Comedy
Wizards Beyond Waverly Place
‘Wizards Beyond Waverly Place’ is a fitting sequel series to Disney’s ‘Wizards of Waverly Place.’ And that can be a good or a bad thing.
This is a story about a boy who meets a beautiful girl and falls in love. Nothing could be more normal, right? Only, nothing about this story is normal.
You see, boy is lonely. Compulsive. Bored. So, he decides to do something about his loneliness.
He meets girl.
Girl is pretty. Winsome. Has a level of depth not even she recognizes. Boy knows this about girl. In fact, boy knows every little detail about girl’s life. Girl just doesn’t know that yet.
Boy, in this case, is Joe Goldberg. A quiet, unassuming bookstore manager, Joe just wants to find someone to love. But he’s been hurt before, so he takes his time with relationships. Does his research. Some might call it stalking. But Joe thinks of it more as his duty.
It’s his duty to get to know the woman he plans to be with. It’s his duty to “accidentally” bump into her, fantasize about her, steal her phone and look at every detail of her social media feed.
It’s also his duty to, uh, “dispose” of anyone who might try and interfere with his love life. And if the woman he loves doesn’t return his affections…well, there’s always a way to solve that problem, too.
It’s nothing new to turn on the TV and see a special about a serial killer or stalker (Dateline, anyone?). But it’s becoming more and more popular to see stalkers and serial killers analyzed on television for seasons at a time.
Enter You.
Netflix’s wildly popular show focuses on fictional stalker and serial killer Joe Goldberg. It dives into his psyche and lays bare the pages of his mind for all to see. And what viewers find is quite disturbing.
In Season 1, Joe lives in New York and meets a woman named Guinevere Beck. He decides to woo her and fix all of her problems. However, things don’t go as planned. Guinevere learns about Joe’s troubled, bloody past and the closer she gets to uncovering his skeletons, the closer she gets to death.
Consequently, in Season 2, Joe Goldberg has become Will Bettelheim. You see, Joe made some mistakes back in New York. And if he wants to stay out of prison, he’ll have to lay low. So, he sets off for Los Angeles. He changes his name. His lifestyle. Everything. He vows to become a better man with cleaner habits, but his past and present impulses continue to haunt him. And soon, he falls for Love Quinn.
But as Joe discovers, he’s not the only one with dark impulses.
Turns out Love is just as lonely, compulsive and bored as Joe is. Much like her new beau, she’s “disposed” of people who have interfered in her love life. So in the third season, the young couple is forced to relocate to stay out of the papers.
Unfortunately, Joe still isn’t quite able to kick his old habits. He starts obsessing over librarian Marienne, removing people who threaten Marienne’s happiness. And when Love finds out, she threatens to remove Marienne herself.
Well, Joe can’t have that. And as obsessed as he once was with Love—as much as he even tried to make their marriage work—he realizes that Love is a much bigger hassle than she’s worth.
As a result, in Season 4, Joe winds up moving once again, this time across an ocean. In London, he poses as literature professor Jonathan Moore. Nobody here knows the truth about Joe’s past. As far as the world is concerned, Joe/Will died in a fire, along with his wife.
Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Oh no, it turns out someone knows all about Joe’s past. And Joe will do just about anything to silence that someone …
And that brings us to Season 5. Joe is back where it all started: New York City. And thanks to new wife Kate Lockwood’s nearly unlimited resources (she’s the CEO of a major corporation), he’s even going by Joe Goldberg again.
Kate knows all about Joe’s past. She’s even got a bit of a dark history herself. But the couple has promised to keep each other good, to only do good.
But here’s the thing: When you spend your whole life justifying all the bad things you do because you only did them to bad people, you don’t really see yourself as a bad person. You start to believe that you’re actually a good person who’s been forced to do bad things.
And unfortunately for Joe and Kate, they’re still living under the delusion that in order to do good—in order to really make a difference in the world—they’re gonna need to keep doing bad things to bad people. And that works out just fine for the serial tendencies of Joe.
As you can imagine with any show focusing on a psychopathic murderer, You is pretty messy. Not only are people whacked upside the head as blood pours from their wounds, but they’re also tortured, locked in underground cellars and left for dead. Sometimes fingers are cut off. Most people keep their limbs (barring a few who get dismembered post-mortem), but that doesn’t prevent them from, you know, dying. There are scenes that depict to physical, emotional and mental abuse. And one character attempts suicide onscreen.
Additionally, language is crude, f-words are used often and there’s plenty of drinking and references to drug use.
Oh, and the sex scenes are pretty graphic too. Although we never see full-frontal nudity, we do see bare rears, movements that suggest masturbation, people rolling around in bed and plenty of other things that drag this show into sordid MA-rated territory.
So yeah, perhaps you (the reader) should just avoid You (the TV show).
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
It’s been three years since Joe and Kate moved to New York to start their lives anew. Three years since Joe last killed someone. But when Kate’s past threatens to ruin her reputation and the life she and Joe have built together, he reverts to old habits to protect the woman he loves.
We hear about many of Joe’s past murders and see a few flashbacks of these scenes. Joe says he misses killing people. He suppresses his serial killer instincts by writing murder fantasies. One of these stories is depicted onscreen, in which Joe chokes a man, ties him to a chair and then stabs him repeatedly. When Kate reads this story, she’s disturbed, realizing that Joe enjoys murdering people. But later, she asks him to kill someone for her. Joe obliges, sneaking into a man’s house and strangling him with a rope. He then stages the scene to look like a suicide.
Kate’s dad was emotionally abusive toward her and her siblings, pitting them against each other. As adults, Kate and her brother, Teddy, have bonded. But their sisters, Raegan and Maddie, are constantly scheming to get them fired.
Couples kiss and dance together. We learn that Kate’s dad had children by three different women. Maddie has been divorced twice and widowed once. Teddy is married to another man, and they have a son. Teddy jokingly flirts with Joe. Maddie also flirts with him, but her interest seems genuine. A few women wear revealing outfits. Joe starts to show romantic interest in another woman.
Kate’s family is described as “homophobic.” A man repeatedly uses a sexist phrase and calls Joe a “simp.” Kate’s family is also described as racist, and we hear that they discriminate against Teddy, since he is Black. Raegan makes some disparaging remarks about Teddy’s mother, since she was a maid who had an affair with their dad. (That said, Teddy also points out that Raegan’s mom was unfaithful, too.)
In the past, Kate had helped her dad with a coverup, wherein many children got cancer as a result of their company’s actions. Feeling guilty, Kate now uses the company for humanitarian efforts, against her board’s wishes. So someone close to Kate betrays her by leaking this story to the papers, hoping to get her removed as CEO.
At the end of Season 3, Joe had given his and Love’s son, Henry, to a gay couple to raise while Joe faked his own death and moved to London. We hear now that Kate used her money and resources to get Henry back from this couple.
Kate says she used her resources to get someone fired. Joe secretly reads messages on other people’s phones. People are rude and condescending to Joe. Joe catches a woman squatting in a building he owns, but he decides to let her go free. There’s a joke about exorcism. Characters use mean nicknames.
People drink at various venues throughout the episode. A woman is described as a party girl, and magazine pictures show instances of public inebriation from her past.
There are about 20 uses of the f-word (once paired with “mother”) and three uses of the s-word. We also hear instances of “a–hole,” “b–tard,” “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s name is misused twice.
Joe Goldberg, now known as Will, leaves New York to start a fresh life in Los Angeles. But when Joe gets there, he finds that staying away from women and his old bad habits is impossible.
Will fantasizes about a woman named Love flirting with him, kissing him and stimulating him. He masturbates while doing so (we don’t see exposed body parts, but we do see him zip up his pants). Love and Will joke about fruit that looks like male and female genitalia. A brief scene shows two women in bed together, in lingerie, kissing.
A few scenes show dead bodies lying on the ground, surrounded by their own blood. A woman threatens to kill and castrate an ex-boyfriend. Will stalks a woman on social media. A woman confesses her husband died from an unknown illness.
A man smokes a cigarette and drinks wine. A woman tells a man not to make methamphetamine in his kitchen. God’s name is misused once. The f-word is used nearly ten times and the s-word is heard five times. Other profanity includes multiple utterances of “a–hole” and “b–ch.”
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
‘Wizards Beyond Waverly Place’ is a fitting sequel series to Disney’s ‘Wizards of Waverly Place.’ And that can be a good or a bad thing.
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