You Season 5 Review
Goodbye, You.
Slight spoilers ahead. Also, read my review of You season 4.
For five seasons, we’ve seen Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) obsess, stalk, manipulate, and murder… all in the name of love. He’s been searching for his happy ending with an equal partner that would never leave him, creatively rewriting the fates of irrelevant or obstructive forces keeping him from what he believes he deserves. Joe sees himself as this romantic hero, a chaotic good whose means justify his ends.
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Three years after a dissociative episode, murder spree, and suicide attempt in season four, Joe is thriving. Married to Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) and reunited with his son Henry (Frankie DeMaio), Joe is living the privileged and picture-perfect life in New York City as a babygirled trophy husband and doting father. He is want for naught. Joe is now integrated into the larger Lockwood clan and New York society (xoxo), which includes twins Reagan and Maddie (both played by the fantastic Anna Camp) and half-brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews).
Previously agreeing to make each other better, Kate is atoning for her sins through philanthropic corporate initiatives as T.R. Lockwood Corporation’s CEO. For Joe, his end of the agreement is harder to test, that is, until snakes within the company start to look into Kate’s past. Joe, ready to protect his family by any means necessary, learns that Kate doesn’t actually appreciate that murderous part of him and this disdain sends Joe into a spin that begins his inevitable end.
You’s final season has been a long time coming for Joe Goldberg; his treatment of women and, yes, the murdering, are both put on trial in the court of public opinion. It’s kind of amazing how often Joe unknowingly falls in with high-visibility elite circles, kills a few people, and still manages to eke his way out of being caught, or at least caught with little long-term repercussions. Yet no matter where Joe runs off to each season, the show is always pointing out just how closely behind his past, and deserved justice, is to him. Finally, in this final season, we see it catch up to him. But Joe is no simple mark. The systems that kept Joe safe and the tools he used to cause harm are finally turning against him, hanging him out to dry.
Badgley goes for broke in this final season, purging the last bits of Joe Goldberg from his system with a fevered performance that is frustrated, enraged, and desperate. After accepting his darker parts in the prior season, season five Joe is more brazen in expressing himself outside of the realm of his internal monologue. It’s when exposing that side of himself to Bronte (Madeline Brewer) that Joe feels that he has, yet again, found the one who will love him for that. Bronte, after all, is the perfectly constructed damsel in distress, an amalgamation of his past obsessions: bookish like Beck, theatrical like Love, and “fragile” like Marienne. She awoke Joe’s protector side, reminding him of his most powerful and effective self, even after being neutered by Kate.
Bronte meets Joe on a literary level, discussing tropes and D&D alignment charts, exposing and exploring their desires through their writing. While Joe thinks he is living in the pages of his new happy ending, he is unaware that she is writing a totally different ending than he is. You breaks down the dark romance genre in this final season, with our heroine fighting to keep the mental fortitude and physical boundaries to temper the self-realized beast’s impulses. She plays her like the dark romance protagonist Bronte encourages Joe to read. Brewers walks the line between curious and scared when it comes to how Bronte is supposed to feel about Joe. She knows better but is swept up in Joe’s gravity.
The series ends with Joe in the only appropriate place to punish a man starved for understanding, affection, and companionship. Reflecting on the depravity in the world, however, in true Joe fashion, he doesn’t think anything is wrong with him. Maybe it’s us. Joe has never known peace since the day Beck walked through those doors at Mooney’s, and may he never know it.
I will miss You with all my heart, but like many a toxic relationship, it must end for both of our sakes. If you’re thinking of starting the show, check out my other piece literally trying to convince you to watch it here.
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