This article contains major character or plot details.

There’s a battle of wills unfolding in the middle of a heavily forested area in upstate New York on a balmy August night. 

It’s after midnight on the penultimate night of production on the fifth and final season of You, and water is cascading from four rain towers, creating a muddy field in the otherwise dry landscape. Penn Badgley, who stars as Joe Goldberg, is clad only in his underwear — his primary costume for the past two weeks — while filming the climactic confrontation between his character and Joe’s catfish turned lover turned nemesis Bronte (Madeline Brewer). In a last-ditch effort to exert control over her, Joe painfully begs Bronte to shoot him, forcing her to write an ending to this story. 

But the question everyone on set is asking isn’t if Joe will survive this encounter. It’s whether Badgley, who is fighting both the manufactured elements and the limits of his own body, will survive the scene.

“He was hoarse. I was like, ‘I hope he is able to keep going and finish the take without his voice crapping out,’ ” co-showrunner and executive producer Justin W. Lo tells Tudum. 

After portraying the romantic antihero Joe for seven years, Badgley is used to playing in the extremes. Sometimes that means having a foursome that gives way to backyard archery practice, and other times that means banging his head against a glass cage as Joe disassociates. But this long-awaited scene in the rain — in which he was struggling to be heard above the precipitation and straining his muscles to convey Joe’s desperation — is the one where Badgley finally felt as though he had truly given Joe everything he had. 

“I really felt in the last take like, ‘I’m done,’ ” Badgley tells Tudum in his stripped-down dressing room on the very last day of production. Sporting an orange jumpsuit and much-discussed buzz cut, he absentmindedly rubs the back of his neck as he recalls the intensity of the scene he shot the night before. “I’m always finding new ways to express rage, [and] the muscles in my neck are so active in that. I actually felt last night like they were giving out. It was such a surreal feeling, and I haven’t had time to reflect on it.” 

Now, with the premiere of You’s final season, Badgley will have a lot of time to reflect on this wild and immersive journey as Joe. After spending three seasons killing his way through California and London on a quest to find The One, Joe returns to New York a new man in Season 5. Not only has he not killed anyone in three years, but he also has his son Henry (Frankie DeMaio) back; his wife Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) is one of the richest women in the world; and he basically has everything he could’ve ever wanted. Well, except for a passionate love that consumes him completely. 

Enter: Bronte, an aspiring writer whose life could maybe use a little course-correcting. Naturally, Joe can’t resist the siren call of a woman who needs the kind of “fixing” that he thinks only he can provide. Thus, Old Joe is awakened, and an extramarital affair begins, threatening everything New Joe currently holds dear. 

Below, we answer all of your burning questions about the final chapter of Joe’s bloody tale, and we’ll start with the agent of his doom: Bronte. 

Who is Bronte, and what is her connection to Beck? 

No one is ever who they appear to be on You. Cool-girl chef Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) was kind as could be, but also turned out to be very OK with murder. Influencer power couple Cary (Travis Van Winkle) and Sherry (Shalita Grant) were secretly influencing other couples to swing with them. And ice-cold art collector Kate Lockwood is actually the daughter of one of the richest and most corrupt men in the world. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Bronte isn’t just an adrift lover of fairy smut who simply stumbles upon Joe one night at Mooney’s. 

Bronte is a catfish designed specifically to take Joe down for murdering Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) in Season 1 and many others. Joe makes this shocking discovery in Season 5, Episode 5 when he rushes to defend Bronte from an angry Clayton (Tom Francis) and kills him in the process. To Joe’s surprise, Bronte’s friends rush in and live-stream the whole aftermath, exclaiming: “We got him!” 

In Episode 6, we learn that Bronte’s real name is Louise Flannery, and Beck was her TA when she was studying to be a writer in New York. But the two fell out of touch after Louise/Bronte had to drop out of school and return to Ohio to take care of her dying mom. Upon learning of Beck’s death, Bronte reads her book The Dark Face of Love and notices some discrepancies in the writing (Beck would never quote A Doll’s House), which leads her to an online forum where she meets other internet sleuths — including Dr. Nicky’s son, Clayton! — devoted to finding Beck’s real killer. It’s not long before this ragtag Scooby gang set their sights on Joe and all the crimes he’s committed, with Bronte putting herself in the most vulnerable position — i.e., the one closest to Joe. 

“[Bronte’s] mom’s death shatters her and creates this giant void in her life, which is when her obsession with taking Joe down takes firmer hold, and she decides to move to New York to catfish him,” says Lo. 

Bronte’s backstory and connection to Beck came as a surprise to Brewer. “I knew that there was a twist, but I didn’t entirely understand to what degree it was until I read Episode 6,” she says. “I knew Bronte was a constructed character. She’s been invented for a very expressed, very clear purpose. I just wasn’t sure what that purpose was when I started.” 

As for Badgley, he loved the twist almost as much as Joe was devastated by it. “I thought it was great,” he says, “because it’s the same way that Love [Quinn] was the necessary reinvention of the [“You”] concept.” History might not repeat itself, but it does have a way of rhyming.

Why does Bronte fall for Joe? 

It all comes down to Bronte’s radical empathy. The same ability that made her so skillful at writing antiheroes — a quality Beck praised — ends up almost condemning her. 

As Bronte recounts her entire catfishing plan to Detective Marquez, played by Nava Mau (Baby Reindeer), she talks herself into believing that Joe acted in self-defense because he genuinely thought her life was in danger. Bronte actually appreciates the fact that Joe was willing to kill for her. In turn, Bronte’s change of heart convinces Joe that what they had was real and there’s still a chance they can make it work.

However, before this ill-advised couple can truly reconcile, they decide to interrogate each other in the cage, a twisted take on Sherry and Cary’s methods. Bronte admits that she loves Joe and (at least somewhat) regrets catfishing him. When it’s time for Joe’s turn in the cage, Bronte helps him have an emotional breakthrough: Joe doesn’t kill because he likes to. He kills because his mother groomed him to murder his father when he was a kid, and then abandoned him because of it. So now he believes the only way to prove his love for people is to kill. 

This is a pivotal moment in You’s journey because, up until this point, the show has actively avoided trying to diagnose Joe, a rule executive producer and former showrunner Sera Gamble established when the series began. But this scene is the closest You has come to providing a psychological explanation for why Joe is the way he is. 

“In the first season, if we just called him a sociopath, or a psychopath, or this and that, it sort of lets him off the hook. It means he’s not feeling,” says Foley. “We wanted, though, in having the show come full circle, in telling a complete story, we did want to get close to a diagnosis. We did some research into how Joe’s childhood trauma could yield a killer. That’s how we wound up with this idea that there was a protector he created within himself. He does want to protect his mom; that’s [the version of Joe] who killed his dad. So the protector was born into a killer.” 

The moment Joe reveals this, Bronte can’t help but feel for him. Despite her better judgment, Bronte is, like Joe, a romantic. “She sees him as that broken boy, and it blinds her to the darker things that he might be capable of,” says Lo. “The other thing is that she has fallen in love with him. That can blind us to so many things about the partners that we have, and that’s very much where she is.” 

Badgley adds, “What’s happening there is the whole conceit of the show: She’s falling victim, as we all do, to wanting the kind of love that we see portrayed, but doesn’t really exist. It’s like a pop song. It can only last for three and a half minutes because it’s not real. She’s falling victim to that feeling and wanting it to be real and to always have it.” 

Moreover, Bronte’s feelings for Joe are also tied up in how the experience of losing both her mom and her writing dream has damaged her sense of self. “She latches onto this case as an obsession, and then she meets him and starts to get caught under his spell, and loses herself. Her journey this season is all about her identity, and figuring out who she really is. Joe is giving her an identity that she ultimately has to reject,” says Lo. 

The writers also see Bronte as an embodiment of the way viewers have been reacting to Joe all these years. Like Bronte, the series’ writers and viewers have indulged Joe’s misadventures even though they’re completely cognizant of all the bad things he’s done. 

“It’s a little bit like the viewer being transported into the show, and then the viewer having the experience, which they often do, of becoming transfixed, charmed by this man, kind of against all odds,” says Badgley. 

“We also were waking ourselves up from the fact that we’ve been rooting for a terrible, terrible guy this entire time,” says Foley. “We didn’t want to shame or preach, but we did want to finally splash some cold water on the audience and say, ‘This is what you’ve been rooting for. This is what you’ve been looking past about this character.’ We realized that Bronte was an avatar for all of us. As she explored how she could have fallen for Joe, it was a way for us all to come to terms with how we saw Joe kill Beck and then tuned right back in for Season 2. Bronte was our way of exploring that and ultimately realizing how we root for love to the extent that we will give someone like Joe Goldberg a pass.”

Badgley relates. “I even find myself, season after season, wanting it to work between the person he’s with, because it just feels better,” he says. “It doesn’t feel as good when they’re at odds and he’s trying to kill them.” 

How do Marienne and Nadia return? 

In the wake of everything Joe does to Clayton and identical twins Maddie and Reagan (both played by Anna Camp), Kate finally sees Joe clearly and has decided he needs to die. To that end, she recruits Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), whose name she clears, and Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) to help her lock him in the cage and, hopefully, in the season’s second-to-last episode, elicit a confession.

“There’s real power in the group effort to bring him down, and the fact that they’re all united by this common enemy,” says Ritchie. “Marienne coming back and revealing to Joe that she didn’t die is very powerful, and it’s also just fun to watch him from afar, to see his madness and total delusion. The gap of the cage really gives you that. [All the women] can see how isolated and out of this world he is.” 

This episode specifically marks a turning point for Bronte. While Kate and Nadia argue about whether they should kill Joe, Marienne tries to break the spell Joe has cast on Bronte and opens up about how Joe weaponizes his romanticism. Critically, Marienne also assures Bronte that she shouldn’t feel any shame for falling for an abuser like Joe. 

“Marienne so beautifully and succinctly speaks to Bronte’s deepest fears and feelings about Joe,” says Brewer. “It is a moment of commiseration between two women, and the stakes are life and death. It just shatters Bronte completely. Not only does she have to deconstruct whatever mental gymnastics she’s been doing to be able to stay in love with Joe, but she also has to recognize that her life is in danger.” 

Meanwhile in the basement, Joe breaks out of the cage using a key he’d hidden in his arm and proceeds to shoot Kate. But before he can fully escape, Maddie shows up at Mooney’s, locks Joe in the basement, and sets the whole building on fire — not believing Joe that Kate is down there with him. 

As the room fills with smoke, Joe and Kate have one last heart-to-heart. Assuming they’re going to die, Joe confesses to killing Love and also Kate’s father, Tom. Kate records the entire conversation on her phone and sends it to Nadia. 

Does Joe Goldberg die in the You series finale? 

No, Joe doesn’t die in the series finale — nor does he die in the Mooney’s fire. Bronte saves him — not because she loves him, but because she wants to get justice for Beck. And Bronte isn’t just Joe’s savior, she also becomes the show’s co-narrator. 

“We hear her thoughts, which is different from when we’ve heard thoughts from other characters in past seasons,” says Badgley. “The vantage point is shifting to Bronte and [Joe]’s becoming the object, which I love.” 

Because of his confession to Kate, Joe and Bronte have no choice but to flee New York and head for the border. Ever a romantic, Joe believes it’s them against the world, but Bronte has another plan in mind. While they’re squatting in a vacant lake house, Bronte pulls a gun on Joe and forces him to redact everything he wrote in The Dark Face of Love. “It’s poetic justice,” says Badgley. “Giving the ghost of Guinevere Beck justice seems to be a significant theme this season.” 

Things take a turn when Joe has a phone call with Henry, who rejects him. With nothing left to lose, Joe lashes out at Bronte and tries to kill her in one of the most visceral displays of violence ever seen on the show. Prince Charming is long gone, and we’re left with a monster. “One thing Penn was adamant about, which we were in agreement with him on, was that he wanted Joe to be his most horrific,” says Foley. “The first half of the finale was a road trip/romantic movie. The second half was the horror movie. Penn just wanted to be the monster in that horror film. He really needed it to reach the nadir and shine a light on what we’ve been rooting for all this time. Which is why he ‘beasted out.’ That’s the term [Badgley] kept using. That’s why we’ve gotten rid of his clothing that civilizes him and gives him humanity.” 

The finale climaxes with Bronte cornering Joe in the woods with a gun as rain pours down and the police gradually start arriving on the scene. On set, in between takes, you could hear Brewer singing “They Both Reached for the Gun” from Chicago, or catch Badgley doing push-ups to ensure he was as physically exhausted as Joe would be at that moment. 

As the sirens grow louder, Joe begs Bronte to kill him because he realizes “there’s no plausible scenario where he gets to have the life and love that he’s fantasized about,” says Badgley. The idea of going to jail is worse than death. “What was important for me is that he’s trying to imagine a scenario where he gets to have a romantic ending. What I wanted was for him to be trying to manipulate her to the very end. He’s basically saying, ‘You can be the one. You are worthy of killing me. This is how our story ends.’ ” 

But Bronte doesn’t kill him. Instead, she shoots him in the penis as he makes one last-ditch effort to wrestle the gun away from her, which is why he’ll be known as Joe the Eunuch during his trial. The police move in and — finally — arrest Joe. 

“I think it really dethroned him there and deconstructed him, and that’s what was important to me,” says Badgley. “His currency was being this romantic sexual icon, which is what allowed him to do what he did for so long. So I was very happy with that.”

“We like to put things on their ear and sort of undercut moments of gravity, and that was an opportunity to do so,” Foley adds. “But also if we’ve gone down this road with him as an archetypal romantic hero, why not take away his manhood?” 

Does Joe get punished at the end of You?

Is there really any punishment that fits Joe’s crimes? The series ends with Joe forced to spend the rest of his life in prison, isolated from anyone who could ever be the object of his obsession and unable to feel affection or human connection. Everyone involved felt this fate was worse than simply killing him. “Death would be too easy,” says Foley. 

Badgley concurs. “I always thought somebody killing Joe wouldn’t be justice. It would be vengeance. Anybody who kills him would be brought down to his level, which is not justice for them,” he says. “He’s a quandary in a way. What would justice for him look like? I think we get as close as we can.” 

What do the final words of the series mean? 

In the very last scene of the series, Joe is seen reading a fan letter behind bars, and as his narration makes it clear, he’s still as unrepentant as ever. “It’s unfair putting all of this on me. Aren’t we all just products of our environment? Hurt people hurt people. I never stood a chance,” he muses. “Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all of the depraved things they want me to do to them? Maybe we have a problem as a society? Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us? Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s you.” 

“We knew we wanted to end with Joe having not changed. That was the most important thing,” says Foley. “One final deflection.” 

Goodbyes are never easy, but Badgley believes this one came at the right time, acknowledging that, as far as Joe goes, “we don’t need to see him do what he’s doing any longer.” 

“I can see the whole arc of the series and I’m like, ‘Man, I’m glad I got to do that,’ ” Badgley says. “But there’s no amount of enjoyment or gratitude that can eclipse the brutal reality of what a man like Joe Goldberg is. And so, giving life to him for this long, I’m ready to lay that down … Hopefully, it just feels like a really good way to end it.”