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From Decider.com: https://decider.com/2021/10/15/you-season-3-episode-4-recap-hands-across-madre-linda/

You S3 Ep 4: Hands Across Madre Linda

‘You’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “Hands Across Madre Linda”
By Tara Ariano @TaraAriano

First, the good news: Gil isn’t dead. Thus concludes the good news.

In You Season 3 Episode 4, Love has, once again, left Joe to clean up her mess. Their current plan is to see if Gil — in the basement cage Joe tells him is for proofing dough — will accept a very sincere apology from Joe, on Love’s behalf. Love and Joe won’t tell anyone about Gil’s anti-vaxx stance endangering Henry’s life if Gil will agree not to tell anyone (including the cops) how Love caved his head in. Gil tries to stand on his (groundless) principles regarding vaccines, but when he can see that his rap isn’t working on Joe, he quickly agrees that they can part friends. However, Joe doesn’t believe him, so he sets up Henry’s baby monitor outside the cage and tells Love his new plan: mutually assured destruction. If they confront Gil with a secret he won’t want getting out, it’ll ensure he keeps theirs. From what Joe can sleuth on Gil’s social media, though, Gil’s clean; all Gil can think of is a time he and a fellow parishioner gambled away $600 raised for a needy family in their church…then replaced it from their own savings. This isn’t salacious enough, so Love puts the Quinn family PI on the case.

Meanwhile: Sherry has taken charge of a community search for Natalie, or evidence, around the area where her ring was found. Out back, Love overhears Matthew and Theo fighting about participating — Theo knows Sherry thinks Matthew killed Natalie and doesn’t want to “help the villagers sharpen their pitchforks” — but Love tells him to quit being a brat and go for the optics, if nothing else; she’ll even be his search buddy. (This scene also brings back the matter of a weak slat in the fence between the Quinn-Goldberg and Engler, which already admitted a runaway bunny in “So I Married An Axe Murderer”; we should keep this slat in mind, it seems!)

And at the library, Joe figures out why Marienne seems so disdainful of him: she assumed he’s been removing the rare books because he’s a rich kid heedless of their value. She softens on him once he explains that he grew up in poverty and came to love books thanks to Mr. Mooney’s care of him, but now he knows she’s aware of what’s in the rare books collection, and he will probably have to take a break stealing them to re-sell for Ellie.

Then Sy the PI reports in, and Joe and Quinn confront Gil: he cheated to get his son Alan into Dartmouth, with faked transcripts and SAT results and a $50,000 donation to a fake charity. Based on Gil’s horrified reaction, and remembering a news report from the school where Gil taught for a suspiciously short time, Joe figures out this is more than a mere Operation Varsity Blues situation: Alan sexually assaulted a student on Gil’s previous campus, and when he did it again in California, Gil’s wife covered it up behind Gil’s back; the cash went to the survivor of Alan’s crime. Love and Joe leave Gil to think about whether he’ll accept the mutually assured destruction deal now…

…but probably should have checked in more often on the app: when they weren’t watching, Gil fashioned a noose from his t-shirt and hanged himself in the cage. Joe is paralyzed with guilt for having driven Gil to suicide, despite Love’s insistence that they aren’t responsible…and then it’s time for her to go make an appearance at the search. On her way out, she gets an idea…

The search seems, at first, just to be a new setting for the characters we know to do what we would expect. Sherry makes herself the main character in public…


…then privately shit-talks Matthew: if she were married to an “unfeeling robot” like him, she’d take off. Theo overhears and confronts her, at which Love intervenes, making sure Sherry is okay (lol) and encouraging Theo, who’s “having a very hard day,” to apologize. But when no one is looking, Love finds a grove in which to nestle the axe, onto which we see, in a flashback, Love and Joe have pressed Gil’s palm print.


Theo and Matthew are both dismayed that the search has been unsuccessful, though Matthew does concede, to Det. Falco, that anything they had found would probably indicate Natalie is dead. Theo, at the bakery with Love, asks her what he should expect from his life now that he’s been part of a nationally publicized tragedy. He also kisses her, though she quickly stops him. And then, as we cut between Natalie’s family members and also Joe, planting a printed suicide note and Gil’s glasses in his empty house, we see Love’s plan come to fruition: officially, it seems as though Gil had an affair with Natalie, grew angry when he realized she wouldn’t leave Matthew, killed her with an axe, buried her at sea, then came home and confessed it all in his note before hanging himself from a stair rail.

In the dénouement, we see how perfectly it all went off. Theo is returning to school, no longer to torment Love with his youth and novelty. Sherry has sent Love a gigantic floral arrangement in thanks for defending her with Theo, and even calls her “friend” on the card. Joe has inherited Gil’s library job and will be reading to the kids from now on; Marienne is so far from suspicious of his motives in handling the rare books that she puts a very old David Copperfield into his hand herself. But then, chatting in a friendly way, she starts playing with the pendant on her necklace, and Joe’s internal monologue starts wondering if she — calling her “You” — is flirting with him.


Joe recognizes, as we do the significance of this pronoun choice: “I cannot be thinking about You like this, no. No, no, no. This is bad.”