Lonely Boy Makes Good (?)
Does Joe Goldberg finally get his comeuppance as You concludes?
The following contains spoilers for the final season of You.
“How do I give you the ending you deserve?” ponders Brontë in the finale of You, which concluded its five-season run on Netflix this week. It’s an apt thesis statement for the series based on the novels by Caroline Kepnes (who I interviewed here), which originally premiered on Lifetime in 2018 before really taking off when it moved to Netflix and a legion of fans romanticised Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) murderous ways.
The show began in New York, with Joe falling for the helpless and hapless Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). She not only started the trend of Joe’s objects of obsession having outlandish names, but she became one in a long line of people who didn’t behave according to Joe’s rigid and idealised fantasy of them.
In season two, Joe relocated to Los Angeles, where he encountered Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), a cook who turned out to be just as deranged as him. It would appear that Joe had met his match (literally, as Love’s twin was—past tense because Joe killed him, of course—named Forty), but he couldn’t handle it and after a third season that saw Joe and Love attempt to play happy families in an idyllic Northern California suburb with their baby, Henry, Joe did what he is wont to do and killed Love, framing it as a murder-suicide.
It would seem You wasn’t ready to really delve into Joe’s fatherhood, and Henry was left on a neighbour’s doorstep while Joe started a new life as Professor Jonathan Moore in London, where his reign of terror continued until he fell in love with Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), an heiress and philanthropist trying to escape her old ways as well.
We find them in season five having returned to New York, with Kate’s money enabling Joe to return to his true identity and get his son back, raising him on the Upper East Side—a locale that Badgley is none too familiar with as his first big role was as “Lonely Boy”/Gossip Girl Dan Humphrey in the peak 2000s series of the same name *insert 13-year-old spoiler alert here*.
The perspective shift from season four is immediate: whereas Joe was at breaking point in London, his Dissociative Identity Disorder causing him to think his reprehensible acts were committed by local politician Rhys Montrose (Ed Speelers), this time around Joe seems mentally well, the trademark second-person voiceover from object to subject. “You” is now Joe. But of course that doesn’t last long, and that true identity means killing, which Joe can’t help but return to. It also means swaying his interest from Kate, when she deigns to act like a human being with unpredictable emotions, to waifish, houseless Brontë (Madeline Brewer), pretentious literary name to boot, who breaks into the old Mooney’s bookshop (the reopening of which Kate is bankrolling) and immediately captures Joe’s attention. And, thus, the voiceover goes back to object from subject.
This being the final season of You, Joe would have to receive his comeuppance, lest the show succumb to the aforementioned allegations that it is indeed glorifying Joe’s actions as those of a brooding, overly-sensitive knight in shining armour.
Badgley has said as much, telling IndieWire, “It feels to me like Joe needs to get what’s coming to him.”
“Redemption or change… I don’t really know that that’s what the show’s about or what he’s capable of,” he continued on the Kyle Meredith podcast.
You does so by having Brontë, or Louise, catfish Joe which viewers can likely see coming several episodes before Joe. Louise and her friends met online in true crime forums position that all was not what it seemed when it came to Beck’s death, so they decide to expose Joe for her murder, using Louise as bait.
It makes sense: Joe, like many men who have come before him and, unfortunately, we are continuing to be influxed with, put on a persona to entrap women into relationships and, when they don’t conform to their ideas of what a woman should be, abuse and/or kill them. Louise turned the mask around to show Joe just how flimsy his preconceptions and preconditions are.
“I’m not your trope… Whatever ingénue you’re projecting onto me,” she says.
But Joe does his darndest, and although I think the show should have gone in a different direction in the back-half of the season which I’ll elaborate on momentarily, Louise going back to Joe illustrates how hard it is to leave an abusive relationship.
“It’s scary for you, isn’t it? The trial and the jury and the crime scene photos and the faces of the sons and daughters that you murdered,” Louise says when she finally leaves and attempts to end his life the way he has done so many others.
I wish we had’ve actually seen that trial, with the final season morphing into a courtroom drama like each season has changed locations. I think that would have helped integrate some of the returning characters into the plot more seamlessly, like Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle) and Nadia Farran (Amy-Leigh Hickman). Though this season touches on the manosphere supporting and uplifting abusive men, that could have been further developed by mirroring the vitriol on social media during the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial and clearly illustrated the throughline between fangirls tweeting that they want Joe to kill for them (which make a meta appearance in the season) and the TikToks vilifying Heard (and more recently Blake Lively).
Instead we get a throwaway line from Joe’s prison cell that belatedly posits, “Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe the problem isn’t me. It’s You.”