You boss Sera Gamble shares the story behind the finale's Taylor Swift needle drop
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the You season 3 finale.
Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn's love story on You ended with the perfect song selection: Taylor Swift's "Exile."
In the Netflix thriller's season 3 finale, the unstable suburban life that Joe (Penn Badgley) and Love (Victoria Pedretti) made for themselves came crashing down in truly shocking fashion as both murders turned on each other. Love drugged Joe because of his obsession with Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) and tried to kill him, but Joe got the upper hand and killer her first. And in the wake of their showdown, Joe faked his death and burned their home down in a montage set to Swift's Folklore breakup duet with Bon Iver.
You couldn't have picked a better needle drop for the moment, because the lyrics of "Exile" capture many aspects of Joe and Love's doomed romance: They always did "walk a very thin line"; both of them "gave so many signs" that their marriage wasn't working (you know, like the multiple murders); and "You're not my homeland anymore/So what am I defending now?/You were my town, now I'm exile seeing you out" pretty much sums up how things fell apart.
JOHN P. FLEENOR/NETFLIX. inset: Jim Spellman/Getty Images Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti in 'You' season 3 (inset: Sera Gamble)
When EW spoke to You showrunner Sera Gamble about her artistic inspirations for our Meet Your Maker story, we asked her about picking "Exile" for this moment, and she opened up about how Folklore is one of the albums that has helped her through the COVID-19 pandemic.
"During the pandemic, when everything was just completely mad and we were all very much staying away from each other, my husband and I rented an RV because we needed to go up north, and the Folklore album had recently come out and the RV was incredibly loud, but we cranked it all the way up and listened to it," Gamble said. "As we were driving through the smoke of all these forest fires in the middle of a pandemic, it was a real apocalypse bonding experience. When we were cutting the last episode of You, I talked to Season Kent, our music supervisor, and I was like, 'Do you think there's any chance we can get this on, because I feel like it's the perfect sad song for this part?'"
Using "Exile" in You was also Gamble's way of remembering a pretty significant period in her life.
"This is so inside baseball, but one of the perks of being a showrunner is that you can embed almost a little bit of a journal or an autobiography into all of the work you do," she said. "And one of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure is to put really significant songs, songs that mean a lot to me personally, in the shows that I'm making. Not just to share them because they're amazing, but they're also little love letters to the people in my life who know what those songs mean."
This was the ethos behind using Phoria's "Evolve" in The Magicians season 3 episode "A Life in the Day." "That track from Phoria also was just a really significant song in my life and ended up being perfect for that," Gamble recalled. "So many people love the song, and it's hard to describe that weird sense of satisfaction when you make something and you put it out in the world and then a lot of people respond to the same thing that your heart responded to."
Of course, this isn't the first time Gamble has used one of Swift's songs: In the first season of The Magicians, a character performed "Shake It Off" while trapped in a mental institution.
"I've always thought that being an artist of any kind, part of what you're doing is you're in conversation with every other artist who's interested in the same stuff about being human that you are," Gamble said. "And I'm sure Taylor Swift has no idea who I am, but in my small way, through the TV shows that I've been making for the last few years, I've been a little bit in conversation with her storytelling by bringing it into our storytelling, which is a beautiful thing that I get to do as part of my job."
You will return for a fourth season on Netflix.
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