SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the series finale of “You,” now streaming on Netflix.
Joe Goldberg is finally in a cage for good, and not the one of his own making. In the series finale of Netflix’s stalker-rom-com-thriller “You,” Joe, Penn Badgley‘s charismatic serial killer, gets his long-overdue comeuppance at the hands of his former victims, who join forces to put him behind bars once and for all.
When we pick up with Joe at the beginning of Season 5, he’s happily married to the uber-rich Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), who’s used her family’s sizable resources to snatch Joe’s son Henry (Frankie DeMaio) from the adopted fathers he was dumped with at the end of Season 3 after Joe flees Northern California, having murdered Henry’s (also murderous) mother, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). Now that Joe has returned to New York City a free man, he wants to play house with Kate and Henry.
Joe putters along trying (yet again) to enjoy married life, using a new vampire novel he’s writing as an outlet to excise his violent impulses. But just as it seems like he’s put his old ways in the rearview mirror, Joe’s world is upended as he meets Bronte (Madeline Brewer) a beautiful young woman attempting to break into his bookstore. Though something about her seems too good to be true, Joe begins an affair with Bronte, only to find out that his instincts were right — she’s a catfish named Louise, who created the “Bronte” identity to attempt to find out what really happened to her friend and mentor, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail).
Though Louise/Bronte and her friends successfully catch Joe on camera killing Clayton Angevine (Tom Francis) — the son of Dr. Nicky (John Stamos) from Season 1 — Bronte has fallen, unfortunately, in love with Joe, and ends up testifying in his defense, getting him freed. With Bronte seemingly unable to take Joe down herself, Kate then takes matters into her own hands, freeing Joe’s brilliant former student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) from prison and recruiting his ex-girlfriend-turned-victim Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) to help her kill Joe.
Together, Nadia, Kate and Marienne successfully trap Joe in his own cage under the bookstore, and are able to record confessions exonerating Nadia and implicating him in Love’s murder. Joe escapes the cage and plans to run away with Bronte and Henry (if he can pry him out of Kate’s custody), but unbeknownst to Joe, Nadia, Kate and Marienne were able to get through to Louise and convince her to turn on him.
As Louise and Joe drive off to begin their new life together, they stop to stay the night at a secluded cabin. Just before they have sex, Louise comes clean to Joe, explaining how much Beck meant to her as a friend and mentor, and forcing him (at gunpoint) to redact his writing from Beck’s book, “The Dark Face of Love.” Joe redacts himself from the book, but lunges for the gun and the encounter turns violent.
Joe, naked and bloody, chases a terrified Louise into the woods, where the two face off one last time. Louise manages to call the cops in the scuffle, and as Joe hears sirens blaring, he begs Louise to shoot him. She refuses and he rushes her, so she fires — shooting his genitals off just as the police arrive. Dick-less and in handcuffs, Joe is arrested and charged with life in prison.
The “You” series finale ends with Joe alone in his cell reading fan letters, and reading Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.” “Why am I in a cage when these crazies write all these depraved things they want me to do to them?” Joe wonders, having already reached his response. “Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s You.”
And so ends the Netflix hit, which was created by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti, and first premiered on Lifetime in 2018 — only to be rescued post-cancellation by the streamer. Over the course of five seasons, “You” was a satire of romantic fiction, an indictment of toxic masculinity and, above all a character study of the character of Badgley’s Joe Goldberg, whose charms could never hide his psychosis. Viewers who fell for Joe along the way found that impulse questioned, if not spoofed, many times throughout the show’s run, but definitively so in Joe’s final voiceover.
Ahead of the “You” series finale, Variety spoke with co-showrunners Justin Lo and Michael Foley about why Beck is so important to Season 5, the inspiration behind Joe’s literary tastes and how the writers’ room found the right ending for a killer we love to hate.
Was prison the plan for Joe all along?
Michael Foley: We had the general plan in terms of the fact that Joe wasn’t going to get away with things, and that he’d have his comeuppance. The actual capture versus death and whatnot, that was a decision that went down to the wire. The question we asked for the final season was: “What does Joe deserve?” He deserves to not get away with what he’s done. We don’t want to redeem him. We want him to face those whose lives he’s ruined. But most of all, we wanted to have him face himself.
Sera, Greg and all of us writers, our plan was to have Joe so horrific that we wake everyone up to what we’ve been co-signing and rooting for all this time. There was no way he was going to get away with it. He was not going to ride off into the sunset, ever.
Louise asks Joe what ending he deserves. What conversations did the writers have about the ending Joe deserves?
Justin Lo: Neil Reynolds, one of our writers, proposed that we set aside two days, take the weekend, and each person think about what they thought Joe deserved. When we came in on Monday morning, we all would sit and listen to each person, and no one was allowed to interrupt each other or comment on what we had just heard, we all just said our piece.
That night, we formulated our opinions, and the next day, we came in and were able to talk about everything. It was very emotional. There were tears. People have such strong feelings about it. People were talking about their personal experiences, and it did go down to the wire, but from that day, we had this rich stew of ideas we could take from. That was the most important part of our process.
Courtesy of Netflix
Given that he’s previously manipulated the system — he even boasts about it to Louise in the finale — how is prison a satisfying ending for Joe?
Foley: In those conversations we had, we decided that death was too easy, that we needed Joe in a cage. Not just for the image of it, the strong visual, but also we wanted him to not know the feeling of a lover’s touch. Beyond not having his freedom, it would be more punishing for him to end the series alone.
In prison, we see Joe reading letters from fans and turning his nose up at them. Can you talk about the fan letters and why he was so dismissive of them?
Foley: That’s part of Joe’s self-delusion, that people would root for him. He’s been exposed for what he is, but there are still people out there writing them letters. He has contempt for them because he thinks he’s above that. It’s a critique of the viewer, to some degree, but it’s more to point to the fact that in the end, Joe can’t be held accountable. The problem is always somebody else and not him.
There was a pitch early on that he would become obsessed with one of those people who’d written him a letter, but we wanted to broaden the ending and have him speaking to us the audience, instead of one person who wrote him.
What did you want to explore by putting Joe in a position of wealth and power in Season 5?
Lo: Joe has always had a bit of hypocrisy in him. Since the beginning of the series, he’s railed against wealth and privilege, but he himself is a white man and he enjoys that privilege. In the fifth season, one of the things we wanted to do was give him money and see how that would impact him. And he uses his privilege in a really destructive way.
A number of Joe’s previous victims, including Nadia and Marienne, return for Season 5. Why did you want to revisit their stories?
Lo: We really wanted to let these women, these victims of Joe, have a chance to have their voices heard. For them to be able to stand outside a cage with Joe in it, and tell him what he did to them and to see if he would take any accountability for it. We also just love these characters. Nadia and Marienne, we wanted to give them the opportunity to close their stories in a satisfying way.
We also revisit Beck in the finale. Why was it important to center her in Season 5?
Foley: Because we asked the most of the audience when Joe kills Beck, and we asked everybody to return for Season 2. Nothing against Peach or Benji, but ultimately, that was the original sin that we, the audience, became complicit in by sticking with the show and rooting for Joe.
It felt right to us that if he’s back in New York, we would come full circle, going back to that original sin of not just killing Beck, but stealing her voice. Then we got into the idea of using “The Dark Face of Love,” of having Louise bring her voice back by having him redact what he had done to the book.
Louise has another great moment in the finale, with Joe at gunpoint in the yard. What went into writing her monologue?
Foley: Louise was reading Joe for exactly what he is. He considers himself a feminist when he’s the opposite, because he takes power away from women. He tries to tell them what they can be. He tries to be the architect of their identity, and that’s disgusting.
How much of “The Dark Face of Love,” Beck’s book, is actually written?
Foley: It’s one of those things that you never want to show the audience, so there was just enough for the camera. In the series finale, as Joe is redacting, if you got your hands on the book, you may see some Latin in there, gibberish that the props people start with, repeated pages and whatnot. We worked very closely with our on-set props person when Joe was redacting to make sure that as he turns pages, he was going to land on ones he could redact if the camera was over his shoulder.
Throughout Season 5, we see Joe working on a vampire novel. When did he get into fantasy?
Lo: Joe’s turn into genre writing, he’s doing it at the beginning of the when he’s having these fantasies about murder — writing about murder instead of doing it. He focuses on genre because that’s the most surface-y way to do it. We wanted to say at the beginning of the season that Joe is not a profound writer by any means. So that’s where he begins.
Then he meets Bronte, and Bronte is interested in dark, romantic literature and genre fiction. The genre fiction, the allusions to “Dracula,” we were able to lean into it and to fit the theme of Joe being a monster. In Episode 9, when he bites into his own arm, that image, it all just fit for us.
What went into creating the sequence where Joe is naked, bloody, and chasing Louise through the pouring rain?
Foley: There was nothing Penn was hitting harder than the fact that he wanted Joe to be at his most horrific in the series finale. He was like, “I need people to see what they’ve been rooting for. Let’s make him as horrific and monstrous as possible.” Hence the lack of clothes that suggest civilization, hence the blood.
We’ve historically shied away from directly showing his violence towards women, but in the bedroom and on the lawn, we have him very violent with Louise. It was him at his most horrific, pulling no punches, to splash cold water on all of us and say “He’s a fucking monster.”
“You” has a long-running relationship with pop music, and we hear “Guilty as Sin?” in Episode 10. Why was that the right Taylor Swift song for the finale?
Foley: It was less about the message and more about matching the moment. In the past, at the top of the Season 4 finale, we had “Anti-Hero,” which is a big cheeky wink at the audience. In terms of hitting the message of the series on the nose, it was more “Creep.” Even the cover we used, which was slightly atonal in the music and lyrics, matched the tone we wanted to leave the audience with.
Cardi B pops up a few times during Season 5 via social media. How did her part in the series come together?
Foley: It really came about because on social media, they had recognized each other and that they were fans of one another’s work. When it came time to do Episode 7, and we thought the world would be “popping off” about Joe Goldberg, we thought “Oh, of course, Cardi B, we could have her pop off!” There was no friction at all, I’ll put it that way.
What will you miss most about working on “You?”
Foley: This is my 10th show, and I’ve never been with a show where the writers stay the same over the course the entire show. We’re a close group. Beyond the writers, who genuinely care for each other, Penn’s just brilliant. There’s no better No. 1 on the call sheet than Penn Badgley.
Lo: It was such a wonderful group of writers. It’s a very touchy-feely writers’ room. As dark as the show was, it was a room filled with love and kindness and really thoughtful writers, extending to the producers and actors and crew. Mike’s right, Penn is the best No. 1 you could ask for. So conscientious, socially responsible. This show also blends all of the things I love most about television: it’s smart, sexy, funny, scary and it’s rare that you work on a show that hits all those things in such a successful way.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
