Penn Badgley, You
Clifton Prescod/Netflix
[Warning: The following contains spoilers for You Season 5. Read at your own risk!]
Oh, it’s You again. The fifth and final season of Netflix’s sinister and somehow also darkly funny serial killer thriller has arrived to give us the final chapter in the charming, hopelessly romantic, and absolutely sociopathic Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) story. As someone who has been a fan of the series, based on Caroline Kepnes‘ novels, since its Season 1 start on Lifetime (remember that?), even I can’t believe they’ve juiced enough out of Joe’s story to give us five seasons that on the whole are quite bingeable romps. This is assuredly a testament to the writers — who over the years have been led by showrunners Sera Gamble (Seasons 1 – 4) and Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo (Season 5) — and to Penn Badgley’s captivating performance at the center of it all. (And, by the way, Badgley is at his best here in Season 5, going about as unhinged as we’ve ever seen Joe.) It especially feels like a feat since every season uses the same basic formula: Joe falls for a woman, believes that she finally sees him and therefore that he can move on from his dark urges, and then deludes himself into believing that he has to give in to his dark urges to keep that woman safe, until inevitably jealousy or perceived betrayal kicks in and he kills her and moves on to another woman, who, you know what, actually understands him this time.
The formula was wearing thin by Season 4, but You kept its momentum going last season thanks to that delightful little reveal that we had been watching Joe have a psychotic break and that he had placed the darkest parts of himself onto an imaginary version of London political star Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), forcing quite the confrontation between who Joe deludes himself into believing he is and who he actually is. What Season 5 seems to reveal is that the team behind You is well aware that its formula has grown tedious and that it is time to wrap this story up, and they use the idea that viewers may have become bored with the show’s routine to their advantage. Once again, the You finale proves that it’s so much nicer when a show gets to go out on its own terms.
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It’s true: You Season 5 tells the familiar story of Joe Goldberg, the serial killer who promises he’s just doing all this murdering out of love. This time around, it’s been three years since Joe went on his “Eat the Rich” disassociated killing spree in London and married billionaire Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) after she admitted to hiding documents for her father, Tom Lockwood (Greg Kinnear), that led to a bunch of kids dying from cancer. Joe confessed to having murdered before, although he rewrote his story with a much shorter kill list and a nice heaping of “I did it to protect the people I love” motive. He left out a lot of details, like, oh I don’t know, how he’d just murdered a bunch of her friends and, hey, also her dad. They framed Joe’s former student, Nadia Farran (Amy-Leigh Hickman), moved to New York, and promised to change the trajectory of their lives; they promised to only do good from now on.
Obviously, Joe cannot keep this promise. Although, to be fair, three years without sticking anyone in his cute li’l murder cage is pretty decent for Joe Goldberg. Still, once family members who disagree with the way Kate is running the Lockwood company start threatening her, Joe wants to handle it in his own special way, which horrifies Kate, at around the exact same time that a well-read pretty little damsel in distress and wannabe playwright named Bronte (Madeline Brewer) breaks into Joe’s old bookstore and steals his heart. We all — and Kate, it turns out — know exactly what this means for Joe’s current wife.
At this point in the season, I often found myself rolling my eyes. Another ingénue for Joe to fall for? To kill for? And she just happens to be Joe Goldberg’s dream girl? She loves literature and wants to be a writer, and her name, for the love of all things holy, is Bronte? This is how we’re sending Joe Goldberg and You out the door — with something so predictable, something that leans so heavily on the tropes the series has used time and time again? Mercifully, there is Anna Camp. Add Anna Camp, like Greg Kinnear before her, to the list of unexpected actors cast in deliciously wild roles and clearly having the time of their lives. Camp plays not one but two roles, as Kate’s twin half-sisters, the vicious Reagan and the flitty Maddie — who, as it turns out, isn’t as vapid as she looks. The first half of this season is saved by both Camp’s performance and You‘s devious, ridiculous (compliment) play on soap opera twin shenanigans. As both Reagan and Maddie, Camp is a formidable scene partner for Badgley, so much so that it’s those scenes that make the first half of the season bearable — you’ll be counting down to them while the snoozefest that is Joe and Bronte plays out. All hail Anna Camp.
Madeline Brewer, You
Netflix
And yet, I have sneaking suspicion that this might be the way the You creative team wanted you to feel about Bronte early in the season: This again, and in the most trite way possible? Because the fifth episode upends all the tropes and turns the show’s usual formula on its head: When Joe kills Bronte’s possessive, domineering boyfriend, Clayton (Tom Francis), right in front of her, two other characters bust through the door, recording everything live on TikTok. Bronte is part of a group looking to finally out Joe as a killer. Clayton — dying was not part of the plan, by the way — is Dr. Nicky’s (John Stamos) son, and he’s been looking to exonerate his father for Guinevere Beck’s (Elizabeth Lail) murder for years. Bronte’s real name is Louise Flannery; she was a student of Beck’s when Beck was a TA, and more than that, she was Beck’s friend. It is a clever, karma-filled way to trick not only the audience by lulling us into this false sense of familiarity, but Joe, too. A serial killer sticks to a pattern, and it’s Joe’s own pattern that does him in.
Well, sort of. When You pulled off that twist, it felt worthy of applause — and yet, it happens only halfway through the season. Yes, Bronte and Clayton’s accomplices, Dominique (Natasha Benham) and Phoenix (b), get traction on incriminating Joe thanks to their live TikTok — Joe can no longer hide under his trademark baseball cap; sorry my man — and yet he remains free. And that is because You takes the story in such a mind boggling turn: It’s at this point that Louise really falls for Joe. She covers for him. She knows more than anyone the kind of monster that he is — she’s been gathering evidence on him for years, not to mention that he just killed her friend in front of her — and she winds up in bed with him. It completely undercuts the well-constructed surprise of having Joe’s downfall come from his own proclivities. It certainly muddles the message.
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It also means the back half of the season is a bit uneven. There are some truly satisfying moments, especially in the penultimate episode, when Kate decides she needs to stop Joe once and for all and gathers assistance from some of the women Joe has hurt in the past — Nadia, whom she helps free, and a very much secretively alive Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) — and they put Joe in his own torture cage to make him face the monster he is. (He remains as deluded to his White Knight complex as ever, even inside the cage.) This plan all goes to hell for many reasons, but I can’t help feel that this — Joe meeting his end (by which I mean being turned over to the authorities to suffer in prison for the rest of his life) at the hands of several women he hurt who have all come together — would have been about as cathartic a finale as you could’ve asked for.
Instead, we get one more episode in which Louise, reminded of the error of her ways and the manipulative monster that Joe is thanks to a heartfelt talk with Marienne, decides she is going to get justice for Beck and take down Joe herself in one of the most insanely stupid plans you could imagine. She gets in a car with him to travel upstate as he absconds from the law, and they stop at an empty vacation rental in the middle of nowhere, when she decides to pull a gun on him and make him redact all the words he added to Beck’s manuscript before he got it published — it’s not a short book either, folks — while she watches. She then wants answers as to how he killed Beck, and then…I guess she is going to shoot him? Or call the police and sit there with him until they arrive? It is wild how terrible this plan is. And we never find out exactly what she has in mind, because Joe, aggravated even further when he discovers that his own son (the only person who can break through his delusions) believes him to be a monster, lunges at Louise, and the two engage in an intense, violent cat-and-mouse chase around the property. It’s genuinely intense and horrifying, and I can never shake the idea that we didn’t really need this — yet another example of Joe being violent toward women. All of this being said, in the end, Louise survives and Joe is surrounded by police, and it is incredibly satisfying to watch this monster, who knows prison will be a worse fate than death, beg, on his hands and knees, for Louise to shoot him before the cops get him. It is also incredibly satisfying to watch Louise shoot Joe in the dick before letting him get arrested. So, so satisfying.
So, yes, Joe ends up in a different sort of cage for the rest of his life — a prison cell — after being put on trial for his crimes, after being forced to reveal the true monster that he is to the world. It really was the only way for Joe’s story to end: Joe in a cage, still clinging to his delusions. There is no redemption for this man. He still blames other people for his actions. He still believes in his righteousness. As he reads fan mail sent to the prison, he even points out that maybe he isn’t the only one with a problem here; maybe we as a society, a society with people who at times put handsome, charming monsters like him up a pedestal, might have some issues, too. While the season as a whole feels stretched thin (to be honest, every season of You would’ve been better off with 8 episodes instead of 10), and there are missteps as to how we reached the conclusion, ending with Joe finally suffering consequences, with justice being served, while we get a close-up on Joe’s face staring straight at us while Radiohead’s “Creep” plays over the credits, is just so exactly right. You gets there in the end.
The final season of You is now streaming on Netflix.
