband, to which she lies that he wasn’t a risk taker (wrong, from the flashbacks we saw last season) and that they’d been planning to have a baby (also wrong: she wanted a baby and he didn’t want to be tied down). Then he got sick, and she wasn’t allowed to be mad about anything. Joe will not let himself be made the villain of this marriage the way James did his.

Later, the manipulation continues: Love tries to initiate sex, and Joe deliberately resists to plant the idea that they definitely do have to open their marriage because nothing else is working. Merely discussing their fantasies and the sexual experimentation they still haven’t done is enough to convince Love that they should talk to the experts…

…which is how they end up at A Fresh Tart (a very fresh tart, given the summit it’s hosting), signing the Conrads’ NDAs before discussing how their arrangement might work. Everyone is fine with every possible pairing of the four of them, in theory, until they arrive at Joe + Sherry. Reflexively, Joe rules it out — you know, since Love killed the last woman he had sex with and the last woman she merely thought he’d had sex with — but at the same moment, Love says she’d be fine with it.

The Conrads have done this enough to know it’s not worth it if a new couple isn’t on the same page, and dip. Joe doesn’t have to live with this setback long, however. Love flirts with Theo in the yard while Joe looks on, then asks how it made Joe feel. He pretends feeling possessive got his juices flowing, and finally puts out for her. Thus, Love is convinced their marriage actually is solid, they can do anything together, and they should call the Conrads.

On the other side of the fence, Theo contrives a reason to get Matthew out of the house so that he can sneak into Matthew’s office. The last video Matthew watched seems to be Joe punching the wall in “Into The Woods,” something Theo had only heard but not seen. When Theo confronts Matthew about this probably illegal surveillance, Matthew accuses him back about his relationship with Love: she’s a married woman with a baby, and a husband with an evident anger problem. Pushed, Theo screams, “Just move on, okay? She’s dead, she’s dead! None of this is going to bring her back!” Matthew orders Theo to go back to his mother’s. With Love’s favorite plaything about to depart the neighborhood…

…it’s a good thing the Quinn-Goldbergs have the Conrads to fall back on! Sherry and Cary arrive with multiple suitcases of gear and a lot of excitement; Joe is psyched to privately toast “a blame-free exit from this marriage.” The Conrads guide the newbies through the ground rules — look at your partner if you get overwhelmed; the safe word is “hakuna matata” — and then it’s on. Joe actually does feel compersion watching Love dancing sexily with Sherry, but then Cary pulls him away to the bedroom, where Cary has laid out dozens of sex toys and a large case of supplements. Cary then strips fully naked and starts jerking off at his own image in a mirror. (Joe: “Oh, of course; Cary is Carysexual.”) But before any gay stuff can happen, DAMMIT, Marienne calls Joe in tears: Ryan anonymously sent nude photos of her (ones she knows only he has, and which Joe also saw when he broke in to Ryan’s) to all her contacts; that includes the children’s book editor whose illustration contest Marienne had just entered (or, rather, that Joe had secretly entered on her behalf); Marienne’s sure she’ll never want to work with Marienne now. Joe talks her down, but has to decline her invitation to come over that night, what with all the groundwork he has to lay for the divorce he’s hoping to have soon!

Once Cary has put Joe’s phone in the bowl downstairs with everyone else’s, it’s really time to get down to business. Sherry beckons Joe onto the bed, but his poker face is bad, and everyone can tell he’s not into it…until he dissociates from the sex he’s currently having with a woman he hates and conjures a fantasy of sex with Marienne on a giant bed in the children’s room at the library. He gets so involved in this image that he forgets he’s supposed to be maintaining eye contact with his partner…

…who knows exactly what he’s doing and screams out a “hakuna matata!!!!!” just as Sherry’s about to climax. Downstairs, Joe and Love’s fight starts out quiet: he reminds her that all of this was her idea (…officially). All he does is worry about her. All she does is try to hold his interest so he won’t find another Natalie. She’s sick of how one-sided their marriage is, finally forgetting they’re not alone in the house and yelling, “You made me kill her!…I killed Natalie for you!!!”

After a beat, Joe and Love head back upstairs — hard and/or pointy kitchen implements in hand — to determine what the Conrads heard. They act normal at first, Sherry even trying to pick back up where she left off with Joe, but then Joe asks if she’s okay and she scratches her arm while insisting she is. Love having told Joe this was the tell for when Sherry’s lying, there’s a long moment as everyone figures out together what the situation actually is…

…and then it’s chaos. We don’t see much of what goes down between Sherry and Love, but Joe and Cary struggle all over the house and yard before Joe finally picks up the automatic bow Cary had given him after their hunting trip and gets off a very lucky blind shot. The Conrads end up, unconscious, in the cage, whereupon Joe and Love have what both agree is the best sex they’ve ever had. Joe’s internal monologue agrees: “The spark our marriage needed didn’t come from swinging. Our love language is violence.”

Joe’s cleaning up the blood in the back of his car when Matthew comes out of the shadows, either drunk or pretending to be. (He’s been taking a lot of pills and getting very little sleep, so it could really be either.) He’s suspicious of Joe’s story of spilled fruit sauce, because it’s 5 AM, and also because he heard a lot of noise from Joe and Quinn’s place earlier and knows the Conrads were there because he saw their car. Joe claims “drunken shenanigans.” “Yeah, you and your wife just love having fun,” Matthew sneers. In fairness to them, they were trying to!

Joe has to race out of Love’s further plans to deal with the Conrads — “She’s too good at this now. This should not be routine” — to support Marienne at her custody hearing, vaguely claiming library business. At the courthouse, Joe and Dante assure Marienne that it could not have gone better, and everyone seems optimistic until they see Ryan glad-handing his friend, the judge. “The system is rigged,” sighs Joe’s internal monologue. “As long as he’s in the picture, You are only going to lose.”

But Joe can’t embark on a new scheme to ruin Ryan’s life right now: he has to get back to the bakery. Love effuses about how happy she is that she and Joe are a team — “Clearly my plan has backfired,” comments Joe’s internal monologue. “My wife seems more into me than ever” — before they both see on Love’s phone that the Conrads are awake and Cary is already frantically trying to open the cage door. “Swinging was supposed to be my marriage’s dying gasp, not theirs,” says Joe’s internal monologue. “How the fuck are these two getting out of here alive?” This close to the end of the season? I don’t like their odds.

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Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.

Watch You Season 3 Episode 8 on Netflix