Note: This story contains spoilers from “You” Season 5, Episode 10.
While “You” has seen Joe Goldberg’s murderous habits take him to some very dark, gruesome places, Penn Badgley and showrunners Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo knew the Netflix series’ fifth and final season had to find the character at his “most horrific.”
“We were all about trying to make Joe see what he is,” Foley told TheWrap. “We were about waking the audience to what they were co-signing all this entire time, and that meant him being his most animalistic, not pulling any punches and not falling in love with him so hard that we forget what we’re really trying to say here and what he is.”
Whereas past seasons saw Joe narrowly escape his indiscretions relatively unscathed, the showrunners went into Season 5 planning knowing it was the end of the road for “You” after receiving a renewal for a fifth and final season in March 2023. “We got to say, how does this show end, and what does Joe Goldberg deserve?” Foley said.
Foley and Lo took the reins from creator Sera Gamble for the last season, though after both showrunners had been with the show from Season 1 and 2, respectively, it “wasn’t the biggest leap to make.” “Sera was with us for 40 episodes and she was the captain of the ship, and it was sort of her saying, ‘that’s land right there — just keep rowing,’” Foley said.
Before getting to Joe’s ending, Season 5 introduced the latest object of Joe’s obsession in Bronte (Madeline Brewer), a young woman Joe discovers poking around Mooney’s who he subsequently hires to work at the bookstore and starts dating, threatening his seemingly perfect life with Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) and his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio). His relationship with Bronte is turned on its head, however, when Episode 6 reveals that Bronte, whose real name is Louise, had been a student of Beck’s (Elizabeth Lail) and teamed up with several conspirators — including Dr. Nicky’s son, Clayton (Tom Francis) — to expose Joe.
“We knew that first half of the season Joe would not know that, and, after that, Joe would be exposed to the world — everyone would know that he was a serial killer,” Lo said. “That gave us a lot of drama to play through the very end of the finale, and a complete paradigm shift for the character and for the series.”
Despite capturing evidence of Joe in the midst of murdering Clayton — whom Joe believed was Bronte’s abusive ex-boyfriend — Bronte folds like a cheap suit when offered the chance to incriminate Joe once and for all, instead telling the detective that Joe was acting out of self-defense.
Luckily, not all hope is lost for bringing justice to Joe when Kate teams up with Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) and Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), who give Joe a taste of his own medicine when they lock him in his own cage in the penultimate episode of the season. “We knew that we wanted some of Joe’s former victims to come back, the ones who have survived him, to have their their day in court,” Lo said. “The trial that we put him on in Episode 9 is our opportunity to give those women voices and to let them tell him what he did to them, and to see if he will actually absorb any of it and accept any responsibility.”
Hickman and Gabrielle were among the handful of returning characters across the show’s five seasons to reprise their roles for the final season — which also included Sherry and Cary and Ethan, among others — but the returning cast members did not include Jenna Ortega, whom the showrunners said they would’ve loved to see back but “unfortunately, we had issues there.”
While Kate resolves to kill Joe and take responsibility for his murder, he gets away at the last minute, instead running away with Bronte at the end of Episode 9. “It was important for us that Joe thinks that his dream has come true of finding a woman who can love all of him and that they ride off into the proverbial sunset together,” Foley said.
Little does Joe know that in the meantime — and after an emotional conversation with Marienne — Bronte has turned on him, and is ultimately the one to bring him to justice. With her arc in mind, the showrunners said they built the character of Bronte in a different way than Joe’s other love interests. “we wanted to create in her somebody who had the capacity to love all of Joe and who would get close to doing so, then most important to us was that she rebuffed him,” Foley said. “What we really wanted to do was give agency back and a voice back to her.”
That agency is given back to Bronte when she helps deliver Joe to the police, who capture him in the finale, cementing his future in a prison cell — a fate the showrunners admitted they shifted to after deciding not to kill off Joe.
“We definitely considered killing off Joe, I think for most of the season, as we were breaking it, that’s where we thought we were going,” Lo said. “But as we got towards the end, we reconsidered.”
“We thought that death was too easy, that we wanted to punish Joe,” Foley said. “We liked the idea of putting him in a veritable cage. We liked the idea of him having to be in that cage, not knowing that the touch of his of his lover, without his freedom.”
“You” Seasons 1-5 are now streaming on Netflix.
