You Didn’t Have to End This Way

The hit thriller You, whose fifth and final season just dropped on Netflix, managed to be both chameleonic and consistent. Each season, a romantic psychopath named Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) moved to a new place and projected his fantasies on a new woman, only to attain her and find himself dissatisfied with the flesh-and-blood person in front of him. Why were these women not flattered by his willingness to kill for them? (Never mind that some of those murder victims were their friends and family.) Why did they feel the need to exert their own wills? They, inevitably, needed to be locked up. From there, their fates were sealed.

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In this final season, a woman ridiculously nicknamed Brontë (Madeline Brewer) purposefully attracts Joel’s attention. A onetime student of Joe’s Season 1 victim Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Brontë tries to entrap Joe and prove his guilt, only to briefly doubt he could truly be evil and fall for him. The writers apparently intend for Brontë to be a stand-in for the audience: A woman who knows Joe’s murderous past but is simultaneously susceptible to his charm. They also grant her the reward of executing the ultimate punishment for Joe: Shooting off the misogynist’s manhood, humiliating him in a public trial, and sentencing him to a fate worse than death for a self-styled romantic—a lonely life spent in a prison cell.

If that all sounds rather blunt, it’s because You dispenses with any sense of subtlety in its final season. The show assumes its audience—like Brontë—forgets that Joe, a serial killer whose modus operandi amounts to locking people in a box, is a bad guy, or that the love he professes to have for his female victims is really just a violent, obsessive form of objectification. Which left two of its longtime fans on the TIME culture team feeling a bit disappointed and condescended to. So, after groaning our way through the finale, we regrouped for a postmortem.

Judy Berman: I was an early fan of You, back when it was airing on Lifetime and no one seemed to know it existed, before it showed up on Netflix and became such a hit that the streamer saved it from cancellation. Seasons 1 and 3, in particular, strike a really exhilarating balance between twisted thrills and social satire—but I even had fun with the weaker seasons. So it pains me to say that I found these last 10 episodes to be a repetitive slog, culminating in a scoldy, didactic finale that insulted my intelligence. “No, really, serial killer Joe Goldberg is a bad person” is not exactly the mind-blowing revelation it’s presented as being throughout Season 5.  

In retrospect, the writing was on the wall by the fifth episode, when Joe and his new “you,” Brontë, talk about the dark romance genre and she insists, “I am not your trope.” It’s like she’s speaking right to the viewer. Though there were plenty of twists left to come, that was the moment I realized the show was preparing to sacrifice its sharp wit in order to leave viewers with a Very Important Lesson. Eliana, at what point in the season did you start to despair?

Eliana Dockterman: I was frustrated from the first episode. Each season, Joe has wormed his way into a different elite group—New York literary society, L.A. wellness gurus, suburban Stepford Wives, the landed gentry of England—and skewered that particular genre of wealthy folks. It was hard not to delight in Joe’s murdering sprees when the focus of his ire was so often on the entitled and cruel—even if innocent people died along the way. 

This meandering final season did not have a specific group as its target. Instead, it turned an accusatory finger at the audience for indulging in Joe’s past exploits. The writers assumed a lack of sophistication from the audience—that we cannot at once enjoy an “eat the rich” narrative and acknowledge that misogynistic serial killers are bad people—that frankly felt a little insulting. Badgley has made no secret of the fact that he was discomfited by fans online begging Joe Goldberg to lock them in cages. But Season 5 of the series takes these thirsty tweets at face value rather than with the sense of irony with which they were likely written.

And so Joe gets punished in the most literal way possible. Let’s just say it, in the finale, Joe is shot in the penis. Subtle!

JB: That was bonkers. And of course we had to then see people on the internet roasting Joe for, er, losing a few inches… or whatever the actual damage was. As if we couldn’t have figured out on our own that this is a guy whose sexual exploits deserve nothing but our derision.

To go back to what you were saying about past seasons, one of the things I always liked about You was that it was smart enough—and it trusted its audience to be smart enough—to satirize more than one thing. On one hand, you had these sendups of rich, elitist social worlds that made Joe’s murder sprees kind of frictionless. And in later seasons there was the added element of genre parody; Season 3 took the piss out of Real Housewives/Desperate Housewives type entertainment, while Season 4 spoofed the Agatha Christie-style whodunits that have been everywhere over the past few years. At the same time, especially in Season 1, you had the character of Joe as a thought experiment: What if the bookish, hopelessly devoted guy—like Badgley’s own breakout character, Gossip Girl’s Dan “Lonely Boy” Humphrey—who is the hero of so many rom-coms were a real person? Wouldn’t he be kind of a delusional, nightmare stalker? Put all those elements together, and the show remained fun and witty and insightful despite all of its darkness because viewers never got attached to any one character.

Season 5 broke that pattern by speaking solely to the contingent New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has called “bad fans”—viewers who fundamentally misunderstand the shows they love by actually rooting for psycho protagonists like Breaking Bad meth kingpin Walter White. Are there really women out there who want Badgley to put on his Joe Goldberg cap and choke them? Probably! But, as you said, Eliana, most of the chatter to that effect surely comes from fans who a) have a sense of humor about what often used to be a very funny show; and b) understand the difference between fantasy and reality. So why would you end a great run with an utterly humorless lecture to a small group of bad fans? Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and Mad Men didn’t need to condescend to their viewers, and neither does You. 

ED: My theory is someone came up with the final monologue of the series, and they constructed the entire season around getting Joe to a place in which he could utter that last line. 

The series ends with Joe Goldberg sitting in prison reading a lusty fan letter. He muses, “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 it’s you.” 

Cue: Radiohead’s “Creep.” Again, subtle. Not only does Joe outright state the thesis of the show for anyone too busy folding laundry or cooking dinner to have paid attention to the last five seasons, but he says the title of the show! Out loud! Get it?? Someone got too excited by that prospect. What did you think of this coda, Judy?

JB: I hated it, Eliana. Hated it. Not because I don’t think there’s any truth to it. Joe’s final voiceover is so broad and vague and easy that you can’t really argue with it. Obviously “we have a problem as a society.” We have many of them, no small number of which cluster around the eons’ worth of ambient misogyny that shaped norms around heterosexual love! Obviously we all need to do some introspection about this stuff. This is, in fact, the basic premise from which You sprang, not the destination it should’ve reached after a fully circular five seasons.

There’s a somewhat more specific line in this vein earlier in the finale, when Brontë and Joe are having their final showdown in the woods. “The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you,” she tells him. I think there’s actually something worth considering in what she’s saying there. It made me flash back to Joe killing Clayton, who was supposed to be Brontë’s ally in taking down Joe but couldn’t restrain himself from trying to hurt her once their plan went sideways. Do women obsess over serial killers and vampires and “fairy smut” (as Joe calls it at one point in the season) because there’s so much violent misogyny in the world that we find ourselves drawn to the violent misogynists who promise to cherish and protect us? 

For me, that line begins to express an idea the season could’ve explored with depth and nuance. It could’ve shown how that sort of Stockholm Syndrome psychology manifests rather than just telling us about it, as an afterthought. I found that to be a real missed opportunity.

ED: I am intrigued by that theory about why women are attracted to stories of true crime and would have happily watched an exploration of that topic. But the show feels like a remnant of the #MeToo era in which it premiered—one in which toxic men masquerading as nice guys were something we’d just started discussing rather than an omnipresent political force.

In that vein, I want to touch on Joe’s son, Henry. As a person currently pregnant with a boy, who doomscrolls articles about the growing influence of the “manosphere” before she falls asleep at night, I’m deeply interested in—and anxious about—how boys are drafted into the online toxic hellscape. Henry commits an act of violence early in the season, and the implication is he’s picking up on his dad’s anger. I wish Henry’s psychology had been explored more, but ultimately he’s largely relegated to pawn status in the legal battle between Joe and his wife. I guess not every show can be Adolescence.