“I see it now,” a character tells You’s homicidal protagonist Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) late in Season 5. “The fantasy of a man like you is how [women] cope with the reality of a man like you.”
It’s a fitting, if on-the-nose summation of what has made Joe and his bloody romantic escapades appealing to viewers for so long. Like the booming true crime genre, the show taps into the modern dating anxieties of what horrors might lurk beneath a date’s self-proclaimed “nice guy” exterior. Joe might fancy himself a modern Byronic hero, but he’s really a Bluebeard for the era of “Am I The Asshole” threads and weaponized therapy speak.
It’s a clever set-up, but it’s been clear for seasons now that he has zero capacity for self-awareness or redemption. In You’s fifth and final season, premiering April 24, no amount of pulpy twists and cutting social satire can make up for the fact that, as bingeable as the series once was, Joe’s tactics have grown tired.
Season 5 brings things back to where they began: Joe, lurking behind the dusty shelves of a Manhattan bookstore, concocting romantic fantasies about a woman—fantasies that will soon have a body count.
No, that woman isn’t Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), the posh gallerist-turned-billionaire CEO who Joe married at the end of Season 4. In the three years since then, Kate’s financial power has enabled Joe to regain custody of his young son Henry (Frankie DeMaio) and come home as himself, having previously faked his death to dodge murder charges.
He should be happy to live out his days smiling at fancy galas as one half of the power couple that the media present him and Kate as. But this is Joe we’re talking about—he might drone on about happily ever afters, but bloodless mundanity was never going to satiate him for long.
Joe finally lands on a new fixation when he meets Brontë (Madeline Brewer), an aspiring writer who’s been squatting in his old workplace Mooney’s Bookstore (of course he used Kate’s money to claim it for himself). In case Brontë reminds you of Joe’s Season 1 love interest, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), don’t worry! The show won’t let you forget, because she’s one of Brontë’s biggest inspirations.
But, whereas Beck was often a fairly bland canvas for Joe to project his fantasies onto, Brewer imbues Brontë with the same jagged, off-kilter charisma that made her so watchable in Orange Is the New Black and The Handmaid’s Tale. Her character manages to further complicate her manic pixie dream girl energy by challenging literary snob Joe about his judgment of her beloved “dark romance” genre.
“How have you read so many books, and you’re still so vanilla?” she scoffs when Joe, who has a laundry list of dead victims, is affronted that a modern woman has a dom/sub kink and an affinity for “fairy porn.” Even before her penchant for true crime and social media detective work come into play, Brontë often feels more like a vehicle for tying disparate plot threads together than a fully formed character. Still, her scenes are a breath of fresh air compared with the dull soap opera antics of Kate’s wealthy relatives.
If You Season 5 has a fatal flaw, it’s how muddled the show has allowed its satire to become. Joe’s kills have grown increasingly sloppy, but across the first three seasons, its sharp social satire never wavered.
Each installment set its sights on a specific, instantly recognizable culture: Manhattan literary intellectuals, Los Angeles wellness circles, and Northern California parenting influencers, to be precise. Joe managing to pinpoint these communities’ hypocrisies while refusing to accept his own was hilarious, while tying into the show’s existential underbelly. Are we all caught in little microcosms of society, trying to optimize ourselves out of the fucked up world around us? And what does it say about us that these communities enable a creature like Joe to not only survive, but thrive?
Season 4 muddied the waters of this structure, slotting Joe into an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery within a British university and topping it off with a Jekyll and Hyde twist. Season 5 has almost jumped the shark entirely. Yes, there are scenes of him bristling against the succession antics of the Lockwood family, but their petty feuds aren’t an indictment of the one percent so much as a chance for new cast member Anna Camp to have a ball embodying Kate’s twin half-sisters Reagan and Maddie.
Brontë’s love of dark romance and her attraction to Joe raise interesting questions of power dynamics and why women are often eager to explore these taboo relationships, but these questions are too often swept aside for the next big twist. Even the social media true-crime component, which comes up over and over again as real-life critics wonder why Joe remains attractive to so many viewers, remains woefully underbaked.
As wobbly as You Season 5 is, there’s a comforting finality in knowing that, at last, Joe won’t be able to slither away from consequences this time. But just as he refuses to stop extending his torturous love life long after it should’ve concluded, Netflix and the series’ creators have become too tempted by the IP potential of You to recognize that it should’ve wrapped up several chapters ago.
