2 weeks Ago By VOGUE India
Warning: Major spoilers for You season 5 on Netflix, including Joe Goldberg’s fate. Read on at your own risk. Content warning for discussions of violence.
The final season of You begins with the idea of resurrection. The old Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) has died and been reborn, this time with Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) and her vast resources by his side. But the new Joe acts a lot like the old one, only he’s doubled down further in his misguided idea that killing for the people he loves gives him a purpose, and he needs a purpose to earn the love he so desperately wants.
That combination of things makes him particularly lethal and arrogant in You season 5, where we finally learn what happens to serial killer Joe Goldberg after five seasons of manipulation and murder. Below, find (extremely spoilery) answers to all your burning questions about You season 5, now streaming on Netflix. We’re back in New York City, baby, where the story of Joe Goldberg began.
Three years have passed since the end of season 4’s timeline. This season starts with Joe and Kate’s fantasy romance—at least in the eyes of the public—as they attend various glamorous events around town and enjoy power couple status. But nothing in Joe’s life stays good for long.
.. he soon finds himself back to his old patterns in attempts to “defend” Kate, and he meets a new “you” altogether who forever alters the trajectory of his life.
A new-old city, a new cast of characters. Meet the Lockwood family, a band of Kate’s half-siblings and their partners. There’s twins Reagan and Maddie (played by Anna Camp), Reagan’s husband Harrison (Pete Ploszek) and their daughter Gretchen (Lillian Tardie) and Teddy (Griffin Matthews), the ostracised product of an affair Tom Lockwood had with his housekeeper.
Also in the mix is seemingly genial Uncle Bob (Michael Dempsey), a detective you might recognise from Baby Reindeer (Nava Mau), and SNL ’s Heidi Gardner as an influencer-journalist. Frankie DeMaio plays Henry Goldberg, now an elementary schooler who lives with Joe and Kate after he was taken from his childhood with season 3’s Dante and his husband. And finally, Joe’s future love interest: Bronté—formerly Louise—Flannery (Madeline Brewer of The Handmaid’s Tale ), who catfishes Joe after bonding with internet sleuths Clayton (Dr.
Nicky’s son, played by Tom Francis), Dominique (Natasha Behnam) and Phoenix (played by b). Ah yes, Guinevere Beck, the anchor of season 1 and one of the first women Joe “loved” and then murdered. She’s a key player in the final season of the show, even after death; we find out about halfway through the season that she was a TA for Louise’s college writing course, and an instrumental mentor who encouraged her writing.
It’s Beck’s murder that catalyses Louise into the plot that eventually takes Joe Goldberg down. “Giving the ghost of Guinevere Beck, justice seems to be a significant theme this season,” Penn Badgley told Netflix in an interview. Coincidentally, Madeline Brewer has high praise for the show’s first season—season 5 does feel parallel to that one.
“I’m a huge fan of the show. I think the first season is one of the best standalone seasons of television,” she told Vanity Fair . She also talked to Interview about Beck as a character, her messiness and how the audience sometimes finds themselves rooting for Joe in various situations—and how that justification obviously isn’t great.
“For all of Beck’s faults, she’s not a very good girlfriend. She’s complicated. She’s messy.
She has really strange boundaries with her relationships with her friends and her parents,” Brewer said. “In a lot of ways, she’s a little bit f*cked up. She’s simultaneously brilliant and very loving and really just smart and cool.
And neither of those two things, the good and the bad, justifies what he does to her. Sometimes, I feel like we get on his side, we root for him. So I hope that in this final season, we get more people on the side of the lives that he’s trying to take.
” Unfortunately no, Jenna Ortega does not reprise her season 2 character Ellie this season. Alas! But we do see some cameos from past characters in episode 7, when the internet reacts to the viral video of Joe killing Clayton. Cameos include: Dottie Quinn, Sherry and Cary, Annika, Paco, Ethan, and even Beck’s brother Clyde.
Noted You fan Cardi B also makes an appearance in the from of some viral tweets. Twins Reagan and Maddie are Kate’s half-sisters, and so part of the Lockwood dynasty—prior to Kate’s ascent as CEO of Lockwood Corp, strong-willed Reagan is running the show, while socialite and publicist Maddie is mainly around for vibes (she’s also extremely jealous of her sister’s life and feels inadequate after years of mistreatment at Reagan’s hands). After Reagan threatens to expose Joe and Kate’s sordid past to the Lockwood board, Joe kidnaps her.
Of course, he gets the wrong twin, imprisoning Maddie until he can manipulate her into killing her sister in the cage (which she does) and impersonating her. So, technically, no, he didn't kill Reagan, but also he basically did. The triumphant return of Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle) is one of the best moments in the season.
If you remember, Marienne survived the cage last season by faking her own death with the help of Nadia. She then comes to New York to aid in Kate and Nadia’s plot to kill Joe, and she gives the best monologue of the season when talking to Brontë, who has fallen in “love” with Joe after he manipulated her into believing he didn’t kill Beck. Marienne clearly sees her younger self in Brontë, and she talks to her openly about what it feels like to be with men like Joe.
(It’s also a nice parallel to Love and Marienne’s conversation in season 2, when Love tells her to run and Marienne says Love deserves better.) “Men like Joe, they really catch you off guard don’t they?” Marienne says. “Even when you think they have all the facts.
Even when you think your hard-fought instincts are so good. Even though a voice in the back of your mind is whispering, telling you ‘Don’t be fooled by his smile. It’s all too good to be true, the way he sees you.
The way he loves you. Even when you don’t love yourself. Don’t believe it when he tells you he’ll take care of you.
Definitely don’t assume the best when he says he’ll keep you safe.’” “You ignore that voice because it feels so good to love him and be loved by him,” she continues. “Like it’s you and him against the world.
You know what bad looks like. You know better. And when the bad things happen, you have to believe they’re not actually bad, right? Because if you got fooled by this guy, you’re not as smart as you thought you were.
You’re one of those women. You know the ones that deep down you think you’re smarter than. It can’t be you.
But he’s convinced you that you need him. And he’s wormed himself so, so deep that you don’t know whether you’re Brontë or Louise or Marienne or Beck or none of those. Or nothing.
” Gabrielle was excited to return to the show one last time, telling LRM Online that once she learned about the “satisfying” ending, she was in. Well, almost! Kate pledges to Marienne and Nadia that she’ll be the one to kill Joe at long last, so that they can both be safe and move on with their lives if it goes awry. (If both die, she’s arranged for Henry to return to season 3’s Dante and Lansing, the world’s most unlucky couple).
After Joe is captured by Nadia and Kate and put in the cage, it seems like the women have taken back the power—but Joe has one last trick up his sleeve, er, arm. A secret key he’s buried in his literal skin that he rips out in an excruciating scene and uses to let himself out. He and Kate fight, and he shoots her with the gun Nadia has picked up quite easily in America.
But he can’t fully escape the basement before Maddie walks into Mooney’s and sets the whole place on fire. He tries to tell her that Kate’s down there too, bleeding out, but she doesn’t believe him; he walks back downstairs and Kate surges to give him a good whack. Both lie together as flames consume the bookstore, and it seems like they might come to the same end: “Til death do us part,” Kate cracks.
Joe uses this opportunity to deliver some last information to Kate: He killed her dad (she knows), and he poisoned Love and started the fire in their home to get rid of the evidence. Someone is finally recording this man—Kate has captured this confession and sends it to Nadia who will take it to the police. Joe isn’t too concerned about this because he’s seemingly dying: “You got me.
You can die happy.” She replies, “I can. I got you.
” Joe can’t resist another monologue about missing Bronté, though he does ponder, “What if this is what I deserve?” Enter: Brontë, our conflicted heroine, in the basement. She sees Kate’s body, and Joe croaks out his usual excuse: “She tried to kill me. I was defending myself.
” We know now that Bronte/Louise realises Joe’s true nature, but she rescues him from the flames all the same as Olivia Rodrigo’s “vampire” plays in a fitting needle drop. When Joe and Brontë/Louise are safe outside the bookstore, Joe thinks this is a great time to propose marriage. He offers an echo of what Marienne warned her about, telling her, “Whatever gets thrown at us, the thing that keeps me going is that it’s you and me against the world.
That’s all I ever need.” Then we finally hear Brontë’s inner monologue: “I should leave you, run away, and never look back. But then there’d be no justice, no answers.
I’m the only person in the world that can stop you.” She agrees to the marriage and hints at subterfuge. “Turns out you’re not the hero of our story, I am.
And you’ll never see me coming.” In the final episode, she ponders shooting Joe quickly when he doesn’t expect it, “but then the world will never know the truth about you. And I wouldn’t get the answers I need.
How could I love you, knowing what I knew? What did you do to Beck? And the biggest question of all: How do I give you the ending you deserve?” It all feels like something of a response to the fan speculation about whether Joe will die at the end or go to prison or ever acknowledge the irreparable damage he’s done: Brontë seems to think that true justice needs to be more than just burning to death. Can she pull it off? Funny, you should ask—yes. You has a history of well-placed Taylor Swift syncs, from ‘exile’ soundtracking Love’s death in season 3 to ‘Anti-Hero’ ringing in Joe’s return to New York in season 4.
You season 5, meanwhile, chooses a Tortured Poets Department track. ‘Guilty as Sin’ plays as Brontë/Louise and Joe make a break for Canada, since Joe knows police will be coming for him after the recording gets to them. (He, of course, lies about what he said on the tape to Brontë.
) It’s a pretty perfect song for the moment. Joe and Brontë find temporary safety at an Airbnb upstate/near the Canada border at a “cloistered, off the grid” mansion with no security cameras. It’s there that Brontë enacts her rough plan, and it’s.
.. .
..justice via writing assignment! Love to see it.
Brontë holds Joe at gunpoint and orders him to redact the parts of Beck’s book that he wrote. We don’t see all of what Joe crosses out, but there is one phrase that apparently he added in the Bluebeard essay Beck wrote in the cage. The words are: “Now I am a remnant.
The detritus left in his wake.” Throughout season 5, we see that Henry and Joe have a close relationship; Henry clearly loves his doting father, who reads him books and takes his interests seriously and is always in his corner—even when he breaks a girl’s nose in his class at school. Henry is obviously dealing with a lot, so his outbursts of violence (and the way he blames Kate at first for Joe’s disappearance from his life) are understandable, if not condonable.
But it was unclear if we were going to get to see Henry realise the extent of his dad’s bad behaviour, and how he would reconcile that with the dad he loves. During a tense Joe vs. Brontë confrontation scene, Joe gets a call from Will, who is helping him talk to Henry through his online game (technology is wild).
On the phone, Henry delivers the ultimate blow to his dad, an injury to the deepest foundation of who Joe thinks he is. After Joe tells him he loves him, Henry is quiet. “What did you do to mommy?” he asks.
Teddy has told Henry what Joe did to Kate. “Do you remember when you used to tell me there were no monsters in my room? You lied. It was you.
You’re the monster.” Henry, crying, hangs up. Joe crumbles, and he remembers Love’s dying words: “He’ll know what you are.
” Then he explodes, questioning his whole life—“I try to love, every time it falls apart!”—and sobbing on the floor. He ultimately comes to the same conclusion that allowed him to skirt any responsibility for his actions: that he is fundamentally unlovable, regardless of anything he does. And then he attacks.
At first, it really seems like he does. Joe attacks Brontë in the house, shoots her and she runs. She manages to call 911 despite her broken phone, throws herself out the window, and he chases her into the yard—revealing that it was him who broke her ankle just so she would stay and talk with him, an injury that is currently helping him kill her.
“It was always gonna end this way, wasn’t it?” she asks. She then calls him a “pathetic misogynist” and he tackles her to the ground. He says he’ll show her how he killed Beck, and he begins to strangle her.
She pulls out the cat ear self-defence device she grabbed from the gas station, stabs him, and runs into the lake, where he strangles her some more, until she’s seeming very much dead. “Goodbye, Brontë,” he says. Except.
.. she’s alive! “It’s over Joe,” she says in the woods, gun pointed at his head.
He begs her to kill him, she refuses, and she finally reclaims her name, Louise. He lunges for the gun, she shoots him on instinct with a bullet straight to his d*ck, and everyone lives to see another day. “If I can wake up, so can the world,” Louise manifests in the final episode about Joe’s toxicity, and society’s implicit approval of men like him.
She somewhat gets her wish: Joe is made to see all of himself in a trial and viral social media meme mocking his “blown off d*ck.” He is convicted for the murders of Love Quinn and Guinevere Beck, as well as Benji and Peach, among others, and given life without parole. Dr.
Nicky has his conviction overturned. But as the band of internet sleuths warn on a podcast about Joe’s demise, “There are other Joes out there.” Meanwhile, the show ends with Joe’s perspective, as he sits in a cell reading The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.
(A relevant quote from the novel: "Maybe it’s not what we learn that’s crucial, but the questions we’re left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?”) His final monologue: “So in the end, my punishment is even worse than I imagined. The loneliness, oh my god.
The loneliness. No hope of being held. Knowing this is forever.
It’s unfair, putting all this on me. Aren’t we all just products of our environment? Hurt people hurt people? I never stood a chance ..
. Why am in a cage when these crazies write me all 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.” Badgley told Netflix he feels satisfied with how Joe’s story ends.
“I’ve always thought somebody killing him wouldn’t quite be justice, it would be vengeance,” he said. “Anybody killing him would be brought down to his level, which is not justice for them ..
. I think we get as close as we can. It’s not perfect, but put him in jail and take away his genitalia.
It’s really important that we dethrone him as a romantic or sexual icon, and they did that.” Nadia writes a book called Salvage the Bones , seemingly about her life and experiences, helping other people cope with trauma. Harrison is freed from prison after he’d been wrongfully arrested for Reagan’s murder, while Maddie is tried for murder and arson but doesn’t go to jail.
They’re seen in the park with their daughter Gretchen, a happy family. They give Reagan a viking funeral in the Long Island Sound, and Maddie is now pregnant and expecting twins. Louise is seemingly able to move on with her life at some point, after she finishes redacting Beck’s book and gets it republished as a new edition.
“[Beck] still won’t get the chance to make what she wanted of her life,” Brontë ends her monologue. “Joe stole that from them. In their honour, we make the most of ours.
Joe was wrong about me. My life doesn’t boil down to before and after him. Every day that passes, he shrinks.
Eventually, he’ll just be some asshole I dated.” “Kate Lockwood was reborn,” Brontë reveals. A somehow completely alive Kate reunites with Henry (“He’ll just have to decide what kind of man he wants to be,” Brontë notes) and repairs her relationship with Teddy, who has turned Lockwood Corp into a nonprofit.
She returns to her love for art, acquiring pieces and supporting artists, including...
...
Marienne Bellamy, whose art is in Kate’s home. She’s now a successful artist, the world loves her, and hopefully she can finally have some peace with her daughter, Juliette. Before season 5, he sits at 18 total murders: his mom’s boyfriend (his dad?), Beck’s ex Benji, the record executive Elijah who flirted with Candace, Beck’s best friend Peach, his neighbor Paco’s mom’s boyfriend Ron, Beck, Will’s debt collector Jasper, the pedophilic comedian Henderson, Marienne’s abusive ex Ryan, Love, Kate’s boyfriend Malcolm, Kate’s friends (Simon, Gemma, Rhys Montrose), Lady Phoebe’s bodyguard Vic, Kate’s dad Tom Lockwood, Tom’s bodyguard Hugo, and Nadia’s boyfriend Eddie.
Season 5 continues the bloodbath: Joe kills Kate’s “Uncle” Bob for threatening sabotage, Brontë’s friend and Dr. Nicky’s son Clayton (alleging self-defence), and Dane, the guy who attacked Brontë after she was doxxed. (Reagan could also be theoretically attributed to Joe, even though Maddie committed the act, because he deeply manipulated her into it.
We won’t count it here, though.) And finally, one of the cops in the woods. Grand total: 22 kills Years ago, Tati Gabrielle told Teen Vogue she wanted “justice” for her character Marienne: “Whether that means taking part in a piece of Joe’s end, or if it’s just being able to live happily and peacefully with her daughter—to live the life that she has worked so hard to have, whichever way that swings.
I think she’s been through enough.” Which, so true. And basically is how Marienne's plot line ends up.
Charlotte Ritchie, who plays Kate, told Netflix, “There’s real power in the group effort that begins to bring him down, and the fact that they’re all united by this common enemy. 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. It was fun to play that, to see his madness and total delusion.
The gap of the cage really gives you that. They can all see how isolated and out of this world he is.” Ritchie also talked to Netflix about how she felt about Kate’s pretend ending—and her real one.
“So in the final scene where she is dying and he also seems to be, because the fire is about to burn them both to a crisp, there’s an openness and a feeling of detachment when they’re talking. Then her capture and recording of his confession is the cherry on top. She feels she did the final thing she needed to do and can now let go.
” The twist, however, was a happy one for her: “I was pleased because the world is often so bleak and it felt really nice to have some kind of survival where some people get to progress beyond the end of the story,” she said. “Poetically, it would’ve been okay if Kate had gone with Joe, but I was happy. It’s nice also to not have to go home so early, and it’s nice for Henry to have some consistency in his life, although I feel for his past dads.
So hopefully there’s a connection there that gets made.” Penn Badgley told Deadline that the ending felt “rewarding” and explained why it’s important Joe doesn’t die in the cage, and that a woman doesn’t kill him. “That’s actually where he does his worst work, is his manipulation and seduction,” he told Deadline .
“The box is kind of obvious, the box is actually where he’ll put anybody, but he only puts women in the bedroom, so that’s where his most dangerous work is. And it was important for him to be seen, finally, as a sexual predator.” He added, “If somebody was to kill him—and it would be a woman, right—well then, actually, now what you’ve burdened her with is having committed murder, like that’s not just, I don’t think.
Torture? Uh OK, same thing. Prison? Eh, feels a bit not enough. So what do you do? Take.
His. Balls.” At the You season 5 premiere red carpet, Elizabeth Lail, who plays Beck, reflected on the ultimate point of the show.
“He’s so beloved, which speaks to our collective psyche and how interested we are in a man saving a woman,” Lail told LRM Online . “It’s about time we put that to rest.” She added to The Hollywood Reporter , “I do think Joe gets an appropriate ending.
It was such a joy to read the final episode, it’s like reading a good book.” And finally, Madeline Brewer had thoughts on where Louise’s story goes from here. “Brontë is one of the very few women who gets a future after falling in love with Joe, and she is embracing that future,” Brewer told Netflix.
“I love that she recognises that he’s just a bad guy that she dated and he doesn’t get to be her whole identity, her whole story. Her life doesn’t revolve around what was before Joe and now what is after Joe. He’s some shitty dude and he neither gives nothing nor takes anything from her anymore.
That’s her story. It’s hers.” This article first appeared on teenvogue.
com Also read: You season 5: Everything we know about the final season, including the release date On Netflix’s You, Charlotte Ritchie is more than just Joe Goldberg’s latest obsession Why is Adolescence the most viral drama on Netflix right now?.
