You Season 5 Ending Explained

Contains spoilers for "You" Season 5

Penn Badgley's Joe Goldberg has said his last "Hello, you" to an attractive young woman, as "You" came to an end with Season 5. The show, which was initially broadcast on Lifetime but moved to Netflix for Season 2 onward, followed an obsessive man who loved to be in love. In fact, he loved it so much that he repeatedly found himself falling head over heels. Of course, if that came with a side of stalking and murder, what could Joe do to stop it? After all, he just wanted to protect the woman he loved at that moment, even if that meant doing some questionable things.

The fact that Joe quickly fell out of love with these women when the glow wore off, well, that was just a product of the fact that he had moved on to greener pastures. It wasn't his fault — or so he would have both himself and the audience believe. "You" was a five-season sensation that took us into the mindset of a very bad man. While Joe, and perhaps even some members of the audience, thought his actions were defendable, in the end, he simply had to go down. Here's what happened at the end of "You" Season 5.

After a lot of murder — including that of Beck (Elizabeth Lail), her best friend, Peach (Shay Mitchell), and her lover, Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci), as well as Joe's wife, Love (Victoria Pedretti) — Joe finally seems happy in Season 5. It's been three years since Season 4, and he's now married to his lover, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie). They are living in New York with his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio). He's also famous. He and Kate have donned magazine covers and filled gossip columns because Kate's suddenly a well-known CEO and people enjoy her love story with Joe. The fact that he had to kill her father and boyfriend in Season 4 to make all of this happen takes the shine off, but what people don't know won't hurt them.

Things get complicated when Kate — who knows about Joe's past — dispatches him to kill her "uncle," Bob (Michael Dempsey), because he's leading a hostile takeover of the board against her. Suddenly, Joe is reminded of how much he loves killing (or, as he sees it, "protecting his family"). He wants to do more of it: Specifically, he wants to put an end to Kate's tough-as-nails sister, Reagan (Anna Camp). But Kate is ashamed of herself for sanctioning Bob's murder and won't entertain the idea. 

At the same time, Joe meets Bronte (Madeline Brewer) at his bookstore, Mooney's, which Kate bought for him. It turns out that Bronte is actually a girl named Louise Flannery who is catfishing Joe because she wants to bring him down. But after Joe kills her friend, Clayton (Tom Francis), because Joe believed she was genuinely in danger, she changes her tune. This leads to Joe proposing to Bronte right outside Mooney's.

Louise, or Bronte, as Joe prefers to call her, falls hard for Joe after he "saves" her. But then, while passing by Mooney's, she sees Marienne (who is played by Tati Gabrielle, in case you were wondering why she looks so familiar), the woman who Joe tortured for weeks in a cage when he lived in London and goes to talk to her. After Kate, Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), and Marienne fail to kill Joe at Mooney's and Maddie (Anna Camp, again) burns the bookstore down with Joe and Kate in it, Bronte saves Joe and goes on a road trip with him. But she's no longer in love with him. It turns out Marienne talked some sense into her. When Joe and Bronte start to have relations in the house they're staying in, Bronte reaches under the sheets and pulls a gun on Joe.

Joe does a great job of trying to make Bronte doubt herself, but then his son calls and gets mad at him for what he did to Kate, calling him a monster. Joe is heartbroken, and starts to play the victim. But things take a turn. Joe tackles Bronte and pursues her through the woods. Bronte eventually calls the cops and as they arrive and the rain pours down, she confronts Joe. Joe asks Bronte, who reclaims Louise as her name, to kill him, but she shoots him in his manhood instead. Joe goes to jail with no hope of parole. His last thought at the end of the series, after getting a letter from a woman — one of many — who wants him is: "Maybe the problem isn't me, maybe it's you."

The end of "You" Season 5, which is also the series finale, very clearly means that you can't get away with murder forever. Eventually, one has to have their comeuppance, especially if you're a serial killer like Joe, who shows no signs of stopping. That said, it's clear that despite his sadness over his incarceration, Joe doesn't blame himself. He continues to blame everyone else instead. He still sees himself as a hopeless romantic who does the wrong things for the right reasons. And as he states in Joe's iconic voice (here's how Penn Badgley created it), "Hurt people hurt people. I never stood a chance." He doesn't see how he lies and manipulates people to get his own way and he doesn't really understand why protecting his family through murder is wrong.

This season, the show comes the closest it ever has to providing a reason for Joe's crimes. In the eighth episode, "Folie a Deux," while Bronte has Joe in the cage he typically uses to lock up people he's going to kill, she comes to the conclusion that he doesn't enjoy killing, like he claims. He does it because his mother groomed him to kill his father and then was afraid of him when he did it. While it's true that young Joe didn't deserve what his mother did to him, Bronte could be wrong about Joe not enjoying killing. Still, in five seasons it's the nearest to an explanation for Joe's behavior that we've gotten, even if in the end it doesn't matter why he does it, since he still needs to go down for his crimes.

Penn Badgley has made it clear that there's no redemption for a guy like Joe. In fact, he called for Joe's death in no uncertain terms on more than one occasion. But when it came time for the show to end, he had a change of heart for a very simple reason: It wouldn't be fair to whoever took him out. He told Netflix's Tudum, "Anybody who kills him would be brought down to his level, which is not justice for them. He's a quandary in a way. What would justice for him look like? I think we get as close as we can." Season 5 co-showrunner Michael Foley concurred, saying, "Death would be too easy."

In fact, the series seems to have come to the conclusion it did because of a combination of these two perspectives: One, that Joe deserves to live but live alone, and two, that none of the women who could kill him should be subjected to becoming a murderer because of what he's done. Those two points of view have created the best conclusion they can with Joe's incarceration. Of course, him being shot in his manhood is a nice touch for those feeling as though jail alone wasn't harsh enough.

Bronte's vendetta is a direct product of Beck's murder. Beck was Bronte's TA when she was in school to be a writer, but then Bronte had to drop out to take care of her sick mother in Ohio. It was during this time that Beck was murdered. Bronte is devastated by the news and gets Beck's book "The Dark Face of Love" when it comes out. However, she notices there are some things that don't add up with the writing. This leads her to a Reddit community where she meets others who don't believe that Dr. Nicky, Beck's psychiatrist and her convicted killer, was responsible for Beck's death, including Clayton, who happens to be Dr. Nicky's son. They end up catfishing Joe because they believe he was responsible, something he discovers halfway through the fifth season.

In the last episode of the series, Bronte seems to have saved Joe for a very specific reason: She wants Joe to admit how he killed Beck, and then she wants him to take out all the passages in Beck's book that he added. Though he goes full horror movie villain on Bronte, he does at least remove those passages from her book, and Bronte has the book re-published without Joe's additions, something she says makes the book more popular than ever.

It was time for Joe to go down. After five seasons of stalking and murdering there wasn't much more he could do that was original, so the show was running out of steam. While it could have been Kate, Marienne, or Nadia, who had also been wronged by Joe and had teamed up to bring him down, the fact that it was ultimately Bronte was a product of Bronte being the girl he was currently with, it's that simple. This gave the show a more dramatic finale, even if some people aren't too happy with it.

For a moment, it appeared as though it would actually be Kate, Marienne, and Nadia who brought Joe to justice: They managed to get him inside a cage, but Marienne and Kate later discovered that Nadia had brought a gun to kill Joe. Though Marienne and Kate were surprised, they ultimately agreed that Kate would be the one to shoot him. However, Joe hid a key to the cage in his arm that he accessed and used when the women were away deciding what to do about the gun, and Joe jumped Kate when she came back with the weapon, ultimately shooting her.

While Maddie, who Joe also hurt, set Mooney's on fire, letting Joe die in a fire would have been anticlimactic. So ultimately, it had to be Bronte, especially because she was the only one at that point that could get him into the bedroom, where the beginning of his ending appropriately starts. And because the series ultimately turns into a horror movie in those final scenes, Bronte is the final girl.

Some people didn't want to see Joe taken down at all, but there had to be some justice given everything that he did. For those who were fine with him being taken down but didn't like the ending, it seems like a combination of not appreciating that Bronte was the one to ultimately do it and the fact that there were a lot of plot contrivances. Season 5 has the lowest audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the anti-Bronte sentiment is strong. "Bronte is the worst forcibly added character I've ever seen," one user wrote, while another said, "Bronte was an absolutely disgusting character. It was like they were blaming us for liking Joe which is unreasonable."

While Bronte does seem wishy washy — she loves Joe, she hates Joe, she loves Joe — she was ultimately the best person to take Joe down simply because she had the best access to him. However, this doesn't excuse the fact that she shouldn't have been around to actually do it, as several Rotten Tomatoes users pointed out. "Somehow Bronte became Aqua Man and survives drowning/being strangled," one dissatisfied viewer wrote. And then there's Kate, who seemingly dies in the fire at Mooney's. Instead, we discover in the coda to the story that despite being shot and burned, she somehow woke up and freed herself from the bookstore instead of dying. Neither of these things seems particularly genuine, and since the show has never had plot contrivances this egregious, to have two in one episode is particularly bad.

Penn Badgley has been making the rounds in the media since "You" came to a close, and he hasn't been shy about saying that he's happy that his character finally got some kind of punishment. He's especially happy that Joe had his penis shot off by Bronte in the final moments of the show. "I think it really dethroned him there and deconstructed him, and that's what was important to me," Badgley told Netflix's Tudum. "His currency was being this romantic sexual icon, which is what allowed him to do what he did for so long. So I was very happy with that."

Badgley was also an executive producer on "You" and is clearly pleased with how much of a hit the show became. However, he made it clear in this Netflix interview that, while he'll always be grateful that he got to play Joe, he isn't sad about being done with such a reprehensible character. "There's no amount of enjoyment or gratitude that can eclipse the brutal reality of what a man like Joe Goldberg is," the actor said. "And so, giving life to him for this long, I'm ready to lay that down ... Hopefully, it just feels like a really good way to end it."

Madeline Brewer, the actor who plays Bronte (she also plays Janine from "The Handmaid's Tale," in case you wondered why she looks so familiar), has a unique take on the ending of "You" Season 5 because so many people took issue with her character. "People really don't like Bronte," she told L'Officiel. "And that's fine, because I like Bronte, and I don't need anyone else to like her." But she does have a problem with people insulting her personally just because they don't like somebody she's playing in a fictional story. "People are truly unable to separate the actor from the character," she added. "If you don't like my character, I don't care — but you don't need to call me ugly."

As for Joe's ultimate fate and Bronte's role in it, Brewer said that it was "thrilling" to be the final girl of the show. "She's the one who holds Joe Goldberg's fate in her hands, and that's no small ask." However, she acknowledged that, while she thoroughly enjoyed it, not everyone will like the finale — and that's okay. "I'd like everyone to love the ending like I do. But a lot of people are probably going to hate it, and that's their prerogative. I know that you can't please everybody." It seems that she's had a blast playing Bronte and having such a big role in the show's last stretch, and hopefully that experience overrides the negativity.

"You" showrunners Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo have revealed that the setting of the ending and the number of seasons were fixed in their minds all along. "We always said that we would stop after five and [that], in a perfect world, we would bring Joe back home to New York," Foley told Netflix's Tudum. "We loved the idea of things coming full circle for him. We're excited by the fact that Joe came home as such a different person than [who] we saw in Season 1. At the core of our final story for Joe is this dichotomy of the old and the new." Crucially, the showrunners also knew all along that Joe would have to face justice come the close of the story.

As Foley explained in a separate interview with the New York Post, everyone agreed that Joe had to face the music. "Throughout the series, there was a shared belief among the writers and the creators that Joe wouldn't get away with his crimes," he said. "We came into the season knowing that we didn't want to redeem him, that he would get his comeuppance, that he was going to face some of those whose lives he ruined." They delivered on that, but they also had Joe stay true to himself — they were aware that he simply wouldn't admit his own culpability for the many lives he destroyed. "We knew we wanted to end with Joe having not changed. That was the most important thing," Foley to Tudum, calling it, "One final deflection."

The showrunners took a long time to decide on the exact details of the ending. While they knew they wanted Joe to pay for his crimes, they hadn't decided on how that would happen. Co-showrunner Michael Foley confessed to the New York Post that "it was late in the season" when they finally decided on the finale we saw. Before that, they actually had several alternate endings for the show — including one that took "You" into the realm of the supernatural.

"We went through many different options, one of which being that he did die at the hands of Bronte," co-showrunner Justin W. Lo explained. "I was even remembering a version where he was shot. And [the audience] didn't realize that he was shot until the very last episode, and then he realizes he's a ghost." Lo added that the ghost idea was " a very early iteration" of the ending. While interesting in theory, this ending would have been a departure from the grounded storytelling that came before it. So, love it or hate it, we should be grateful that "You" Season 5 ended the way it did.