This article contains spoilers for all of “You,” including the fifth and final season and the series finale. Stop reading now if you haven’t finished the entire series!
After five seasons and a big old pile of dead bodies in each one, serial killer and self-described romantic Joe Goldberg, the character made famous by noted Swiftie Penn Badgley on the Netflix series, has finally been held accountable. So how did we get here?
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We reunite with Joe in the season 5 premiere when, thanks to his wealthy and powerful wife Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) — who he met and wooed while pretending to be a professor named Jonathan Moore — he’s back in New York City and reclaiming his real name. Joe first left the Big Apple after the show’s debut season due to the fact that he murdered a bunch of people there, including his then-girlfriend Guinevere Beck, played by Elizabeth Lail; he then lived in California with his first wife Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) before killing her and absconding to London. (To be absolutely fair to Joe, Love was also a murderer, so that one might have been an actual act of self-defense. I can’t say that about the rest of his victims, though.) By the season’s end, he’s in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, which is precisely where he belongs, and here’s precisely how this notorious killer ends up behind bars.
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Season 5 of “You” finally lets Joe fail, first of all. For the show’s entire run up until this point, Joe has solved literally all of his problems with murder, and now, that tactic is finally not working as well as it once did. This is a relief, as a viewer; sure, the show is supposed to be heightened and campy, but at a certain point, the show really needed to break away from the endless cycle of “Joe gets in trouble, murders people to get out of it, and the trouble is no more.” Ultimately, the show does something pretty smart: it introduces a resourceful new character whose tactics actually fool Joe, manipulating him right into a corner.
Throughout Season 5 of You, Joe gets tricked by an unlikely person
At the beginning of season 5 of “You,” we meet a young woman named Bronte (Madeline Brewer), while she’s apparently sneaking in and out of the bookstore Joe now owns, Mooney’s (that’s where he worked back in season 1 of the series). Bronte — a book lover who probably borrowed her name from the famous literary sisters Anne, Charlotte, Emily, and Elizabeth — is young, beautiful, and friendly to Joe, meaning that she’s his type, so it’s not that surprising when they start an affair. (Despite his “romantic” nature, Joe isn’t always awesome at basic fidelity and loyalty.) Feeling guilty about being the “other woman,” Bronte vanishes … and when Joe tracks her down at a house outside of New York City, she’s with Clayton (Tom Francis), a jealous, controlling guy she claims she once dated. As it turns out, Bronte has always known the truth about Joe, because she was once mentored by Guinevere Beck and is convinced that he killed her. (She is, obviously, correct.)
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Joe kills Clayton after the two have a physical altercation, at which point Bronte approaches him with a taser and her friend Dominique (Natasha Behnam) films the entire thing. But when Joe gets into Bronte’s head and is convinced that he was actually protecting her, Bronte and Dominique’s entire plan seems lost. Things escalate from there thanks to the machinations of Kate and a young girl named Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) whom Joe once framed for a murder he committed, and after a showdown in the basement of Mooney’s where Joe keeps a plexiglass cage we’ve seen time and time again, the place ends up in flames. Kate’s fate is unknown, but Bronte and Joe escape the inferno, at which point he proposes. She says yes, and the two run away together.
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Bronte, thankfully, betrays Joe — and justice is served
In the series finale of “You,” something interesting happens: Joe’s internal monologue, which is presented as a voiceover throughout the show, is temporarily replaced by Bronte’s, and we learn that she’s still planning to turn on him. The two head to an isolated house in upstate New York, but during a moment of passion, Bronte pulls a gun on Joe, forcing him to admit that he’s committed countless crimes; she really drives the point home when Joe begs to call his son Henry (Frankie DeMaio) only for Henry to call his own father a “monster.”
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Joe definitely doesn’t go down without a fight. The two chase each other all over the property, with the gun changing hands multiple times — and Joe does shoot Bronte in the side — and when he drags her to a lake that happens to be next to the house, he seemingly drowns her and escapes into the woods. Bronte isn’t dead, though, and she chases him right back, finally getting the upper hand with the gun. Joe begs her to kill him, but she demurs as the police close in … but when he lunges for the weapon, she shoots him in what I can only describe as his “bathing suit area.” As Bronte tells us in voiceover, the Internet turned on Joe after she “made him into a walking d*ck joke,” and there’s even a funny little Easter egg where we see a tweet from rap queen Cardi B that reads, “He was a 10 now he’s 2 … inches.” (I call this an Easter egg because Cardi and Badgley are friends, and not only is she a fan of “You,” her song “I Like It” was featured in season 4.)
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The police capture Joe, the evidence against him is overwhelming, and everybody but him lives happily ever after. Kate is alive, albeit scarred, and raises Henry on her own. Bronte is free to live her life without Joe tormenting her. Finally, Joe himself is completely alone in a cell, surrounded by fan mail that he tells us is absolutely depraved in his own voiceover. There’s no question that “You” needed to end with Joe finally behind bars, and honestly? This was a pretty satisfying conclusion to his bloody, deranged “love” story.
“You” is streaming on Netflix now.
