The series follows Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a hopeless romantic and violent serial killer. It’s been a chaotic, frequently bonkers, and massively entertaining series—and now it’s over. The fifth and final season has dropped on Netflix, and its ending is something of a disaster, and an insult to those who have championed the show. Let’s get into it.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Good has won: Joe has finally been imprisoned. Bronte (Madeline Brewer), Joe’s love interest this season, played an instrumental role in his downfall. With the evidence stacked against him, he’ll be locked away for life.
You ends with Joe in his dark, miserable prison cell, head shaven and desperately lonely. “In the end, my punishment is worse than I imagined,” he narrates. He talks about the system of violence, and how “hurt people hurt people,” reflecting how his trauma influenced his life as a killer.
That would be an appropriate note on which to end You: Joe reflecting on his past and accepting his future would establish growth in his character. But You isn’t done there.
New mail is slid under Joe’s cell door, a naughty letter from a fan. “Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all the depraved things they want me to do to them?” he wonders. “Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me.”
Staring at the camera after a dramatic pause, he says, “Maybe it’s you.” And the credits roll. It’s a gobsmackingly awful ending, not only because it’s stupid—blaming the audience might be the corniest trick in the book—it’s also lazy and reductive. And to make that extra obvious, all of this happens while the outrageously overused “Creep” by Radiohead plays. Because Joe is a creep, but so are we!
Joe has always eschewed any responsibility of his own. Every kill in his eyes has been for the greater good, even though it’s alarmingly apparent to anyone with a moral compass that this is not the case. In this sense, ending things by blaming society—and specifically the audience watching and ogling him—is Joe’s ultimate way of deflecting and wrongdoing of his own.
For a guy who thinks of himself as an intellectual, Joe’s claim is embarrassingly broad. Oh, there’s a problem with society? You don’t say! It’s so broad that it’s about as purposeful a statement as “the sky is blue” and “water is wet.” It doesn’t mean anything, and underlining your point with “Creep” just highlights that you have nothing left to say.
Even worse, You already explored how society is flawed in more interesting and effective ways. When the series started, beneath the schlock was a smart investigation of an elitist class system and what it means to hold power. The show introduced some truly reprehensible characters while highlighting Joe’s lovable qualities, making us question our own ideas of who deserves what.
Joe’s final monologue proves that You is a show out of ideas, shaming the very people that watched the show—specifically fans who turned to social media to talk about how hot Joe is and how they’d like him to do unspeakable things to him. What You fails to understand is that those fan reactions are laced in irony. People can tweet that they want to sleep with a killer without actually wanting to do so!
Sure, I’m sure some of the sentiments on social media about Joe are genuine, and that’s obviously deeply concerning. But instead of continuing You’s legacy of using implausible scenarios to critique serial killers and societal structures, Season 5 strips that all back to raise a middle finger at its audience for worshipping Joe, because irony is dead.
This is especially ridiculous since the show is arguing that we’re every bit as awful as Joe is, yet for all five seasons, and particularly the final episode, Joe is endlessly sexualized. This is especially true in the final chase scene, where Joe hunts Bronte down wearing only boxers.
It’s entirely possible to find someone on screen attractive while also understanding they’re pure evil! Yet You doesn’t get that. It begs its audience to lust after Joe with one hand, and stabs them in the back with the other, delivering an atrocious and deeply unsatisfying finale to what was once a fascinating television show.
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