The Final Season of 'You' Ends on a Powerful Note
This article will contain major spoilers of You season 5.
I am beyond thrilled with how You ended. People have always been mixed on what they think of this show, but I have always loved the insanity of this crazy serial killer.
Joe Goldberg is such a complex character who thrives on the power of love and is willing to do whatever it takes for the next woman he falls for.
He never hesitates to murder anyone, including his love interest. If she stops loving him, he will not hesitate to murder her. That is the main reason why Joe is freaking scary. He will be your knight in shining armor, but once that image of love is taken from him, he will show his true nature.
I loved how the final season focused on Joe’s evil self. While the first four seasons purposely viewed his character sort of like an antihero, the final season does not hold back on Joe’s evil side. We get a new glimpse into his character this time around, because in the earlier seasons, he refused to accept that he was a monster.
Once Joe embraces his murderous side, he is happy.
And that acceptance is what leads to his downfall.
Joe makes a shitload of mistakes in the final season. He continues to murder, despite knowing that he has a family at stake. He is rich, and has a good life now, but that still isn’t enough for him. He even gives in to another woman named Bronte, cheating on his current wife, Kate Lockwood from season 4.
Like come on, dude. You are a billionaire now, and you got your son Henry back for faking your own death in season 3, yet that still wasn’t enough for his ass.
Once Kate realizes that she was swayed by his ‘love’ to ignore the red flags of the horrible things he has done throughout his entire life, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
She vows to take down Joe Goldberg for good, and is willing to throw herself under the bus to make sure her plan succeeds.
And she does exactly that.
She gets Nadia out of jail, a woman that he had framed for the murder of her own boyfriend back in season 4. She then teams up with another victim of Joe’s, a woman named Marienne who was captured and kept from her daughter for weeks. The women band together to form a plan to kill Joe Goldberg, and they get the idea to capture him and trap the bastard.
They trap Joe in his own cage, the same one that he had trapped all of his previous victims, in the basement of his bookstore.
This plan immediately goes to crap, because Joe is always one step ahead of his enemies, another quality that made this asshole dangerous.
Joe and Kate fight to the death, in probably one of the best scenes in the entire franchise.
And this fight is VICIOUS.
Joe escapes with a secret key that he had stitched into his own arm to leave the cage.
Dude is a freaking menace…he literally chewed his own arm to get to the key, and there was blood all over his mouth when he confronted Kate.
Kate and Joe fight over a gun she brought to end him for good, but Joe gets the upper hand and shoots her. Then Kate is knocked out with a mallet that Joe has used in the past on other victims. Before he can end her, Joe is interrupted by Maddie Lockwood, one of the sisters of Kate.
Maddie had a twin sister named Reagan, and she was forced to murder her to save her own skin, under the control of Joe. She decides to take revenge by setting his bookstore on fire, to burn Joe to death. Joe panics, and runs back to the basement to retrieve Kate’s phone to call 911.
Kate knocks out Joe, and he is also down for the count.
Defeated and exhausted, Joe admits to murdering people she had no clue about, and Kate reveals to Joe she had recorded his confession, sending it to her team.
This part was kind of bittersweet. And I think it would have been an awesome finale if this had been the final episode. Watching Joe and Kate burn together, knowing that they deserved to die for their evil actions in the past, would have been perfect.
Alas, that is not the case for this lucky bastard.
Joe is saved last minute by Bronte, the new woman he had found in his life. However, she had a big secret. While she had fallen under his spell at first to take him down for good, she never forgot the fact that he murdered her old friend, Guinevere Beck from the very first season of You.
She decides to go along with his escape from the authorities, to give justice to all of the victims he has killed or ruined. Bronte tricks Joe and threatens him with a gun to keep him from attacking her. During their confrontation, Joe receives a phone call, directly from his son.
In one of the best acting performances I have seen, Joe loses his mind when Henry rejects him, calling him a monster.
Like seriously, Penn Badgley gives it his all during the entire scene. He was born to play Joe Goldberg, and damn, he was absolutely terrifying.
This is the moment where Joe embraces his monstrous self to the max.
He lost his son.
He lost the life he could have gotten away with.
He is now being hunted by authorities.
He has nothing to lose anymore.
In an act of vengeance, he attacks Bronte. This is another vicious fight that threw me off guard, and wow, none of them held back. Bronte gets shot, but she is still held her own against Joe, due to her determination to survive.
Joe and Bronte then have a standoff, and once Joe realizes the cops are getting closer, he begs Bronte to finish him off. He is terrified of being alone, his worst fear in the world.
I’m so glad the writers had this addressed, because I always wondered if Joe would freak out over being alone. He sounded so damn scared, and man, that was satisfying to watch.
In an act of desperation, Joe lunges at Bronte, and she accidentally shoots him. And I burst out laughing when I realized that Joe…
…got shot in the dick.
No, I’m not playing, that was the perfect karma this dude could have gotten as police dragged him away.
The season ends with a powerful message for the victims of this crazed killer.
Bronte is the one who gives the last narration of how everyone is now beginning to heal from the pain that Joe Goldberg caused for so many victims.
Kate is now happy and thriving with Joe’s son, Henry.
(How she survived the fire is a mystery to me, but that is probably my only criticism of the final season lol. They didn’t even show how she made it out of the fire, but oh well).
Marienne is now living her dream through her art, with Kate’s help in making her famous.
Nadia is now a writer, helping other prisoners get a head start in life.
Bronte will always be haunted by Beck’s death, but now she can start to move on, knowing that she got justice for her.
And then we see how Joe is doing in prison in the final scene of You.
And it is satisfying as hell to watch him behind bars.
This was the best punishment for him. Even though I wanted Joe to die like Love Quinn, (how people defend her character is insane. She was a killer like him too) the thought of him being alone was the best ending for him.
He will no longer be able to trap a woman in his love bombing ways, and end her life in the worst way possible. The final line of his character proved that Joe is truly a monster, when he flat out admits that the problem isn’t him, it’s you.
That last line sealed the deal for me and I found myself clapping with the ending of the show. It was definitely a great ending, and I am kind of sad that this show is now over.
It was one of my favorite television shows of all time, because of how interesting Joe Goldberg’s character was.
Goodbye, you.
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