Warning: The following article contains spoilers for You, Season 4, Part 1.
Yes, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) has survived it all. After escaping the murder of his girlfriend Beck and her friends in season one of You, he encounters his match in the next season in the form of Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), a vicious and unpredictable murderer who, in Joe’s words, “occasionally kills people with her bare hands.”
Like Joe, Love is willing to slit throats and bury an axe in the heads of anyone whom she feels to be a threat to her relationship with him. We have already seen the terrifying ends that Candace, Delilah, and Natalie met.
In the final episode of season three, “Love, Actually,” Joe successfully stops her from carrying on with her murder spree by injecting a syringe of aconite into her body, killing her.
Season four sees him in London, working as a Literature Professor at a University under the name Jonathan Moore. As the viewers have seen so far, no wonder where he goes, Joe stumbles upon a snooty and wealthy group of people he thoroughly dislikes and there’s always one among them whom he despises.
In season one, it was Peach, in season two, Forty, in season three, the Madre Linda snobs, Sherry and Cary Conrad. And in season four, it’s Malcolm (Stephen Hagan) and his ultra-wealthy friends.
Who is Malcolm?
Malcolm is Joe’s colleague, a fellow professor at the university where Joe teaches. The latter describes him as one of “the occasional d********s”, indicating his ultra-privileged and wealthy background.
As recalled by Joe, “Malcolm went to all the right schools like his father and grandfather. He’ll never have to work a day in his life, but he likes being an academic, giving him an air of respectability that counteracts the assumption that generations of wealth and inbreeding mean he’s not very smart.”
Be it explicitly blaming the ‘poor’ for the city’s increasing crime or engaging in an outrageously hedonistic lifestyle in Britain’s wealthy neighborhood, Sundry House, the viewers — like Joe — take an immediate disliking towards the character.
As a ‘thanks’ for saving his girlfriend from a mugging in episode one, “Joe Takes a Holiday,” Malcolm takes him to a party, thus initiating him into the inner circle of ultra-rich London folks in Sundry House. For a major part of the episodes, we see him introducing Joe to a group of characters who play significant roles in the plot of the show.
Sadly, the character couldn’t last more than an episode as he ends up stabbed to death at Joe’s house after they return from the party. In a typical Joe fashion, he dismembers his body to get rid of the evidence (of a murder that he didn’t commit).
After that, a slew of murders take place, and the unknown murderer comes to be known as the ‘Eat the Rich’ killer. Even though Malcolm didn’t have enough screen time, his death introduced the viewers to the central plot of the season and the question that comes with it — which is “Who is the ‘Eat the Rich’ killer?”
You is currently streaming on Netflix.