Farewell to Netflix’s Favorite Stalker: A You Season 5 Review
Netflix’s TV series You is the perfect rom-com, provided you ignore the kill count. It follows the exploits of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a charming, romantic stalker who is obsessed with “You”—his moniker for the woman he’s fixated on. For four seasons, he’s followed the same cycle: he becomes obsessed with a woman, manipulates his way into her life, controls her until his fantasy of her crumbles, and last but not least, murders her (along with anyone who gets in his way).
The series opened in a humble NYC bookstore, grounding Joe’s obsession in believable realism. But as Joe moved from New York to LA to the suburbs and finally London, his actions grew increasingly unhinged. Season 4 transformed bookstore clerk Joe into an Oxford-esque professor-slash-murder-mystery-detective with a mental counterpart who kills off London’s elite. Absurd, yes. But entertaining.
There’s a unique thrill in watching Joe pull off something wildly horrifying (as Jinoo’s essay explores). We don’t watch You for realism. This tightrope act—will this be the time Joe gets caught?—is what makes You so captivating. However, with season 5 as the show’s finale, we knew his house of cards was certain to fall. The question was no longer if, but how, Joe would be brought to justice.
“We just need to see the monster for what the monster is.”
The showrunners recognised this, aiming to show “the monster for what the monster is” with Season 5. For the finale to work, we needed Joe’s fate to feel like a checkmate, not a deus ex machina. They would have to depart from the absurdity of Season 4. This means characters acting like human beings; a society behaving as ours does; and a real world punishing Joe. Season 5 needed to deliver an ending that was both earned and consistent. Unfortunately, it fails to do both.
The season sees our friendly neighborhood psychopath return to the Big Apple. Now part of a celebrity power couple with Kate, the oil heiress from Season 4. He’s become a public intellectual—hot, in every way. He reopens his bookstore, playing the reformed family man.
In steps Louis “Bronte” Flannery, a free-spirited, artsy playwright who breaks into Mooney’s to “borrow” a book. She’s everything Kate’s not: broke, idealistic, “authentic”. The show skillfully frames its world through Joe’s unreliable lens—suddenly, Joe’s picture perfect relationship with Kate is framed as a suffocating marriage, where spats and toxicity accompany every conversation.
However, to make this work, the writers lobotomize Kate. Down goes her character consistency as the calm, enabling woman from Season 4 suddenly becomes horrified by Joe’s actions—a complete 180. It’s a cheap writing trick to push Joe towards his new obsession, a new “you”: Bronte.
But Bronte isn’t just another wide-eyed victim; she’s a member of an online collective that had finally connected the dots. Her romance with Joe is a long con, meant to extract a confession out of him and expose him. This alone addresses the show’s slew of sloppy coverups and loose ends, exploiting Joe’s tendency to idealize women.
Bronte and her collective lure Joe to a supposedly off-grid beach house under the guise of going on the run together. Joe, under the impression he was defending Bronte, is streamed murderingone of her co-conspirators live on social media. Other people burst in, she reveals the con, and the episode cuts with Penn Badgley staring into the camera—crazed, disheveled, betrayed.
We can accept Joe escaping a glass cage like back in Season 1, but not the world collectively ignoring a livestreamed murder because the plot demands it.
This should have been the series’s mic-drop moment. After four seasons of near misses and implausible cover stories, we arrive here: Goldberg’s actions literally replayable on loop. Joe finally thrown into a courtroom here, the show could have ended with him finally accountable to a reality that no longer bends around him.
Yet, the writers sabotage their own momentum. Kate’s wealth handwaves away the legal issues through her magic, rich person powers, and the internet immediately moves on from the livestreamed murder. This is where the show starts losing its grounding. We can accept Joe escaping a glass cage like back in Season 1, but not the world collectively ignoring a livestreamed murder because the plot demands it.
From here, the series becomes a first-draft Wattpad fanfiction of alternate endings crammed together, each taking a swing at bringing Joe to justice in their own poetic manner. Unfortunately, to hop from one ending to the next, the writers sacrifice the consistency of the world around Joe. The survivors of his actions across the show manage to trap him in his cage (symbolic, but brief). He escapes. He runs away with Bronte, who abruptly loves him again, except suddenly after listening to Kate she doesn’t, ending with her violently emasculating him.
And just like that, the ending You chooses is a fairytale one: in a short 10-minute sequence, every main character gets their own neat little pink bow. Joe gets his time in court—some rallying behind him, some not—as the rest of the cast get their happily-ever-afters in an instant.
It feels fake. It feels forced. Any ending on its own—the murder, the cage, the shooting—could have worked. But in an effort to move from one self-indulgent, metaphorical end to the next, the writers stripped the finale of any weight. Beyond the tonal whiplash throughout the plot, characters’ motivations shift minute-to-minute with no internal logic. The people in Season 5 act as ersatz humanoids, chess pieces the writers move wherever the plot demands. The same lack of realism that let me watch Joe murder and stalk without a care for the consequences prevented me from feeling any satisfaction when he’s finally sentenced. When the universe bends this hard to fit the writer’s needs, the justice he receives feels hollow.
Ultimately, Season 5 falls flat, failing to ground Joe’s earned consequences in a real, consistent world. But perhaps judging “You” on narrative consistency misses the point entirely. Let’s be honest, most of us watch You as junk food TV, not prestige drama. We watch because we’d watch Penn Badgley do nothing but groan for 24 hours straight. The actors are hot, the drama is enticing, and the logic is nonexistent. Season 5 won’t give you narrative closure, but if you’ve watched this long for Badgley and messy drama, it delivers exactly that—a hot and juicy fantastical guilty pleasure. In that regard, I couldn’t recommend “You” enough.