From the minute I pressed play, I couldn’t stop; at different points, I watched at 1.5x speed because I couldn’t wait for answers. I’ll say it: I loved every minute of You season 5, but I am overwhelmingly in the minority. Season 5 is one of the show’s lowest-rated seasons since it premiered in 2018. Still, I have my reasons for loving it, just as critics like the AV Club’s Saloni Gajjar have their reasons for loathing it. Below, Saloni and I discuss the highs and lows of You’s final season—and of the show as a whole, which has always been equal parts deeply stupid and deeply addictive—as we say our tearful goodbyes to the Netflix hit.
KC: How about all of Joe’s love interests—who were your favorites and least favorites?
SG: That’s such an interesting question because I’ve never really seen the show that way—like, these women as love interests rather than objects of obsession.
KC: I mean, Love is like the fan favorite; she’s definitely my favorite. I love her.
SG: Love is definitely the fan favorite and probably mine just because she’s got way more complexity than anyone else, challenged Joe, and you get to know her so much over two seasons. I think they tried to let you see more complexity in Kate in season 5, with all the storylines about her family, but I just don’t think they did it well; it felt very ham-fisted. I also enjoyed Beck a lot, because you can see in her exactly what Joe needed.
KC: Right, she’s a classic mess, and Joe loves this idea of saving her and being needed by her.
SG: I also liked Marienne Bellamy, the way she survived and overcame so much, and what she says to Brontë is what wakes Brontë up to the truth about Joe.
KC: Me too. So you hated season 5—what are your three reasons?
SG: First reason is the total opposite of why I know you liked it—I didn’t love the whole coming back full-circle situation, or at least coming back to season 1 with Beck and Dr. Nicky’s son. There’s potential there, in terms of storytelling about people from Joe’s past coming back, but it felt like they barely scratched the surface. Dr. Nicky’s son dies on a TikTok livestream and then it impacts nobody. There didn’t seem to be consequences to what the show was building up to, which felt like lazy writing. The other reason I didn’t like the season is the whole twin arc—I thought that was really dragged out. I found it all very distracting.
And then, the third reason is, we have a character like Joe who’s just been so pretentious for all this time, but then the conversations he has with Brontë are just so trope-y, lazy, icky to me, and I know that’s in part by design. But it just felt like the quality of the writing went down.
KC: Yeah, I personally loved that it came full circle. It was satisfying and fun for me. And I weirdly liked the twin thing even though I usually hate twin storylines. Like, the twist of kidnapping the wrong twin—I was seated from there, because that was a damn mess. But I agree with you that it’s interesting they spent so much time on the Lockwood family when we have no real emotional investment in these characters. Finally, I really like how this season almost feels like it’s breaking the fourth wall, where it uses social media to fold in our real world and imagine how our real world would respond to someone like Joe going viral. That was so interesting to me.
SG: Yeah, the way this show uses social media has always been fascinating.
KC: Particularly with the twists with Brontë this season—god, it just feels so dumb to even call her that. The fact that Joe eventually learns it’s not her real name and he keeps calling her that, he is so dumb, I hate him. Anyway, when they bring in that twist, having these manosphere influencers talk about what a bitch Brontë is and everything—obviously, it felt a little too on the nose, but I was also like, this is really realistic. What did you think?
SG: I think it elevated the rest of the season, because it speaks so much to the times we’re in. When they’re showing us the comments Joe’s getting on Twitter, it was so realistic. I wish there was more of it. I wish we saw more of Brontë and her circle of friends and their history on the internet. Something I thought was so funny was that voiceover from Joe where Bronte’s friends do the TikTok live and solicit information about him, and he says, “Did my death sentence really just begin with the phrase ‘pop off’?” I was laughing so hard because that is exactly how people would talk on TikTok right now.
KC: I think there’s a 50-50 chance that if the writers waded deeper with incorporating social media, they would have done it really well or really terribly, so it felt like they were careful and just scratched the surface. Maybe they didn’t want to date the show too much, where if it revolved so heavily around social media in 2025, 10 years from now, it’d feel too dated.
It’s just interesting to imagine the real-life public’s perception of Joe. That perception is how he always gets away with it, how he’s handsome and can come off sympathetic. The Instagram Live he does with the influencer-journalist—I thought that bit was really interesting, because there are so many content creators like that now. We especially saw that with the Amber Heard trial or the saga between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, where you have influencers posing as journalists to push whatever narrative—and accuracy really goes to the wayside.
SG: That’s why I wanted more of it.
KC: OK, so, the twist with Brontë, when you learn she was friends with Beck and was catfishing Joe for revenge—did that surprise you? What were you expecting from her initially? Because I know I initially found her so annoying, she just felt like someone who was addicted to TikTok, and TikTok just vomited her into existence. Obviously some of that was intentional, like satirizing social media trends, BookTok, and online-speak…
SG: I definitely think she was designed to annoy the audience. I had a friend text me, she was joking: “I almost want Joe to kill Bronte.” She’s annoying because she’s perfectly curated for Joe, who’s annoying. I at first thought she’d be some FBI agent. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I wasn’t that surprised. I almost wish instead of her being the one to take him down, it was someone we were more invested in, like if Jenna Ortega’s character from season 2 came back or something.
KC: I agree. I mean, the whole ending, the choice to circle back so heavily to season 1, and the final note it all ends on where Joe gets the fan letter in prison, and he thinks, “Society is the problem, you are the problem, not me”—what did you think of all that?
SG: I love how that last voiceover is so fitting with who he is. He will never blame himself, he’ll think it’s our fault he is the way he is. When they show us that glimpse of him walking into court—I wanted to see his trial. Why couldn’t all of the ending stuff happen in episode nine, so we could see his trial? I want to hear him get sentenced instead of this final shot of him, with his shaved prison head, in the dark, reading that letter.
But speaking of that, of course Joe is getting fan letters in prison. That always happens with popular serial killers, so I found it a very fitting end. It satisfied me. The show has never exonerated Joe, and I love how Penn Badgley is always talking about how much he hates Joe.
KC: The funny thing to me is how awful Brontë’s plan was. I don’t have a problem with her being the one to take him down, but why not just leave him to die in the fire in his bookshop? Her plan of just going alone with him to a remote cabin with nothing but a gun—it was just so dumb.
SG: I know she was like, death alone would be too easy for him. And in the cabin, she was like, I have to kill him tonight because otherwise I’ll have to have sex with him. Then the fight in the woods, her drowning, but not really being dead—nothing made sense, but whatever.
KC: The parts of the season that really delved into online misogyny and how so much of social media embraced Joe—all of that was so interesting to me. So, an episode dedicated to his trial would have been really cool; seeing him try to work the jury, the online reactions to him, and the fans he’d have. And Penn Badgley just looked so hot in his suit in the courtroom.
The other part of the ending—that last phone call with his son—it was just so funny to me. Like, this very young kid saying this deeply profound thing. I laughed. I’m curious what happened off-screen that made Henry turn on Joe like that or realize his dad is a monster.
SG: We see Henry is an iPad kid, so I imagine at a certain point, he was doing his own research.
KC: OK, finally: What do you think Joe deserved? Do you agree with the ending? I loved him getting his dick blown off.
SG: Definitely. I don’t love how they got there, but I love the ending. I’m glad he didn’t just get an easy death. And his dick getting shot off was very cathartic. A little too silly and on-the-nose, but it serves him right. When that happened, I immediately thought of season 1, when he jerks off outside Beck’s window, and right then, when I was watching, I thought, “Oh, you deserve to die.”
KC: It’s perfect because it really is over for him, the show is over, he can’t seduce a woman again. If he’d just gone to prison, dick intact, I’m so sure he would’ve been able to seduce one of his fans and the cycle would’ve continued. I also think watching all five seasons of this show, you get the sense that he has a lot of self-awareness, that’s why he works so hard to justify all his killing to himself, because he knows on some level it’s wrong. And instead of being able to escape that by just dying, he’s really trapped and forced to sit with himself.
SG: I feel like the show could’ve ended in season 3 or 4, in the fire with Love, or when he jumps off the bridge. But it kind of just dragged on, then gave us this very silly ending. Wait, let’s go back—the part where he’s in the cage and then he unstitches his arm and takes a key out—that was way too convenient.
KC: That was so gross. And I was like, when did he put that in his arm? So, so stupid. Look, I’m going to miss this show, but there was nothing else left for it to do.
SG: I agree. I think it overstayed its welcome a little. But almost no one is more glad it’s over than Penn Badgley, I think. Imagine embodying this character you hate for so long, especially a character where so much of it is living in that character’s head, it’s so psychological.
KC: He’s an amazing actor, truly. What he does with his eyes. Terrifying.
SG: He deserves awards. He won’t win, though. This is just not the kind of show that’s going to get an award, I’m sorry. But he deserves one.
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