Over the past seven years, many of us have crawled out of the woodwork for the absurdist guilty pleasure that is You. The monologue is cheesy, the plot can somehow be both predictable and extremely convoluted, and the concept itself, the seduction of a viewer into the dimpled smile of a serial killer, has always toed a problematic line. Nonetheless, You’s charming lean into its own ridiculousness and its standout acting performances have baited viewers into the same deluded rhythm of Joe Goldberg’s psyche time and time again. But, this season is different. After seasons of switching between anti-hero and villain and pumping out disguised versions of the same story, much like Doctor Frankenstein, the creators have to face what they made.
Trigger Warning: The mention of murder, violence against women, and misogyny may be triggering for some viewers. Please exercise personal care while reading.
The Shattering of the Fairy Tale
The final season of You reveals itself quickly as a reckoning; arguably too quickly. Back in New York, Joe Goldberg has become an internationally adored husband. Idolized for his commitment to Kate and his happy acceptance of being the Earth to her Sun, Joe has gotten the legacy he always envisioned for himself as a real-life Prince Charming. With Kate’s influence, they successfully strip Joe’s son Henry from the parents who had been raising him in Joe’s murderous absence and are carrying out their lives as a happy family in an impenetrable fortress forged from Kate’s obscene wealth and status. But, as we all know, Joe has urges that money can’t buy.
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When a threat to Kate’s status as CEO and their family’s livelihood arises in the form of Kate’s Uncle, Joe feels his true self flare up again. Though Kate ultimately did permit Joe to neutralize the threat, she wasn’t prepared to face his insatiable need and love of murder. As soon as she attempts to put out Joe’s lust for violence, he miraculously falls out of love with her and soon sets his sights on Bronte, a woman who broke into Mooney’s for a book. From here, the season takes off at an extraordinary pace and mimics the same tired plots from the seasons prior. It makes Joe’s self-righteous monologue even more nauseating than in the past, as the viewers are plunged into the infuriating delusion that Joe has architected his life around rather than gently wading into it. This created a plot that never felt fully developed; it just kept you distracted long enough not to really notice or care.
Joe’s infatuation with Bronte is fast, and his descent into untethered violence, gaslighting, and deceit is faster. Joe murders Kate’s relative and has set his eyes on a new victim to romanticize by the end of the first episode, mistakenly attacks and imprisons Kate’s sister Maddie who he had taken for her twin sister Raegan by the second episode, has attacked and imprisoned Reagan with Maddie and coerces Maddie into killing her to save herself by the fourth episode, and killed Dr Nicki’s, the man falsely imprisoned for Beck’s murder, son on livestream by the end of the fifth episode where it is revealed that Bronte has been plotting to expose him since before she ever entered Mooney’s store.
Brontë’s Are Always Drawn To Damaged Men
Initially, I loved this turn. Though it had a whiff of predictability, it was the fulfilling kind. The type that makes you lean back, relax, and enjoy a plot as it gives you exactly what you want. Not another love interest going mooney-eyed at the charms of a practiced manipulator (not to blame any of our tragic heroines of the past ー we know its the writing, not you), but a woman who came to turn the tables on this stalker and parasite by giving him a taste of his own medicine: manipulating him into falling in love with a fantasy and revealing herself as his worst nightmare. Another corny, but still exciting, turn came in the shape of a familiar face: Beck.
Beck was Bronte’s, or Louise Flannery’s, TA at NYU, where she had made a deep impact on her self-conception before she retreated to Ohio to care for her sick mother. When Louise saw the news of Beck’s death, she joined a group investigating Joe’s murderous past and seeking to exonerate Dr Nicki. She is so committed that she moves to New York, breaks into Joe’s store, and has him fall in love with her. It’s almost perfect, but of course, Joe’s charms make her see him in a whole new light and convince her that a man as perfect and fairy-tale-esque as this could never have committed these atrocities. Her refusal to condemn Joe’s murder of Clayton as anything but self-defense allows Joe to slip out of custody.
After Joe’s murder goes viral and the team fighting for his capture pleads for more information, we get a slew of familiar faces taking to social media to share their experiences with Joe. Some are damning like Dottie Quinn who comes forward claiming Joe murdered her two twins Love and Forty (absolutely correct) and Anika who identifies Joe as Peach’s murderer (right again) and some are supportive like Sherry and Cary who put all the blame on Love, and Paco, Joe’s young neighbor from season one, who claimed Joe was a good guy who protected them from his mother’s abusive boyfriend. The internet quickly turns on him, but Joe is gifted a redemption arc when he does an interview at Mooney’s. First despised in the comments of the live interview then loved for his spin of Clayton’s murder as a passionate defense of a woman he loved who deceived him, the misogyny of the internet wins out by pardoning Joe and villainizing Bronte.
However, Joe drifts into a fairy tale again when he finds out that Bronte stood by him when questioned by the police; surprise, surprise, he loves her again! They rekindle after Joe stops a man, part of a toxic manosphere-esque online group seeking to teach women who “trap men” a lesson, from attacking Bronte on the street. When she wakes up the next day, to prove her love to Joe, she is tasked with deciding the fate of her attacker. Despite this man’s vicious hatred of women and plans to carry out future attacks, Bronte lets him go but decides to protect Joe instead of running to the police despite her knowledge of his affinity for murder because he says he’s never killed anyone innocent (spit up my drink hearing that one). How incredibly insane and disappointing. Bronte falls into a cliche group of deluded “I can fix him women”; characterized by her passion for romance tropes, she becomes one herself.
Trial of the Furies
As we watch another woman delude herself that this monster before her is nothing more than a wounded and avenging angel, others fall out of complicity. Kate finally puts her fears that she’ll be ruined alongside Joe if she comes forward to bed and sets a plan in motion. Sneaking custody papers into the paperwork for Joe’s release, Kate has gotten Henry out of his father’s clutches. Sensing that this will trigger Joe’s descent into completely unhinged violence, Kate flees to London to start rectifying her egregious culpability in the wrongful imprisonment of Joe’s former student Nadia. There, she gets Nadia released from prison and convinces her to help her take down Joe for good (another glimpse at the capabilities of obscene wealth, but again, only interacted with superficially). After a disheartening conversation with a lawyer who told them the fight for justice will take years, Kate and Nadia decide it’s time to take out Joe themselves.
After starting over with Bronte and falling fast into another “soulmate”, Joe seeks to exterminate his former soulmate, Kate, who is now the bane of his existence. Joe follows what he believes to be Kate into a parking garage, and just when he’s about to pounce, we discover she’s a decoy baiting Joe into Kate and Nadia’s clutches. When Joe awakens, he finds himself in his own cage in Mooney’s basement with the two women on the outside seeking his confession. Another familiar vengeful face appears when Marianne joins them to confront Joe and shatter his insane mirage of self-justification.
Half of the excitement of this season comes from the wronged faces of the past coming together to take down this pathetic man. Marianne getting to reveal that she survived as Joe sits in an identical cage to the one he thought he murdered her in is an easy, but effective way to get to the heart of the viewer. The torture of Joe’s delusion ails Nadia and Marianne to the point of accidentally revealing their true intentions to murder him. Marianne goes upstairs to cool off when Bronte spots her through the window from the street. Shocked to see the face of a woman she believed to be dead, Bronte finally starts to see that the truth she had deemed a lie was her reality all along. Marianne confronts her honestly:
“Men like Joe, they really catch you off guard, don’t they? Even when you think you have all the facts, even when you think your hard-fought instincts are so good, even though a voice in the back of your head is whispering… ‘Don’t be fooled by his smile. It’s all too good to be true’ […] And when the bad things happen, you have to believe they’re not actually that bad right. Because if you got fooled by this guy, you are not as smart as you thought you were. You’re one of those women […] You’re not stupid. And as long as you’re alive, its not too late.”
Bronte rushes out but is awoken by Marianne’s words. Meanwhile, as all three of Joe’s captors convene upstairs, we see what could be one of Joe’s most deranged moves yet: he inserted a key into his arm, sewed it inside, and now bites open his stitches and retrieves it with his mouth. As Kate goes down to murder Joe and sends Nadia and Marianne away, she returns downstairs to find the cage empty. Joe sneaks up from behind, and they begin a grim battle, which ends with Kate unconscious with a bullet wound to her abdomen. Just when it seems Joe is about to escape, Maddie arrives to burn Joe alive in Mooney’s (God, what a savior of a character this season). Trapping Joe in the basement, Maddie sets the fire as Joe frantically runs back downstairs to find an escape. Kate knocks Joe out upon his return, and as the fire rages on, they’re both too immobilized to fight. Kate sends a recording of Joe confessing to Love’s murder before what we thought was her death. Bronte rushes back into Mooney’s when she sees the fire to save Kate, but upon finding her dead, hatches a new plan.
In a definite nod to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Joe’s wife burns in his cage as his new love interest drags him to safety. Overcome with gratitude, Joe proposes to Bronte on the street as Mooney’s burns. Bronte’s internal monologue comes before her “yes” and reveals her return to her former plan:
“I should run away, leave you, and never look back. But there would be no justice, no answers. I’m the only one in the world who can stop you.”
This may seem to be falling into a Jane Eyre-esque feminist letdown, but the story isn’t over yet.
“Dear reader, I shot him!”
The finale picks up with Joe and Bronte fleeing for Canada as Bronte painstakingly keeps up her facade as a dedicated fiance while she waits for her opening. After Joe breaks them into a mansion in the woods and Bronte plays into the romance long enough to land him into a vulnerable position in bed, she reaches for a gun hidden under the pillow and aims it at Joe’s head demanding he tells her about Beck’s murder. Better, she forces him to black out all his contributions to Beck’s book he published after he killed her (all book lovers and writers collectively saltute her). When she’s satisfied and ready to call the police, Henry calls and shatters any hope Joe has of believing he is loved. Which, as we all know, is when he becomes his most ferral and dangerous self. Henry knows what Joe did to Kate and asks his father:
“Do you remember when you used to tell me there were no monsters in my room? […] You lied. It was you. You’re the monster.”
After a self-indulgent meltdown about how Joe became this person, blaming circumstance rather than himself, Bronte quiets him by telling him he’s not the victim. Joe lunges at her, they wrestle for the gun, and a shot goes off. Bronte runs from the house clutching at her bleeding stomach and Joe, in only his boxers, follows shortly after her. She calls the police and the operator’s voice can be heard as Joe wrestles Bronte to the ground and recounts his murderous past. He screams in her face “You want to know how I killed Beck? I’ll show you” before viciously choking her.
She breaks free by stabbing Joe in the side, but it only slows him. Quickly, he gains on her, tackles her into the lake, and drowns her. He doesn’t have long to bask in his success as he hears police sirens in the distance. Running through the woods, completely primal, Joe avoids the flashlights zeroing in on him until he finds himself in the direct line of a cop. He sneaks around a tree and swiftly murders him. He’s about to start fleeing when, seemingly from the dead, Bronte returns with a gun aimed at him. Knowing the fight is lost as the perimeter is closed in on, Joe pathetically begs Bronte to murder him, but she refuses. In a rare moment of good writing this season, Bronte tells Joe:
“The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you.”
A poignant observation dropped into a ridiculous plot that didn’t have the tools or the care to properly dig deep into what that sentiment means. Joe squabbles on the ground like a wounded animal begging her to kill him so he doesn’t have to face the reality of what he’s done. She smiles as she tells him he’ll spend the rest of his life alone, and at that, he lunges at her, resulting in my favorite part of the show, no matter how cliche it might be: she shoots Joe in his groin. The police drag him off as he wails in agony, and his manhood is left behind on the forest floor. Joe doesn’t die, and thank god for that, because I think we all would have been livid if he got that mercy. He goes through a trial that exposes all the horrific corners of his past, and we see a montage of some justice. Kate is alive and has returned to the art world where she champions Marianne, Nadia is a published writer and teaches literature at her old prison, Beck’s book is republished with all of Joe’s writing removed, and Joe sits alone in a small, grey cell.
His last monologue, and the concluding lines of the show, are ones that I and a lot of viewers have taken issue with. Joe deflects accountability:
“It’s unfair. Putting all of this on me. Aren’t we all just products of our environment? Hurt people hurt people. I never stood a chance. [opening fan mail] Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all the depraved things they want me to do to them? Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe… [looking into the camera] it’s you.”
There may be a point somewhere in all this, but a show that has only ever interacted with Joe as a societal product on a surface-level basis has no business now lecturing the audience about their intrigue in the plot. The fourth wall break indicates a finger at the viewer; our interest fuels the creation of men like Joe. What a load of crap. There has been plenty of opportunity to dissect the ails of society, on nature versus nurture, but You consistently phones it in in exchange for shock value and satire that hardly ever scratches the surface, and, honestly, that’s fine with me. Just don’t try to change the tone of the show in the last thirty seconds if you don’t have the writing to back it up.
Your enjoyment of the final season of You depends on how much you expected in the first place. With You, I tend to keep my expectations low, and it usually pays off. Though parts of this season were sloppy and arguably problematic, it gave me what I wanted in the end, and sometimes that’s all you need a show like this to do. Give me absurdity, give me revenge, give me the ultimate punishment for the manwhomo I’ve been patiently waiting to be destroyed. Saved by standout performances from Penn Badgley and Anna Camp as Maddie/Raegan and the draw of a juicy and insane plot, You wasn’t a homerun, but when has it ever been? In a few weeks, the disappointment of some of the story will fade, but I’ll always be left with this: Joe Goldberg had his penis shot off and is rotting away in prison far away from womankind. Maybe that can be enough for us all.
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