Shows Like You

Frequently asked about You

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• Why does Joe Goldberg rationalize his stalking and murders as acts of love?▾

  Joe grew up in an abusive, unstable household and was conditioned to conflate obsessive control with devotion. He narrates his actions through a self-serving internal monologue that frames every violent or invasive act as protecting the woman he loves from people he deems unworthy of her. This unreliable first-person perspective is central to the show — the audience hears Joe's justifications while simultaneously witnessing the horror of what he is actually doing.

• What happened to Joe's childhood and how does it shape his behavior as an adult?▾

  Joe was abandoned by his mother and spent time in the care of Mr. Mooney, the bookstore owner who locked Joe in a glass cage as punishment and instilled in him the belief that extreme measures are justified to protect the people you love. This formative trauma is the origin of Joe's pattern: he idealizes a woman, constructs a fantasy version of her, and eliminates anyone he perceives as a threat to that fantasy. The glass cage Joe later uses to imprison victims is a direct callback to Mooney's methods.

• Did Beck ever truly trust Joe, or did she suspect him before she found the box?▾

  Beck had growing unease about Joe throughout their relationship — she noticed inconsistencies in his stories and felt he was unusually possessive — but she suppressed her doubts because she was drawn to his attentiveness and stability. Her suspicions crystallized only when she discovered the box containing Benji's phone, Peach's phone, and her own stolen underwear hidden in the bathroom ceiling. By that point it was too late for her to escape.

• What is the significance of the glass cage in the bookstore basement?▾

  The cage is both a literal tool Joe uses to imprison people he wants to control or neutralize (Beck, later others) and a symbol of his worldview: he believes the people he loves must be contained and protected from themselves and from outside threats. It also mirrors the cage Mooney used on Joe as a child, suggesting Joe has internalized his abuser's logic and reproduced it on his own victims. The cage represents Joe's fundamental inability to have a relationship without domination.

• Who is 'Rhys Montrose' in Season 4 and what does his existence reveal about Joe?▾

  Rhys Montrose, the charismatic politician Joe encounters in London, turns out to be a dissociative hallucination — a projection of Joe's own suppressed violent impulses that he has externalized onto a real person as a psychological defense mechanism. Joe genuinely cannot accept that he is the Eat the Rich Killer, so his mind invented Rhys as a separate entity to carry the guilt. When the real Rhys is revealed to have no knowledge of Joe, it confirms that Joe's psyche has fractured to the point where he can no longer acknowledge the full extent of his own actions.