You 1x09 Candace

I expected this episode to be momentous ever since I looked through the upcoming episode titles like two months ago, and boy did it deliver! True, we didn’t meet Candace in the present day just so she could deliver some shocking truths to Beck like I originally expected we would, and neither did we really find out what happened to her - that’s the job of next week’s episode, I guess – but so much else happened in these forty minutes that I almost don’t mind any of that.

After a brief break of about three months, if I remember the previous episode correctly (this show really loves its time jumps, huh), Joe and Beck are together again, but not in complete bliss. Something that Joe’s in-between girlfriend told her kept bugging Beck, so she went on a little social media digging of her own. After literally stalking Joe and trying to sabotage his new relationship any way she could last week, it really seems like these two have more in common than I thought. It’s not quite at the point of „they’re both terrible and therefore completely deserve each other”… but you know what, after this episode, that just might be true. Anyway, looking into Candace kept turning up dead ends, such as a wonderful friend of hers who apparently thought that suddenly „moving to Italy” aka disappearing from the face of the earth, becoming completely unavailable, and never contacting anyone you know ever again is a perfectly normal thing to do, and it’s Candace’s brother who has „crazy theories” about her being actually dead. Makes perfect sense! I mean, I still don’t think she’s dead but that’s only because I’m a viewer of a TV show and I expect something more than the obvious. But if this was real life it really would be incredibly in your face obvious that something’s not right. I just hope my friends wouldn’t just accept it if I ever disappeared like that, and move on as if I never existed. At least Beck had the sense to realize how fishy all this was, but sadly, Candace’s brother is really, truly dead at this point, so there was no one else for Beck to question but Joe.

Of course, Joe does have all the answers for Beck, just not necessarily ones that are true. He shows her an Instagram (?) account to prove that Candace did indeed move to Italy, and change her name so she could start anew. Plausible, but since all this was interspersed with flashbacks to the fallout of her and Joe’s relationship, coupled with the fact that this wouldn’t be the first time we saw Joe operate someone else's social media accounts long after their demise (RIP Benji), everything is still as fishy as it was before. Not for Beck, though, who’s just relieved that all this really was just in her head, because of course Joe would never kill anyone, duh, it’s just not in him! So the happy couple walks off into the evening, only for Joe to get jealous and suspicious at Beck’s refusal to answer some calls from her alleged college friend, who of course Joe already knows doesn’t exist, because Facebook. On a hunch he tracks down and attacks Doctor Nicky, and wouldn’t you know, his phone is full of texts exchanged with Beck, as well as naked pictures of the two of them in bed. God, she really is terrible, huh. And when Joe confronts her about it, she has the audacity to blabber something about how she has never loved anyone the way she loves him, which made her afraid because she doesn’t know if she’s even worthy to have this, blah blah blah. Look, I know she has a „traumatic past” or whatever, but cheating is a CHOICE. Just to sprinkle some personal information that no one asked for in here, I got into my first ever relationship when I was 23, only a few months after – you could say finally - losing my virginity on a kind of one weekend stand (to a different man), in what was, for me, a surprising turn of events, because up until that point no one but drunk fifty year old festival-goers ever expressed any interest in seeing me naked. So when I got together with my boyfriend I was still pretty hung up on the other guy, but when he reached out to me asking if I want a repeat, I said no. Multiple times, and again when he wrote a few months later, and again the next (and so far last) time. Now I’m 26, still with the same boyfriend, and I would never cheat on him, even though I had opportunities aplenty. I know the situations are not exactly the same but they’re similar enough for me to say that I don’t care how surprised you are to find yourself in a loving relationship, immediately cheating on your new partner is just about the stupidest, most fucked up thing you can do. Luckily for Beck, the only thing Joe hears out of her bullshit apology is the fact that she loves him a lot, which is apparently the only thing that matters to him, so all is forgiven! … Yay?

But wait, it’s not over yet! The next morning, when Joe goes out to get some breakfast, Beck answers the door for Paco, who lets it slip about Joe’s little hiding place above the toilet. Naturally, Beck can’t help herself and ends up finding a little box containing her old phone, Peach and Benji’s phones, and… Benji’s teeth. Yuck. Also naturally, she scatters all of that to the floor, and since she fails to collect all of them AND fails to escape, Joe gets to her and puts her into his secret bookjail. It’s implied that this is what he did to Candace as well, but we never find out what happened to her after, so as I said, next episode? I honestly don’t know what to expect from this finale. There’s a sequel to the book the show is based on, and it follows Joe’s further adventures, that much I know. But I have no idea what that means for Beck. Will she survive, or is she about to take an extended trip to, I don’t know, Spain? I would hate to lose Elizabeth Lail but she probably deserves a better character than Beck, if I want to be honest.