‘You’ Season 3 Episode 3 Recap: “Missing White Woman Syndrome”

As the news spreads about Natalie’s disappearance in You Season 3 Episode 3, Joe is trying to make like Scout Finch and believe that “Things are always better in the morning” — he’s reading Henry To Kill A Mockingbird now — and seems not only to have convinced himself, but is also keeping Love relatively calm. He can, after all, point out that most people assume when a wife is victim of foul play, the husband did it, and Matthew isn’t helping himself by refusing comment to the news crews that have congregated on his lawn. Evidently when Natalie checked out Gone Girl from the library in the first episode, it wasn’t for Matthew to read, or he would have learned from Nick’s mistakes.

Sherry may have hated Natalie for “stealing” Matthew from his ex-wife, but she makes her living on social media and would never let the truth deprive her from creating content, starting by pumping Natalie’s closest neighbor for gossip. Love remains decorous, but does take advantage of Stella’s need to ingratiate herself to Love by selling Stella and her minions some keto vanilla bean scones.

So Joe and Love decide they should act as normal as possible, and go to work. The former gets a hard time from judgmental librarian Marienne (Tati Gabrielle); meets his de facto boss Dante (Ben Mehl), who’s both completely blind and gay; and gets another visit from the detectives, who have photos of Joe talking to Natalie in the supermarket parking lot; he explains them away by telling the embarrassing (partial) truth that he’d driven there to jerk off. Meanwhile, Love gets a surprise visit from Theo. But then both parents are pulled away by an emergency call from Dottie. Theo offers to keep the bakery open while Love deals with it, and she hastily agrees, telling him where to find the spare key to lock up. Not sure I would so readily leave a near-perfect stranger whose stepmother I had recently murdered alone in my bakery, with its weird solitary-confinement cube in the basement, but I’m different.

It turns out Henry has the measles. Love is shocked that anyone still gets them, I guess because she doesn’t keep up with the news; the theory is that Henry was exposed, at the birthday party, to the unwitting offspring of anti-vaxx parents. Love’s just finished her contact-tracing duty when Dottie appears with an exciting update: Dottie’s bought a vineyard, so those Quinn family funds that were recently in flux are now just spent. Love screams at Dottie for letting her down — Love keeps trying to win Sherry’s approval because she’s recreating her relationship with Dottie — but she’s already fighting a battle on two fronts and can’t add a third. Love’s professional relationship with Natalie is now a matter of public record, thanks to Sherry telling TV news reporter Ryan Goodwin (Scott Michael Foster) about the lease on A Fresh Tart, and acting normal isn’t going to help her and Joe once it comes out that Love was the last person to see Natalie alive. Love and Joe agree that they need to frame Matthew for the murder, and fortunately Joe still has her bloody scarf…

…but when he goes home to do it, Joe swoons, and realizes he hasn’t been sweating all day because he’s guilty: he also has measles.

Joe’s fever spikes so fast that he starts hallucinating. First, there’s a second Joe who keeps him on task. When he physically jumps the fence into Matthew’s yard, he mentally jumps back to the group home to which he was sent after killing his mother’s partner when he was a kid, and into the office of a kindly young nurse. She knows he’s just faking sick to avoid his bullies and doesn’t mind if he stays, but she also can’t find his vaccination records. Loyal young Joe is sure his mother handled it — “She was good” — but his doppelgänger sneers that if Joe had been honest about his negligent mother, the nurse would have had him immunized then and he wouldn’t have infected his child. Joe and Joe are grappling on the floor…

…when suddenly Joe wakes up on the couch at the Englers’ with Matthew looming over him, asking, “What were you doing in my back yard?” I don’t know anything about anything, but it seems to me as though Matthew’s dialogue in this scene is deliberately ambiguous. Maybe he means to ask what Joe was doing in his back yard earlier, but he may also be asking what Joe was doing in his back yard when he came over to have a drink with Natalie in the season’s first episode; she had said then that the camera in the yard was the only one that didn’t work, but (as Joe’s internal monologue muses) what if there were more she didn’t know about? It’s established in this episode that Matthew initially made his name in “cutting edge surveillance” — plus we already know that Natalie initially got Joe’s cell phone number through Matthew somehow — so one assumes that interest would extend to his own home; surely he’s got video of everything Joe did once his feet touched down in the Engler yard…right?

But in this conversation, Joe — his senses surely dulled by his fever — is convinced that Matthew sincerely loved Natalie and is genuinely worried about her. He’s also, apparently, convinced that what Matthew gave him to swallow when he was unconscious was just a Tylenol. Joe is so moved by Matthew’s plight that he decides he can’t frame him for the murder after all: “I’d be killing a mockingbird.” When Love gets back from the hospital with Henry, whose fever broke, she’s relieved when Joe reports that he did plant the scarf in Matthew’s garbage — apparently that’s where Matthew found him, passed out — but then he took it back. (And like…Matthew watched him do this too, right???) Love is coming from another conversation with Theo, who met her at the hospital with dinner; she was moved by his feelings of alienation and rejection by Matthew. Joe and Love couldn’t send Matthew to prison: “We’re better than that.” They burn the scarf in the kitchen sink…

…and then it’s time for a candlelight vigil outside the Engler house. Joe is concerned that his new pal Matthew is only making himself look guiltier by not making an appearance, but when Matthew comes out just in time for the news crews to have given up on him, Joe is once again persuaded that Matthew is not calculating, and truly couldn’t bring himself to speak in public about Natalie until this moment. “If, God forbid, someone has done something to my wife,” he intones to the cameras, “I will find you, and you will be punished.” One of the detectives, Ruthie Falco (Romy Rosemont), is also at the vigil, and gets a call as it’s breaking up: her partner found Natalie’s ring.

Things seem to have settled down for the moment, and Love is alone at the bakery when Gil (Mackenzie Astin) — a dad Joe had dismissed at the birthday party as “Mormon Neville Longbottom” — comes in for some muffins. Love asks after his wife Margaret, who had seemed especially upset when Love called about Henry’s infection, and Gil admits that’s why he’s there: his daughters “both had it,” and were also at the party. Their girls’ cases were so mild, and they just don’t believe in vaccinations — not that they judge anyone who does! Love remains stonily silent as Gil continues his self-justifying babble, and he’s almost out the door when she calls his name…

…and bludgeons him with a rolling pin. Surely we all agree that public health is important enough to fight for, but will Joe feel Love has taken her vigilance too far? Or will this be the moment small business owner Love decides she’s enough of a girlboss to start handling her own corpses?

READ NEXT: ‘You’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “Hands Across Madre Linda”

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano was the co-founder of Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), and 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 has also contributed to New York, the New YorkTimes Magazine, Collider, Vanity Fair, Slate, Mel Magazine, Vulture, Salon, and The Awl, among many others. She lives in Austin.

Watch You Season 3 Episode 3 on Netflix