Joe & Love Use The Snoo Like Absolute Psychopaths

The following contains mild spoilers if you haven’t caught up on season 2 of You.

You Season 3 opens on Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and his new bride-slash-murder-soulmate Love Quinn-Goldberg (Victoria Pedretti) trying to make it work as young parents to little baby Henry. As the two grapple with the sleepless hellscape that is the newborn phase, Joe has a fleeting thought about parenthood, wondering if it is “Groundhog Day written by Jean Paul Sartre.” Yep. Sure can be! Love puts it more succinctly: “I’m just a stay at home mom, going insane!”

Life with a newborn means running on primal parenting instinct. Even though they are both emotionally labile serial killers, Joe and Love’s core protective reflexes kick in. They do the midnight feeding thing, the changing diapers thing, and the buy-all-the-gadgets-and-gizmos thing. Love comes from obscene wealth, so obviously the little family enjoys all the bougiest parenting gear. The Quinn-Goldbergs have fancy WiFi monitors and the finest butt paste. At one point, a piece of stunning Le Creuset cookware features prominently.

And, of course, they also have a Snoo.

At first, the couple has the Snoo in their room, situated by Joe’s side of the bed. Fair enough.

For the uninitiated, the Snoo is a happy-baby making machine. Its creator, Dr. Harvey Karp, claims the device helps newborn babies snooze better with longer stretches of sleep so that exhausted parents can get a bit of shut eye and therefore be more rested when they care for their children. Based on Karp’s 5 S’s, the Snoo uses swinging, swaddling, and shushing (white noise) to soothe baby to sleep or — crucially — back to sleep in the middle of the night. Karp claims that the Snoo’s patented clipped-in sleep sack is not only safe but that it can help prevent SIDS. The company’s application to be officially designated as a lifesaving device is currently under review at the FDA.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Like baby nirvana. (Not to be confused with the Nirvana baby.)

The Snoo doesn’t work for everyone, but anecdotally, hello, hi, it worked for me. I am a sample size of one, but I know many many parents who were very glad to have it as a tool in their sleepytime arsenal. However, even with options to rent it monthly, the Snoo is pricey, and can be the kind of big-ticket item that gets dropped when working within a budget.

But, of course, money isn’t a problem for the Quinn-Goldbergs! At first, the couple has the Snoo in their room, situated by Joe’s side of the bed. Fair enough. It should be used in a sleeping environment, with the baby securely strapped into the little Snoo straightjacket so it’s impossible for them to roll over. However, mere minutes into the first episode of the season, the Snoo can be spotted smack dab in the middle of Love and Joe’s living room. Excuse me? What? This thing is a $1400 baby sleep magic maker. Not a bassinet to be used in the middle of a sunny room??

Mere days later, the Snoo is in the kitchen.

This is the mind of a complete psychopath, no, two complete psychopaths at work. Why would someone ever pony up the cash for a Snoo to then place it outside of a darkened room in which Baby can sleep? And to move that heavy thing around on the regular is absolute madness!

Love and Joe proceed to use other baby items in morally questionable ways. We’d expect nothing less. For example, they snag one of Henry’s monitors to surveil potential victims they’ve trapped in Joe’s trademark glass cage. But that’s an actual, rational use of that particular baby item. Using a baby monitor to watch a captive? Sure. Dragging the Snoo around one’s house? No. Makes zero logical sense.

Furthermore, Love and Joe use the Snoo far past when it’s developmentally appropriate for lil Henry. At one point in the season premiere, we hear that Henry is 7 months old. Yet, they’ve got him chilling in the Snoo, unsupervised, with a fluffy blanket covering his baby bod! There is so much wrong here. If Love posted this whole sitch on that infamously cutthroat safe sleep group on Facebook, they might just send a momma mob to murder her. (That mob would be in for a surprise, though.)

Children at that age are rolling from side to side, crawling, and, in some cases, pulling up on steady objects. So, no, Henry is not safe in that Snoo. (Or with his parents, really. These two crazy kids are used to taking lives, not making and shaping them. But I digress.)

As You Season 3 progresses, Henry himself sort of fades into the background, but his paternal and maternal genetics remain on full, wild display. Using the Snoo incorrectly is perhaps not the most egregious error that Joe and Love make, but it is something to think about. After all, they don't want their kid to grow up to be a serial killer.