It seems, at first, like Joe Goldberg might actually get away with it. At the beginning of You’s series finale, the suave serial killer Penn Badgley
It seems, at first, like Joe Goldberg might actually get away with it. At the beginning of You’s series finale, the suave serial killer Penn Badgley has played for five seasons is on the lam with Madeline Brewer’s Bronte. As far as he knows, it’s the two of them against the world. Joe is hoping to secure a few phony passports courtesy of Will Bettelheim, a hacker played by Robin Lord Taylor we haven’t seen since season two, then abscond to Canada—after first sending one last message to his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio).
What Joe doesn’t know is that Bronte has ulterior motives—and, as of this episode, an inner monologue of her own. She saved him from the fire that consumed Mooney’s bookstore and accompanied him on this cursed road trip solely so that she can force him to confess that he murdered her mentor, Elizabeth Lail’s Guinevere Beck.
Bronte’s methods are slightly suspect—does she really need to put herself in such a precarious position just to extract the answers she seeks? But even so, she gets results.
The series ends with Bronte and Joe locked in a deadly pas de deux that begins when she finally pulls a gun on him (in the midst of cunnilingus!), demanding to know what really happened to Beck—and if Joe altered his dead girlfriend’s manuscript before it was posthumously published. She has Joe just where she wants him—using a Sharpie to blacken out the portions of Beck’s book that he added without her consent—when Will interrupts them with a phone call, saying he’s managed to get a hold of Henry.
Joe wants to comfort his son, to reassure him that his father will always love him. But Henry, at last, has also tired of Joe’s deceit. He knows that Joe killed (or at least tried to kill) his adoptive mother, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie)—and maybe he’s come to understand that Joe killed his birth mother, Love (Victoria Pedretti), as well. “Do you remember when you used to tell me there were no monsters in my room?” Henry says. “You lied. It was you. You’re the monster.” With that, he hangs up.
The conversation sends Joe into a self-pitying tailspin that pushes Bronte to have a breakthrough of her own. “This is deluded,” she tells him. “You’re not the fucking victim! I’m calling the cops now. This is over. This has to be over.”
Of course, nothing on You is that uncomplicated. Before long, Joe is chasing Bronte through the secluded lake house where they’re squatting and into the water itself, like a literary Jason Vorhees. (He’s doing all this, by the way, while wearing just a pair of black boxer briefs—because, while You knows that Joe is a monster, it can’t facilitate emphasizing Badgley’s washboard abs.) Joe manages to drown Bronte, but not before her last-ditch 911 call summons the police. Joe kills one cop, but he can’t murder them all.
At last—at last!—he’s surrounded. Then Bronte resurfaces, not Virginia Woolf’d after all. She’s holding a gun again… and she’s ready to shed the skin of the character she’s been playing all this time. Her name, she tells Joe, is Louise. And though Joe begs her to kill him before he can be apprehended, she refuses. “I’m done. I am done, Joe. And I have been asking myself over and over, why? And finally, I see it clearly now. The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you.”
Louise tells him he’ll live the rest of his life alone, having to face the families of the people he’s murdered. “They are all going to see you, Joe. And you’re going to have to see yourself.”
Then she shoots his penis off.
You concludes to the strains of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” as Louise explains how Joe is tried and convicted for his many, many killings. He’ll never be free again, she tells us, and the women he tried but failed to destroy—Amy-Leigh Hickman’s Nadia, Anna Camp’s Maddie, Tati Gabrielle’s Marienne, even Kate, who somehow didn’t die in that bookstore fire after all—are blossoming. (The New York Post apparently called the conflagration “Bronte’s Inferno.”) Even Beck is living on, in a way, with a newly redacted version of her posthumous collection earning rave reviews. Eventually, says Louise, Joe will just be “some asshole I dated.”
Madeline Brewer knows that this ending might rankle You’s fans. “I know people of the internet will be like, ‘Why didn’t you just fucking kill him?’” she recently told VF’s Savannah Walsh. “Because it’s not her. It’s not her place. It’s not what she was after. She wanted an answer to her question, and she got it. And the rest, they were seeking justice. And I think she realizes, ‘I don’t think that this justice is necessarily up to me, because I’m not the only person who was hurt by you. Everybody now gets a piece of you, and you have to be alone forever.’ And that is a fate worse than death for Joe.”
Penn Badgley, for his part, agrees. If Joe had died at the hands of a woman—someone “he’d been trying to seduce, manipulate, or kill,” the actor recently told VF—that would have “saddled her with trauma that feels unjust. So I think we found the one just ending.”
But just as this ending might be, Louise doesn’t quite get the last word. You’s final scene brings us to Joe in prison, where he’s reading The Executioner’s Song (a bit on the nose, Goldberg!), and musing about his epic loneliness. Yet Joe isn’t entirely alone. Every day, it seems, he gets fan letters from women who believe in his innocence, who love him, who want him to dominate them. “Maybe we have a problem as a society,” he says in his final voiceover. “Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe… it’s you.” And we cut to the credits—underscored, fittingly, by a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.”
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