You Season 3 Was Right Not To Kill Sherry For Her Perfect Ending Joke
Sherry's death in You season 3 would have prevented the use of one of the series' best jokes to date. You season 3 continually breaks fresh ground in the controversial Netflix series, painting Joe Goldberg in a less favorable light and removing the strangely likable protagonist from his well-trodden comfort zone. Season 3's sideswipe at the increasingly vapid tech culture in California is just one of numerous clever jokes You utilizes, with the majority conspiring to make contemporary culture the punchline.
You season 3 sees Joe (Penn Badgley) and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) trade Los Angeles for the seemingly idyllic suburb of Madre Linda in an attempt to escape their chequered pasts. However, the disconcerting nature of parenthood, coupled with the grinding tedium of suburbia, quickly causes Joe and Love to slip back into their old covetous, murderous ways. The couple is particularly perturbed by Madre Linda's self-appointed queen bee Sherry Conrad (Shalita Grant) and her muscle-bound husband Cary (Travis Van Winkle), leading to the Conrad's eventual incarceration within one of Joe's patented 'boxes.' While in the box, Sherry and Cary seemingly set aside their vapid pursuits and rekindle their love for each other, before eventually surviving their ordeal and immediately using the situation for extra publicity.
Despite calls to the contrary, You season 3 exercised good judgment not to kill Sherry, with the series instead showing uncharacteristic restraint in favor of her "perfect ending" joke. Sherry and Cary's decision to further "optimize" themselves after renouncing their social media lifestyles earlier in the episode acts as a perfect send-up of contemporary culture while also reinforcing the couples' shallowness. In this way, Joe or Love killing Sherry would have destroyed You season 3's ability to set up what is arguably their best ever joke to date, which surpasses even Joe's hilarious internal monologuing on the Madre Linda residents.
Sherry and Cary's apparent epiphany that they both are "needlessly optimizing" themselves for each other arrives when both characters believe they will die in the You season 3 bakery cage. Cary is bleeding profusely after being shot by Sherry, causing both characters to soften and recount the ways in which they love each other. The nexus of this conversation is the promise that if they survive, Cary and Sherry will no longer chase fame and other vapid pursuits. Yet this promise is almost immediately discarded following their survival, with Cary and Sherry creating a couples' self-help book: Caged: A Radical Couple's Therapy Technique based on their experience in the box which, ironically, further serves to optimize the shallow couple's nature. Killing Sherry and Cary would have robbed You season 3 of its core premise that people are their own worst enemies, something Sherry and Carry's book vehemently promotes.
This clever punchline is perhaps the only reason why Sherry and Cary are left alive in You season 3's plot, with the reversal of their epiphany providing one of the best zeitgeist-mocking jokes of the entire series. Sherry and Cary acutely embody the endless cycle of overt "personal optimization" which pervades social media, and so the couples' immediate return to type after surviving a near-death experience feels particularly poignant. Sherry and Cary are undoubtedly characters designed to be viewed as a joke, but ultimately it is their inability to let go of the shallow trappings of modern culture that provides You season 3 with the series' best joke to date.