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[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of YOU. Read at your own risk!]
The ending of YOU‘s second season delivered quite a twist in the final episodes, so if you haven’t gotten to that point of the new episodes yet, look away now. No, seriously. Let this Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) GIF serve as a final warning that what comes next is completely spoilerific.
Still with us? OK.
If you’re reading this, you already know that YOU Season 2 delivered one heckuva surprise in its final episodes when Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) was revealed to have her own deadly little secrets. Not only did she murder poor Delilah (Carmela Zumbado) before Joe could release her from that glass cage, but her first killing took place years and years before, when she knifed the au pair who sexually assaulted Forty (James Scully) as a kid. So, it’s not like Joe’s bad behavior just suddenly rubbed off on her after they met. Shockers, all!
Before we got to that point, though, you might’ve noticed a creeping sense of familiarity when it came to Love, and we think it has something to do with the fact that, in a lot of ways, the character was essentially the same person as Pedretti’s The Haunting of Hill House counterpart Eleanor “Nellie” Crain.
Let’s break down some of the major similarities between them, shall we?
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1. They were both Angelenos. Let’s start with the simplest one: Both ladies lived in LA, which meant that the backdrop of their screen stories were very, very similar. Whenever they did return to their family homes, too, things got awfully complicated for each of them, albeit in different ways. For Nellie, the place was literally haunted and dangerous for her, with her mother’s ghost trying to trap her into dying there so she could become a Hill House ghost herself. Meanwhile, her life might not have been in overt danger, but Love also had a toxic relationship with her own mother — and there was at least one skeleton lurking in the closet of her family home as well.
2. They both had “the twin thing.” Love and Nellie also both happened to have fraternal twin brothers. In Nellie’s case, it was Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) whom she once shared a womb with, and in YOU, Love’s twin brother was Forty (James Scully). The parallels between their sibling scenarios might’ve been eerie enough with that, but it didn’t end there.
3. Their twin brothers were each very troubled. Not only were both of Pedretti’s Netflix characters twins, but their brothers were also each beset with addiction issues stemming from their difficult childhood experiences. As a result, both Nellie and Love were fiercely supportive of their brothers’ efforts to recover to the point of having co-dependent relationships with them. Despite all that effort, though, each of these twin pairings were eventually separated by tragedy before it was all said and done. Gulp.
4. They both became widows at a very young age. Speaking of loss, both Nellie and Love also lost husbands at very young ages due to illnesses. Nellie’s husband Arthur (Jordane Christie) had an unexpected aneurysm during one of her sleep paralysis incidents, while Love’s husband hid his terminal disease from her until it was too late. Here’s hoping her The Haunting of Bly Manor character gets a happier ending (however unlikely that may be).
5. They both had devastating secrets. Both YOU and The Haunting of Hill House decided to drop a bombshell about Pedretti’s characters and changed everything we knew about them. Midway through Hill House, we learned that Nellie was actually the Bent-Neck Lady who’d haunted her for so long, and in YOU, Love presented her true self as a woman who was capable of killing and had done so on multiple occasions. Those were obviously two very different outcomes for Nellie and Love, but the two twists were equally as jaw-dropping and dark for the otherwise sunny characters.
Pretty spooky, no?
The Haunting of Hill House and YOU Seasons 1-2 are now available on Netflix.
Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House and YOU