In You’s Final Season, Joe Goldberg’s Story Comes Full Circle at Last

Netflix’s You is not a series for the faint of heart. One part relationship thriller, one part stalker drama, and one part meta commentary on the state of gender politics in a world dominated by social media and misogyny, it’s a bonkers ride full of violent deaths and high-tension twists. What began as a series ostensibly meant to interrogate the dangers that lurk behind the public veneers of the sort of so-called “nice guys” whose golden exteriors can often hide dark hearts, You ultimately became something much bigger—and often more ridiculous. From its breakneck pacing to the outrageous (and often downright unbelievable) narrative swerves it had to employ to allow its primary protagonist to escape everything from nosy neighbors to law enforcement, it’s a show that consistently swings for the fences, even when you’re not entirely convinced it knows what it’s going for when it does so. But, as they say, all good things must come to an end, and You Season 5 will almost certainly disappoint, frustrate, and delight long-time fans in equal measure. It’s a fitting final chapter to a show that’s been tonally and emotionally all over the place, but that remains impossible to look away from. 

That You has run for five seasons is more than a little shocking, given how outlandish most of the show’s story has become by this point. By now, there are few crimes Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) hasn’t committed and/or gotten away with, and though the show has done its best to give him the kind of dark, traumatic backstory that tends to categorize messy antiheroes nowadays, he’s still undeniably a monster, despite his preternatural ability to fail upward. 

As Season 5 opens, Joe’s on something like the fifth successful reboot of his life. It’s been three years since the events of Season 4. He’s back in New York, has reclaimed his given name, and the son, Henry, that he abandoned back in Madre Linda a couple of seasons ago. He’s married to billionaire heiress Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) and is generally beloved by the public for doing the absolute bare minimum, like holding his wife’s purse a couple of times while the pair are at a public event. But despite having virtually everything he could have dreamed of in life, he still can’t deny the attraction when a waifish young woman named Bronte (Madeline Brewer) breaks into Mooney’s bookstore one night and stirs the instincts he’d been trying to claim were long buried.

Another in the long line of vaguely Manic Pixie Dream Girl-adjacent types that Joe loves to go for, he’s immediately drawn to Bronte’s love of literature, her Bohemian attitude, and her dreams of becoming a writer. That he meets her just as he and Kate begin to clash over the best way to handle some uncomfortable threats from her family leaves him spiraling over whether or not there’s any woman who can ever truly accept all of him, and a familiar cycle seems set to begin all over again. 

Given that this is You’s final season, it’s really difficult to talk about anything that happens without spoiling some significant plot twist, surprise cameo, or meaningful flashback. To its credit, the show does a remarkably good job of weaving loose ends and significant details from previous seasons into this final run, and there are plenty of nods to what has come before. There are even a few moments where the show seems to want its audience to question its own complicity in You’s—and subsequently the idea of Joe Goldberg’s—popularity. What does it mean that this series has spent so much time encouraging its viewers not just to sympathize with but to outright root for Joe, that we’ve enjoyed reveling in his close calls and last-minute escapes from justice?