‘You’ Showrunners Break Down That Killer Season 5 Ending, Joe’s Final Monologue

Note: This story contains spoilers from “You” Season 5, Episode 10.

The penultimate episode of “You” Season 5 felt like Joe Goldberg’s final reckoning as he stood trapped in his own cage by the ghosts of his past in Kate, Nadia and Marienne, but, of course, Joe escapes once again.

Joe (Penn Badgley) is dragged out of the fire at Mooney’s by Bronte/Louise (Madeline Brewer), who — knowing she is the only one who can now bring him to justice — accepts his marriage proposal at the end of Episode 9, leaving the pair to be found on a picturesque road trip in Canada by the beginning of the finale.

“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,” showrunner Michael Foley told TheWrap, adding that while the first half of a finale feels like a “road trip love story,” the second half quickly turns into a horror movie.

Cracks start to creep into Joe’s fantasy of a life with Bronte and his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio) when Joe gets a fleeting moment to speak with Henry via an online game server, during which time Henry calls Joe a monster — which showrunner Justin W. Lo said plummets Joe to the lowest we’ve seen him across the entire series.

“It was the thing that happens right before he completely drops his mask with Bronte — we needed a moment that carried … the weight of that,” Lo said, adding the scene references what Love (Victoria Pedretti) told Joe at the end of Season 3 as she was dying, saying that his son will know who he is.

Shortly afterwards, Bronte reveals her true intentions. She and Joe have an all-out brawl, with the police arriving just in time to capture Joe. In her final moments before the police take Joe away, Bronte stands with a gun in hand, and, instead of taking a fatal shot or none at all, she shoots directly at Joe’s genitalia after telling him, “the fantasy of a guy like you exists because of the reality of a guy like you.”

“The shot to the groin was a little bit of us having fun and putting a grave moment on its ear,” Foley said, adding that co-creator Greg Berlanti recognized that Joe’s power comes in being a romantic hero. “This was a chance to take away his manhood.”

After Foley and Lo decided that death would be “too easy” of an end for Joe —explaining they wanted to “punish” him by putting him in a “veritable cage” without his freedom — losing his genitalia might be a consolation prize for any viewers who were hoping for a more vengeful end.

The aftermath of Joe’s arrest is then shifted over to Bronte, who stands as the remaining voice for Beck, who lost her voice at Joe’s hands, both literally and metaphorically, as he rewrote “The Dark Face of Love” under her pen name.

“Louise was always an avatar for the audience,” Lo said, while Foley added she represents all women. “We wanted a woman to have the final voice, even though Joe has his pithy Coda where he puts it all on us, it was important that in the end, a woman stands proud and walks away and says,’ I’m not going to be a victim to Joe Goldberg.'”

After running through the hefty murder charges Joe racked up that prompted him to see “all of himself,” Bronte/Louise narrates the happy endings for everyone else who managed to escape Joe, including Bronte, who restored Beck’s original writing to her novel, and Kate — whose ending the showrunners remember debating heavily in the writers’ room.

“Some people thought that she should die because of … her being responsible for the deaths of children that we talk about in Season 4 and this season, that was something that she should be punished for ultimately, but we thought that the character did feel guilt, enough guilt that she was worthy of some sort of redemption, and that’s why we let her live,” Lo said.

The final moments of the “You” series finale close out with a monologue from Joe from his prison cell, who turns the blame back on the audience as he receives fan mail filled with desires of twisted fantasies. “Maybe we have a problem as a society,” Joe says. “Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me — Maybe, it’s you.”

With the series as a whole hoping to hold a mirror up to viewers and how they tow the line of love and obsession, the showrunners hope the final monologue shines a light on “our complicity, and how easily we were able to co-sign his terrible behavior, because it was in the name of love,” according to Foley.

“Is that because at an early age, we’re just coded to want the Disney prince and the princess to find love?” Foley said. “It’s not something we necessarily have any answer for so much as we want to ask the question and have people asking themselves the question.”

“You” Seasons 1-5 are now streaming on Netflix.

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