Three Cheers for You Season 3's MVP Couple: Sherry and Cary

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for You Season 3! Read at your own risk.]

Joe (Penn Badgley) and Love (Victoria Pedretti) encountered a lot of new people in You Season 3 as they settled into the affluent Nor-Cal suburb of Madre Linda. At the beginning of the season, there may have been no two people you wanted to see get locked in the Quinn-Goldberg's cage of death more than Sherry (Shalita Grant) and Cary (Travis Van Winkle) -- the Instagram-influencer couple hyped up on so much self-love and inner peace it could make you sick. 

When Sherry barks at Love in an early episode because she had the nerve to feed children cupcakes with raspberries on them (because even fruit has sugar), you were ready for Love to put an ax in the back of her head too, but when Sherry and Cary did eventually get locked in the cage, you couldn't help but root for them. 

"I think of [Sherry and Cary] as a fun mirror of the other marriage. We thought that by the end of the season, Sherry and Cary will also be in a form of couple's therapy that is a lot more intense because they are in a cage and they might die at any moment," showrunner Sera Gamble explained. "There's a gun in play and all of that stuff, but I think what you discover by the end of the season is what the writers were on to from the beginning, which is we have been rooting for them the whole time. We see them through Joe's eyes. We see them through the audience's eyes. There's a lot of stuff about them that is pretty privileged and clueless, but they're awesome. We all wanted them to live." 

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Since we have spent so much time inside Joe and Love's heads, it was easy to look down on Sherry and Cary. Their narcissism was hard to stomach for the first few episodes, but as Joe and Love spent more time with the nauseatingly perfect couple, Sherry and Cary's idiosyncrasies started to look like gold. Joe accidentally almost killed Cary during an all-male hunting retreat, but when Cary survives apparently off of pure testosterone, you can't help but be amazed. Things only got better when the couple asked Joe and Love to try swinging with them, and their full eccentricities were on display. Unfortunately, that polyamorous encounter is what led to Sherry and Cary being in the cage when they overheard Love yelling about how she had actually been the one to kill Natalie (Michaela McManus) and got overtaken by the Quinn-Goldbergs in an intense physical throwdown. 

However, once inside the cage they had to use their wits to figure their way out, and it turned out that Sherry and Cary were definitely not as vapid as they had pretended to be for most of the season. Their ability to talk things through, whether using their green and purple zone communication tactics or by waving a gun in each other's face, became a fascinating case study to watch -- especially if you are comparing them to Joe and Love, the ultimate dysfunctional couple. Sherry and Cary may have made you roll your eyes at first, but they undeniably had a more stable relationship. 

"I think in terms of the themes of Season 3, their relationship is a relationship that does, for lack of a better word, have legs. They thrive," Shalita Grant told TV Guide. "They thrive out of that cage and the house of Love had to burn. I think that them making it out was a testament to even if you feel like they're parasitic and horrible, which they may be, their love was what got them through." 

Part of what made Sherry and Cary a better couple than Joe and Love was they realized how to make opposites work rather than keep them diametrically opposed. 

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"I think there's a great yin and yang between Sherry and Cary. I think that Sherry is just so results-oriented and outward-focused," Travis Van Winkle shared. "Cary is always about the experience and the moment. They really fill in each other's gaps. I think the love is very real. I think that you'll see as the show wraps up that the facade they represent, it's real. They walk the walk."

And Sherry and Cary are one of a few people to encounter Joe Goldberg's true self and live to talk about it. They believe he was murdered by Love at the end of the season, but Grant and Van Winkle are ready to see Joe get what's coming to him. 

"I think all the seasons he gets, that's beautiful, but at the end, I want to see him get it," Grant said, while Van Winkle offered "Karma is a bitch, right?"

No matter what happens to Joe, we are just so happy to see Sherry and Cary surviving and thriving after their time in the cage. 

You Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.