You Season 5: The Ending Did Joe Goldberg Get What He Deserved?

You Season 5 just arrived on the Netflix streaming platform. For us, it has always been “much more than a guilty pleasure”, we had already said on these pages, especially after the surprising fourth season. Perhaps it would have been better if the Netflix series ended like this, You, saved by the streaming giant after the cancellation by Lifetime in the first season, and taken from the namesake novels of Caroline Kepnes, from which the creators Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti soon freed themselves. There was great anticipation around this closure, thanks also to the return of – practically – all the women in the life of the protagonist, a stalker and serial killer disguised as a prince charming, along with apparently juicy and crackling new entries. How did it end? Continue reading and … attention to spoilers.

You Season 5: A Karmic Ending

The last episode of the fifth season and therefore of the whole Netflix series closes, maybe just like Dexter: New Blood, to stay on the serial killer theme, in the only way possible: the protagonist does not die, but is arrested and exposed before everyone for the crimes he has committed. This last cycle partially reversed the roles of victim and executioner by introducing the character of Brontë (Madeline Brewer), a deliberate literary reference to breach Joe’s heart and mind, and to lure him into his diabolical plan. Pretend to fall into the attacker’s arms to actually peel him primarily on the murder of Guinevere Beck – the only one he did not admit – and on the real authorship of the book she wrote and published posthumously. The girl, in an apparent romantic escape given a crazy marriage that makes them become two fugitives, manages to make him confess his crimes and what changed the book after forcing Beck to write it in the basement. So much so that the voiceover becomes no longer single, but double, to involve viewers in both points of view.

At that point Louise Flannery underlines what her name is – and not Brontë, as the writer and only as a bait for the tormentor – regaining possession of her identity and reminding him that he is not the victim, despite wanting to pass as such; although he continues to say that he has put all of himself every time and could have ended up differently, as if the culprits were the real victims. A punctual and multifaceted identikit of the killer of women par excellence, with all his distorted beliefs and psychologies. The man also has the opportunity to make one last phone call with his son Henry, who had recovered from the affections right between the end of the previous chapter and the beginning of the latter: the child will tell him that the monster under the bed he has always been the biological father, in reality, and who now also knows it, also for how he killed his mother Love.

Satisfied or Refunded for the Netflix Series?

We feel bittersweet at the end of the vision of these last ten episodes. It seemed an excuse to lengthen the broth, despite the excellent initial premises of Kate and her wealthy and vindictive family a New York, where it all started after the London parenthesis of the fourth season, with increasingly absurd and crazy storylines, also for the standards to which he had accustomed. A good idea but developed in a discontinuous and at the same time repetitive way that we do not know how much justice has done to originality in the guise of the serial, despite the interpretation by Penn Badgley which instead was a crescendo and you can see all the heart that the actor put in the character after Dan Humphrey of Gossip Girl which made him famous all over the world.

There is also a final wink at public obsession with true crime and serial killers, with letters from fans who arrive at Joe once in prison. Something that really happens in reality and often becomes a narrative device in the thriller and crime series for seasonal and betting cases. It cannot be said that the circle has not closed, in every sense – with the return of Elizabeth Lail, Tati Gabrielle, Amy Leigh-Hickman, and their Beck, Marianne and Nadia, all ready to return to live their lives in freedom, while the first re-obtain justice and credit on one’s destiny. But perhaps we would have preferred something more bloody and psychologically analytical. And you?

You End with a Disturbing Dilemma

The final of You, Penn Badgley said it couldn’t be different than his alter-ego was delivered at the most appropriate end. And patience, if this does not satisfy the totality of the public, meeting the collective favor was impossible. The last minutes of the series, therefore, turn in a precise and perhaps even quite predictable direction: whether or not Joe Goldberg pays for his crimes (we leave the viewer the taste to find out for himself), it doesn’t matter, but is he the only culprit in this affair?

You Series on Netflix, he leaves us forever with an image: the one in which the protagonist looks into the room and is exalted by reading the letters of fans in delirium for his exploits and his charm. In the end, it is Joe who asks us the most disturbing question: Is he or are we too? And it is at this point that current events overlap fiction, recalling recent and past crime stories in which the figure of Joe Goldberg fades into that of murderers who existed. The charm of evil – see the displays of affection for Ted Bundy, Menendez brothers, more recently for Luigi Mangione – envelops the human being even when the contours of the crimes committed have no justification. You taught us that nobody is immune.