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About the series

Contains story spoilers.

The opening encounter at Mooney’s bookstore gives Joe Goldberg the material for an obsession. Guinevere Beck pays for a book, and he uses her online presence to find her address and follow her life. She is a poetry student struggling to keep up with wealthier friends; Joe decides he understands what she needs better than she does. After a disappointing open-mic appearance, a drunk Beck falls onto subway tracks. Joe rescues her from an approaching train, but also steals her phone. What looks to Beck like a chance meeting and a rescue has already been shaped by surveillance. His narration offers a romantic account of their connection while his actions give him access to private information she never agreed to share.

Benji, the man Beck has been seeing, becomes the first obstacle Joe removes from this new relationship. Joe holds him in the bookstore’s basement cage, exchanging drugs for information about Beck and her friends. Benji offers blackmail material that might secure his release: a video of a fatal incident involving him and his friends, which their parents covered up. Joe instead uses Benji’s peanut allergy to kill him with contaminated coffee. Elsewhere, Beck is fighting her own battle after her teacher retaliates against her rejection of his advances. She contacts other women and threatens to expose him, preserving her position. Her effort to regain control of her life runs alongside Joe’s decision to take another person’s life on her behalf.

Keeping that murder hidden proves less controlled than Joe imagines. A power failure could send an electrician into the basement with Benji’s body; a colleague’s advance phone call gives Joe time to intervene. Police looking into suspicious purchases do not immediately inspect his car trunk, where the corpse is being transported. Even his growing intimacy with Beck creates risks. He has to explain how he knows the dimensions of her room, while Peach notices the smell from his car and suspects he stole a book from her library. Beck’s writing workshop brings a different humiliation when another student, Blythe, undermines her confidence. Joe is juggling a relationship, a body and the increasingly difficult task of making his knowledge appear innocent.

Beck eventually becomes a prisoner herself. Her attempt to escape includes writing an account that incriminates her therapist, Dr. Nicky, rather than Joe. Appealing to Joe’s romantic fantasy gets the cage opened, but does not get her out of the basement alive. Paco, the neighbour Joe has helped, refuses to open the outer door when she calls to him, protecting the man he trusts instead of recognising the danger. After the failed escape, Joe kills Beck and has her manuscript published with changes that help direct the blame toward Dr. Nicky. The book becomes a bestseller while its author is dead and the wrong man is arrested. Candace’s arrival at the bookstore then reveals that someone from Joe’s past can still interrupt the story he tells about himself.

Los Angeles offers a new identity, Will Bettelheim, and a relationship with Love Quinn, but Joe repeats the same methods. Reporter Delilah Alves finds his storage-unit cage after investigating him; he traps her inside it and promises to release her using timed handcuffs after he has fled. Forty’s drug-fuelled writing scheme delays that plan, and Joe returns to find Delilah dead. Candace later imprisons Joe in the cage so Love can see what he has done. Love kills Candace, frees Joe and reveals that she also killed Delilah. Joe’s fantasy of an innocent partner collapses: Love has her own violent history and sees him as someone with whom she can build a family. Her pregnancy helps keep them together, while Delilah’s sister Ellie is left to escape the damage they caused.

Marriage and a son, Henry, do not settle them in Madre Linda. Joe becomes fixated on neighbour Natalie, and Love kills her after finding evidence of his interest. Their shared domestic life now includes disposing of her body and building another cage beneath Love’s bakery. Joe’s attention shifts to librarian Marienne, whose custody struggle with her ex-husband Ryan gives him another excuse for intervention; he murders Ryan. Love later paralyses Joe with aconite and summons Marienne, but lets her leave after her daughter arrives. Joe anticipated the poisoning and recovers enough to kill Love with a lethal injection. He stages their deaths, burns the house and leaves Henry with his colleague Dante and Dante’s partner before going to Europe in search of Marienne.

London’s version of Joe appears to let Marienne return to Paris, but that apparent mercy hides another captivity. In a dissociative state, he drugged and abducted her, then kept her in a reconstructed glass cage for months. His student Nadia discovers her and helps devise an escape that exploits his willingness to believe his own explanations. The women convince him Marienne has lost custody of her daughter, then stage an apparent overdose. Beta-blockers make her seem dead; once Joe leaves her body on a park bench, Nadia revives her with a stimulant. Marienne returns to her daughter in Paris. The reversal gives the captive a plan of her own and makes Joe’s mistaken belief that she is dead the opening through which she survives.

The final season brings him back to New York with wealthy wife Kate and a renewed obsession, Bronte. She is really Louise Flannery, a former student of Beck’s who noticed discrepancies in Beck’s published book and joined an effort to expose Joe. She is still vulnerable to his charm. Kate, Nadia and Marienne eventually confront him, and Kate records a confession during a fire at Mooney’s. Bronte saves Joe so he can answer for Beck’s death, then demands that he correct the book he manipulated. Their flight ends in violence when Joe attacks her and she shoots him as he tries to seize her gun. He survives and is imprisoned for life. His final narration still seeks excuses, even after other people have broken his control over their stories.