“The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with a man like you.”
If that doesn’t perfectly encapsulate the message behind the hit Netflix series “You,” I don’t know what does.
I’ve been a massive fan of the series from season one, but I noticed an ongoing critique of the show over the years: the fact that millions of fans thirst over Joe Goldberg, the series’’ anti-hero, who ruthlessly kills in the name of love.
Every season, social media is flooded with romanticized edits of Joe. This makes sense since the show is known to blend the sensual with the scary, but critics often worried this distracted from the point that Joe was an unreliable narrator — and a killer.
That being said, season five showed nothing short of the real Joe and perfectly executed a tone shift that constantly keeps the viewer aware of Joe’s lethally abusive nature.
It begins three years after Joe returned to New York from London with his wife Kate Lockwood — a high-powered CEO who inherited her father’s company after Joe killed him in season four.
Using her connections, Kate shoved many skeletons back into Joe’s closet, allowing him to return to where season one started as himself, not one of the several aliases he acquired over the series. She also returned to Joe full custody of his son Henry, whom he had with season two and three’s Love Quinn — I miss you, Victoria Pedretti.
His life was near perfect, but Joe’s urge to kill grew. In season four, he came to the sickening self-reckoning that he enjoyed killing.
Penn Badgley was absolutely terrifying as Joe this season, unlike any season prior. His acting is Oscar worthy — if only Oscars were awarded for television shows — and illuminated what critics of online Joe romantics have reiterated for years.
Badgley masterfully conveyed the nuances of Joe’s deadly self-acceptance and his perpetual victimhood.
While Kate accepted Joe’s dark past, she didn’t plan for a dark present. She discovered Joe writing murder fantasy fiction and frequently argued with him about how to handle her clashing family members at her father’s company during the early half of the season — you can guess how Joe always wanted to deal with them.
Meanwhile, enter Bronte: a new employee at Joe’s bookstore with whom Joe began an affair. However, it was revealed that Bronte lied to Joe about having an abusive ex, Clayton, after Joe followed her out of town and murdered Clayton to protect her.
Bronte’s real name is Louise Flannery, and she’s a friend of Joe’s season one victim, Guinevere Beck, who was shaken by Beck’s death and plotted to expose Joe.
However, even Bronte fell under Joe’s manipulation and fell for the idealistic version of Joe, ignoring his more-than-streak of violence.
After Bronte’s friends live streamed him murdering Clayton, the internet erupted with debate over the man who killed for love. During the social media spiral, the season masterfully sprinkled several returning appearances from Joe’s past exploits.
Joe rose to a whole new level of “sick and twisted” this season. From making Bronte decide how he should kill a man who harassed her — and killing him anyway after she chose to free him — to forcing Kate’s sister Maddie to kill her own twin sister, Reagan, and pretend to be her for weeks, I was astounded by Joe’s unapologetically sinister gambits.
Anna Camp was a standout for her performance as Reagan and Maddie Lockwood. Camp’s distinguished acting made it clear which twin she was embodying in every scene, even in one where Maddie eerily argued with herself, impersonating Reagan, in the mirror.
I also have to make a special dedication to Joe sewing a spare key into his arm and biting himself to get it out after Kate trapped him in his cage at the bookstore. “You missed a key” may go down as the coldest line in television history.
Badgley continued to shine and scare with Joe’s outbursts over the season. Joe was far more vocal about his violence this season — such as one scene in which he aggressively stabs a chair cushion after Maddie and her lover Harrison agree to comply with Joe’s plan, seemingly because he was mad he didn’t get to kill them for refusing.
Marienne Bellamy, Joe’s season three and four victim who managed to escape captivity without his knowledge, made a return as well. She gave Bronte a major wake-up call to Joe’s manipulative tactics, and she managed to break Bronte from Joe’s spell and set her up to take him down.
The final episode truly pushed the show from thriller to horror, stripping Joe into his purest, most evil self. When Bronte pulls a gun on him at a remote house outside the city, demanding to know how he killed Beck, Joe goes full throttle.
Literally — he full-body tackles Bronte three times over the course of the wild final showdown. Joe is genuinely terrifying running through the woods after Bronte in nothing but his underwear.
“You want to know how I killed Beck? I’ll show you,” Joe monstrously sneers at Bronte after pinning her to the ground outside the house.
For the first time in “You,” we got to see the Joe that Beck and many of his other lovers saw right before they died. This was necessary to burst the bubble of fans who idealize Joe.
Encountering a “Joe Goldberg” in real life is wholly possible, even if they’re not all serial killers.
Part of me wishes the final episodes didn’t shift so far over into Bronte’s voiceovers — purely for continuity and my enjoyment of Joe’s classic inner monologue — but it’s such a strong, important choice that reinforces that Joe is a man who hurt dozens of people.
Additionally, some viewers are not happy with Bronte’s larger role in the finale, wishing someone from deeper in Joe’s past was the one to finally defeat him. But in the same way any man could be a “Joe,” any girl could be a “Bronte.”
Beyond Joe’s victims, the show leaves us with the question of whether Henry will grow up and treat women the way his father did.
The finale drives home themes of abusive relationships and domestic violence, but I think the closing scene of Joe in his prison cell is particularly revealing.
As “Creep” by Radiohead begins to play, Joe laments in voiceover that his punishment was “unfair,” ultimately landing on the conclusion, “Maybe, the problem isn’t me. Maybe, it’s you” — which is not correct at all, for the record.
Ultimately, the series finale of “You” proved that you can’t, in fact, fix him.
