Spoiler alert: The following article contains details about the series finale for You.
After seven years, it’s the end of You. Or, rather, the end of its main character: the misogynistic, manipulative and murderous Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley).
In crafting the harrowing end to a saga filled with deceit, treachery and countless lives lost, Badgley tells Deadline the pulse-pounding Netflix drama had to go “back to form,” focusing on his “object of desire” — each season’s new “You.” This time around, Bronte (The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Madeline Brewer) “becomes an avatar for the audience,” subverting Joe’s cunning to bring about his downfall.
“It becomes a meta exercise on: Why are we so obsessed with this man?” explains Badgley, who has been vocal in the past about censuring fans who glorify or romanticize his character. “Apart from the superficial reasons, what is it about a protagonist like this that works? And I think we deliver; it’s a true deconstruction of Joe.”
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Season 5 kicks off with Joe apparently safe atop his ivory tower, opposite his wife Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), the powerful leader of family conglomerate Lockwood Corp. In his native New York City, Joe is in his element — with a few million extra — sending his son Henry to private school and generally being a doting husband. As a famous power couple, the two grace the coveted cover of New York Magazine.
But it’s only a matter of time before Kate asks him to take care of a nosey Uncle Bob, who threatens to expose Kate’s involvement with a pipeline that gave children cancer, and Joe sets his sights on a new bookish young woman.
“Every season has been a herculean task for the writers,” Badgley says of keeping the material fresh and avoiding trodding familiar ground; he adds that the scribes work their way backward to craft a season that is “like a magician’s trick,” distracting viewers in the first half for a big payoff toward the end.
“It’s so rewarding,” he says of the way the soapy/satirical show wraps up, pointing to the season’s sixth episode as when the heart of the plot “really cracks open.”
“The Dark Face of Love,” an entire flashback sequence delving into the life of Bronte — who is revealed to be a former student of Season 1’s Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) — explores how she connects with a group of online sleuths who find Joe’s tidy explanations in the wake of numerous suspicious deaths less than satisfactory.
“‘Oh, so she’s me.’ She knows who he is, she knows his name, she knows what he’s done, she even watched him do it in front of her face,” Badgley says of how audiences connect with Bronte. “And yet, ‘I still love him.’ Some of the best conversations Madeleine Brewer and I had — what I think she did that was really smart and sensitive — is to know that part of Bronte still loved Joe even when she was pointing a gun at his head.”
Following a fakeout in the penultimate episode, which up until its final moments seems to claim both the lives of Kate and Joe in a fire that engulfs Mooney’s bookstore, Bronte and Joe are on the lam. Directed by pilot helmer Lee Toland Krieger, the aptly titled “Finale” has “a road-movie horror” feel, as Badgley relays, an ultimate battle royal where the final girl does, indeed, triumph against the blood-thirsty abuser.
“Hats off to our producers this season — Marcos Siega and Jason Sokoloff — they made sure we had the extra time and money that you usually never have at the end of the season,” Badgley says in a shout-out. “So it was like a movie. It was really a lovely experience, ironically, though it looks horrific.”
Of the ending, Badgley says it’s “key” that Joe is not caught in his signature box, the glass prison in which he traps and eventually kills his victims, but rather in the bedroom.
“That’s actually where he does his worst work, is his manipulation and seduction,” he says. “The box is kind of obvious, the box is actually where he’ll put anybody, but he only puts women in the bedroom, so that’s where his most dangerous work is. And it was important for him to be seen, finally, as a sexual predator.”
Toward the end of the series, the show pointedly employs the term “abuser,” ensuring both Joe and the viewer are “viscerally confronted” with the reality of Joe as a perpetrator of gendered violence — as well as a serial killer.
“How graphic do you need us to be, for us to understand what he really is? But so finally, he’s the closest you’ve ever seen him to crossing that threshold and really in the act of sexual abuse and that’s,” he transitions, adding sarcastically as he throws his thumbs up and smiles, “real popular light fodder, apparently!”
In the denouement, Joe chases after Bronte in the rain-thrashed forest by their makeshift safe house, after she pulls a gun on him and instructs him to redact his words from Beck’s book and tell her how he killed her. Mud-stained and beaten, Bronte manages to evade a drowning and refuses to give Joe the out of death. “You are going to have to see yourself,” she says.
“It was exhausting, but in a good way. It was the right way to do it. I did fight — the one time I’ll ever fight to be in my underwear for a whole sequence — because they really wanted a white tank top on him to show the evolution of the ripping, the blood, the dirt,” Badgley recalls. “I was like, ‘I feel you, I get you, but he needs to be as close to naked as possible because he needs to look like he’s about to abuse [Bronte].”
Before he is hauled off to prison for good, Joe attempts one last lunge toward Bronte, prompting her to shoot him … in the genitals. With every remaining survivor who has been in Joe’s orbit alive, the only salve for his loneliness is disturbing fan mail.
“It does become a question of, ‘What do we do with people like Joe?’” Badgley says. “It is a carceral question, a question of justice, of transformative justice as it’s referred to sometimes, vengeance, retribution. What is best, not just for Joe, but the person who then has to do it? If somebody was to kill him — and it would be a woman, right — well then actually now what you’ve burdened her with is having committed murder, like that’s not just, I don’t think. Torture? Uh OK, same thing. Prison? Eh, feels a bit not enough. So what do you do? Take. His. Balls.”
All of You is currently streaming on Netflix.