Is This the End of Joe Goldberg?

Good news, psychos, your messy gap-toothed boyfriend is back. The growling murderer clad in collared shirts has returned from his English hiding hole and is ready to terrorize and romance audiences for one last season.

You’s fourth season finale has Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) no longer looking like a relic of The Omen living under a false identity and returning to New York with his endlessly powerful wife, Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie). That endless power has afforded him the ability to clear his name, return from the dead, blame his UK mishaps on his student, and reclaim his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio). He and Kate insist they’re atoning for past behavior, keeping each other “good,” and holding each other’s secrets. But Joe is Joe, and he will naturally get bloody hands by the end of the first episode. Kate’s immense sway is only valuable so long as she and Joe are on the same team, of course, her being cunning, wealthy, and loaded with a mysterious team of “people” who can seemingly do anything. Things for Joe should be idyllic, him reclaiming the best parts of his former life and living a new one of luxury as the media’s prince charming, but things get messy when Kate needs to weaponize Joe against her loose-cannon family with different ideas about the direction of the Lockwood empire. This mishap and change in how Kate looks at him leaves Joe and his wandering eye seeking validation from his latest vict- uh- love interest, Bronte. Series newcomer Madeline Brewer catches the eye of the romantic when he finds her stumbling around his bookstore, needing saving. Joe might have moved on but skeletons rarely stay hidden, and as he clunks around with a would-be mistress and bloody murder weapons, the walls slowly begin to close in on the man who fancies himself a dark romance protagonist.

The past has seen many viewers lust over the lady killer that is Joe Goldberg, so much so that it even prompted Penn Badley to squawk about it, even once telling EW, “He’s a murderer. He’s a sociopath. He’s abusive. He’s delusional.” Naturally leaping off the themes of books that have threaded the series, this has Bronte and Joe questioning what kind of romance novel character he really is. Is he really the dark-romance hero, sexy for being the man who would kill for his love? Or is he a dark killer of women who collects love interests and body bags? For the final season, these things are explored, the audience and Joe being forced to look directly into themselves and each other and ask exactly who or what Joe is.

Bronte is a compelling foil, a woman exploring the implications and intersections of feminism, humanism, and post-feminism as a reader and a writer. It’s a meta-exploration of what that makes each of them while she falls for a man who would kill for her, but whom she suspects might kill those like her. Bronte is, at times, an audience insert, as she slots Joe into her genre fantasies and then sees whether or not he fits. The genre specific references will be fun for dark romance lovers, Joe literally looking like a vampire and a werewolf in different moments, and the framing of those scenes should also please horror fans and gorehounds alike.

You’d think seeing Joe as a villain would be easy when holding up his body count and list of lost lovers, but his cheekbones and deep voice pose a challenge. Adding to that is his unconditional love for Henry, a clever way of creating stakes for Joe as a means of tying him to New York and Kate. That and now he’s famous. Joe can’t hide from the real world, new love interests, and perhaps even worse, podcasters and true crime junkies.

And while it might be a meta-comment on romance novels, that doesn’t mean it’s rinsed off any of the soap. Welcome addition, Anna Camp, plays Kate’s twin half-sisters, Reagan and Maddie: one a shrewd CFO and the other a bubbly liability who likes to flirt with her magnetic brother-in-law. Griffin Matthews was ported over from The Flight Attendant bringing his sharp wit and warmth with him. Soapy twin hijinks and slick battles for control of the Lockwood company legacy make it all feel like The Fall of the House of Usher slammed into A Simple Favor after a near miss with Succession. Brewer brings her usual balance of being a petite delicate flower with ferociousness when it’s called for, and Badgley’s distinctive rhythm in speaking as Joe is perfectly wrapped around him being seen as a romantic hero and a pathetic loser desperate for external validation who buys into his own manipulation.

The soapiness, cheesiness, and a bit of difficulty suspending disbelief might suggest this latest season of You is mid, but that’s almost why it works. You started on Lifetime before moving to Netflix for its second season and onward, and that’s where it really shines. The campiness of Lifetime was brought along with it to a platform that breeds low-stakes binge-watching, something this show seems primed for. It’s as trashy and watchable as it should and needs to be.
Goodbyes are never easy, but You wants a finale worthy of what must come to its lead, something called out directly by Bronte as she references Joe’s own self-referential writing. What is the appropriate earned finale for Joe Goldberg? A serial killer of women is a hard character to send off. Cops? Death? Vigilante justice? You’ll have to see what this series comes up with for him but rest assured that the cheesiness of it is absolutely earned by its build up.

You Season Five is on Netflix April 24, 2025