Picking up right where episode 2 left off, You season 5, episode 3, begins with Joe realizing just how badly he messed things up in grabbing the wrong twin.
We see Joe spiraling, and he can’t help himself from silencing Maddie… or so it seems. We once again have a fakeout death as Joe is instead attempting to use his writing to walk through possible outcomes for how to clean up this mess. He realizes killing her won’t help. He instead tries to play it off as if he misread the signals when he heard she was sleeping with another man. What he didn’t know was that the other man was her sister’s husband. Maddie doesn’t take the bait and instead spirals about her sister being right about Kate killing Bob, and it’s clear Joe has a bigger problem on his hands than he expected.
After talking through some ideas about how to solve the Reagan problem with Teddy and Kate, Kate suggests he focus his time on the bookstore’s opening and sends him off. This, of course, works for Joe as he needs to take some food to Maddie and figure things out.
When he arrives at Mooney’s, Bronte points out her observation that the bookstore is seriously lacking in the romance department, literally. It seems they don’t have any romance books. She tells him about a lot of books she found, which they can use to flesh out their selection. Seeing this as an opportunity to keep Bronte away from the prisoner in his basement, Joe agrees to go buy the books with her and tasks her with clearing out his trunk so he can give Maddie the food he’s brought.
Joe tells Maddie that if she gives him dirt on Reagan, he’ll discuss releasing her which is when he realizes just how badly he really has messed up. Turns out when Maddie was younger, she was taken hostage by one of her father’s enemies who cut off her ear during the ordeal. She walks Joe through how she realized her captor seemed to have feelings for her and she used them to manipulate him, leading to him taking his own life and giving her the chance to get free, something the FBI had never seen before. Joe tries to leverage the food he’s brought against her, to which she points out that he clearly didn’t take into account that she needs her insulin, which he now has to go fetch. In her own words, she’s not the prisoner: Joe is.
Bronte and Joe head out to the sale to pick up the books, and Joe begins to question why he can’t shake the feeling that he shouldn’t trust her. She pokes around a bit about how he and Kate met, which makes Joe question his marriage a bit. When they get back to the store, things get a bit flirty as she talks him through some romance clichés in a book, and we have to wonder – is she pushing all the right buttons accidentally, or does she have some sort of ulterior motive?
As Kate begins to put a plan into place for how to handle Reagan after Teddy finds out Reagan has been embezzling money, Joe returns to visit Maddie in hopes of turning things around. Maddie continues to push Joe’s buttons by undercutting his power, which triggers him to finally lash out about how few people have seen this particular side of him and lived. Even after watching Joe snap, Maddie keeps her cool as she questions how Kate has managed to whip a literal psychopath into her purse-carrying lapdog.
Turns out Bronte isn't who she says she is
Leaving Maddie to continue to think things over, Bronte and Joe head back to pick up the rest of the books, but she needs to head out to meet with her friends at a nearby literary salon. Joe offers to accompany her and she suggests perhaps seeing imperfections present their flawed work can help break him out of his writer’s block.
Bronte notices a familiar face in the crowd and tries to get Joe to leave with her, but the man walks over to greet them before she’s able to bounce. Turns out the mystery man is her ex, Clayton, and he’s just as big of a douche as we expected. He refuses to let them leave without sharing some of their own work, so he decides to read an early draft of one of Bronte’s works. When she interjects, trying to stop the reading, Clayton reveals to Joe and the crowd that Bronte’s real name is actually Louise Flannery, a former dental hygienist from Ohio. He claims she picked the most writerly name possible and then moved to the Big Apple and stole from him for months.
Kate goes to see Reagan, looking to leverage the new information Teddy unearthed. As she arrives, we quickly pick up on things being off as Harrison is racing out the door and mutters something about Kate not believing his side of the story as he heads out. Kate walks in to find Reagan crying on the couch and Reagan tells her about getting a call from security about Harrison being found half-naked in the supply closet and about his affair with Maddie, who she believes has run off to get out of Dodge. Kate lets her guard down briefly before using the moment to point out that unless Reagan wants her trauma to be front-page news, she needs to leave the kids out of this. With her back in the corner, Reagan backs down.
After leaving, Kate calls Joe to tell him the good news, and she also spills the beans about the affair coming out and the assumption that Maddie has gone into hiding now that it’s been exposed. With this news, Joe tries to convince Maddie to run away with Harrison and live their happily ever after. Rather than seeing this as good news, Maddie begins to spiral about how this is the worst case scenario, as Reagan will stop at nothing to get revenge. She’ll take Harrison for everything he has and never let her see Gretchen again. Maddie pushed her into having Harrison’s baby as a surrogate, and she mentions that there is nothing worse than death.
Joe enters the glass cage to give Maddie her insulin directly before heading upstairs where he goes down the rabbit hole of looking into Bronte. You fans will know that this is never a good thing as Joe’s searches into the women who enter his life and catch his attention always end the same. During his search, he finds that Bronte was a big fan of Guinevere Beck’s work and he suddenly begins to question whether she really has been hiding something from him. After all, is it really a coincidence that she read Beck’s works as well as Sherry and Cary’s book?
Eager to know if he can trust her, Joe goes to see Bronte in hopes of clearing the air. After telling Joe about how she met Clayton and the death of her mom, Bronte gives Joe the perfect opening to ask about Beck, and he takes it. Bronte admits that she saw herself in Beck’s work and asks Joe to tell her about Beck. Joe tells Bronte about dating Beck briefly and calls what happened to Beck a tragedy, and how he wishes he had killed Dr. Nicky as it means that Beck might still be here. Joe notes that the anti-hero with no backstory and murder didn’t come from nowhere, and that he wishes he were as strong as he is on the page.
The two get dangerously close to kissing as he admits he’s not being fulfilled in his marriage, and Joe begins to head out. As he’s leaving, Bronte tells him she’s not the cliché and doesn’t know if she can handle an affair. That’s when Joe sees Bronte in a dangerous new light as he forces himself to leave.
Joe sneaks back to his typewriter and begins writing, when Bronte shows up unexpectedly. She unzips his pants and reaches in to pleasure him — only for us to find out that this is yet another manifestation of Joe’s mind as he pleasures himself to his own writing.
When he gets home finally, Kate asks Joe about the voicemail he had left earlier about Maddie and asks if he’d spoken with Maddie. Ever the quick thinker, Joe tells her that he was simply looking for dirt to use against her sisters, but it seems Kate had the Reagan situation handled. Kate confesses to him that she’s been having nightmares after what they did to Bob and that she needs help understanding why he’s not suffering the same way she is. He tells her that he needs a purpose. When he can protect her and Henry, he feels not even remotely guilty, and that he thinks that’s what makes him special. He begs Kate to let him help her make the world a better place, to which she replies that he can help her in any way except that (i.e, solving their problems with violence).
Following the conversation with Kate, Joe does a bit more sleuthing into Bronte’s social media and alludes to how perhaps she’d be happy if he protected her as he looks into Clayton’s social media. He puts his phone down for just a moment before a notification flashes across that catches his interest immediately: Maddie has gone live on social media!
Joe watches as Maddie tells those watching that the rumors are true; she messed up with her sister’s husband. He immediately realizes it’s Reagan, whose act even fools Kate. As she concludes the live, Reagan as Maddie tells the world she’s ceding her board voting capacity in absentia to her sister, Reagan, immediately. This sparks an idea in Joe.
He goes to see Maddie in the cage and asks how she’d like to become her sister as the episode concludes.