Joe's fate in the 'You' series finale and that 'cheeky' final scene, explained by the showrunners

Business Insider

25-04-2025

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for season five of Netflix's "You."
Joe Goldberg got the ending that he's long deserved.
Netflix's hit thriller series " You," which stars Penn Badgley as Joe, a romantic at heart with a penchant for repeatedly murdering in the name of love, released its final season on Thursday.
The 10-episode fifth season is a culmination of years of Joe narrowly escaping real consequences for his actions. But now, he's finally locked up for good thanks to the efforts of a new character named Louise Flannery (Madeline Brewer), a woman who dupes Joe into falling in love with her through a carefully curated persona known as Bronte.
In a spoiler-filled discussion with Business Insider, co-showrunners, executive producers, and writers Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo explained Joe's fate and why death would be "too easy" a conclusion, why Badgley wanted audiences to see Joe at his "most horrific" in the bloody finale, and the "cheeky" way the last scene winks at fans' complicity.
Michael Foley: Penn always gets an early draft and gives us his thoughts and sometimes jumps on the phone with us. He's very communicative on set in prep about the episode that he's filming. Obviously, he has such a great handle on his character that it is really just about honing in on things.
But in this final season, the goal, as you hopefully witnessed in the finale, was that we see Joe Goldberg at his worst. And that was really important to Penn, that he was at his most horrific. He wanted to help us in our mission to have everybody stop and see him be so horrific that we all have to question what we just co-signed for all this time and sort of burst the delusion that he's a rootable hero.
So, that was really important to him. That's why he's in his boxers in the rain and that's why he's punching a woman for the first time. We usually cut away from the violence. We just wanted it to get really nasty and awful. And he was very much leading the charge in that regard. He's like, do not pull punches with this guy. I want him in the end to just be a monster.
Episode seven is when people finally start turning on him a bit, and we see characters from his past come out of the woodwork, like Annika, Ethan, and Paco. Who else was on your bucket list of people that you wanted to bring back, but it didn't work out?
Justin W. Lo: I'm trying to think who else we wanted. I think we got mostly everyone we wanted to be in that montage. We did this thing in the writer's room where we put a list of people who would be pro-Joe, against Joe, and sort of neutral, and then we brainstormed what they would be saying about him. One of our favorites was Paco, of course, because Paco is pro-Joe, but what he says ends up screwing Joe over in a major way. So, that was one of our favorite discoveries.
I was surprised not to see Jenna Ortega's character, Ellie. I feel like she would've been such a fun fit in there. Was she one of the people that you tried to get?
Foley: That was complicated by the fact that she's doing "Wednesday" in Ireland and it just seemed like a non-starter. We just couldn't figure out a way to make it work.
If Ellie was in that montage, what side would she have been on?
Lo: Oh, pro-Joe [ laughs ]. Well, I think... hmm. It's a good question. It could have gone either way. You could make an argument for pro-Joe, because he was there for her during a very difficult time in her life. But you could also say, I think Ellie's very smart and she probably knows that he had something to do with her sister's death, even though it was Love. So she could have turned against him as well.
Who came up with the idea for Bronte to shoot Joe in the penis, and what does that add to the punishment that Joe deservedly got in the final season?
Lo: Greg Berlanti came up with the idea for the dick shot, and it was symbolic. Everybody, Penn, the showrunners, Greg, Sera [Gamble], we all wanted to make sure that Joe was taken down and no longer a romantic or sexual icon. And so that is the best way to do that. Couldn't get more pointed than that.
In that moment when Bronte pulls the gun on him and he begs her to kill him, was he genuinely OK with dying at her hands in that moment, or was he just bluffing?
Foley: She's suggesting that he's going to have to face what he really is, and that means he's going to sit in a courtroom, he's going to hear testimony of people who lost loved ones to Joe Goldberg, and that would break the delusion that he's a white knight and a good guy, and he couldn't handle that.
So he was actually in that moment choosing death and hoping for death. And both Louise and we, the writers, thought that death was too easy, that we needed to put him in a veritable cage, and he needed to live on without knowing the feeling of a lover's touch, without his freedom, et cetera.
Foley: The specifics of it, in terms of him being in prison and living, were things that we worked out pretty late in the final season.
But in terms of him A) not getting away with it, B) not being redeemed, C) facing loved ones or people who he wronged, all of that was known early on, going into the season, if not a season or two earlier. We just didn't know the actual shape it would take.
What was the conversation like with Penn when you mapped out the specifics of that final scene and his ending?
Foley: There's a single line that Louise says to him, which is that "the fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you." That's the most important line this season for us, if not in the series, and he was a big fan of that line. He liked that it was the closest we were going to come to just sort of really stating our message, if you will. So yeah, we were all completely on the same page about Joe's condemnation, Joe's end.
In the final scene, Joe's reading a creepy letter and he's still delusional and putting the blame on other people. It kind of felt like a little nod to the fans who thirsted over Joe this whole time, despite him being a murderer. What was the message you were trying to convey in that scene?
Lo: We were trying to convey that Joe will never take responsibility for anything that he's done, that he always has to blame someone, and in this case, it's society, and he's speaking to us.
It's a cheeky way to show that we have been complicit and he's turning against us in this one moment. We have been with him, in his voiceover part of his thought processes, in the whole series. And in this moment, he turns against us and blames us, the society, for creating him and for loving him.
In the past, the female leads of the show have not fared well, but Louise, Kate, and Marienne all get their happy endings. Why was it important for the series to end with these women not being casualties?
Foley: The entire run of the series, yes, there is Joe getting what Joe needs to get, in terms of killing for love. And then sometimes the killing can just seem bleak, and we want to entertain, and we don't want to lose our audience. And so it felt like with Kate, she had earned her absolution and her redemption, being willing to die by going back down to the basement to kill Joe. That's why we kept her alive, but it just didn't feel additive to kill. We don't want to kill people just for killing's sake.
I would just say that Louise, in the end, keeping her alive was very important to us because we wanted the show to end with a woman's voice. Like, yes, we add this coda with Joe where he says, "It's not my fault, it's yours." But the real ending of the show is a woman having a voice and having agency, and Louise walking out of that bookstore and saying, "Joe Goldberg is not going to write my story. I'm going to define who I am." That was very important to us.
Beck is such an important part of this whole season, and it brings the show full circle. What was it like pitching that to Elizabeth Lail and getting her back for a couple of scenes?
Lo: The Beck storyline always brings tears to my eyes because it is so deep. And I say that Beck really got a raw deal in season one and she didn't do anything to deserve what she got. And she has been that symbol of innocence that got marred this whole series, really.
So, it felt fitting to be able to give her justice. And that's why I think that the connection to Bronte was so powerful. You can feel it all through the season as soon as we learn the connection between them in that fifth episode.
[Elizabeth] loved it. She was so excited to be part of the final season and she loves this character, too. So it was very meaningful for her to be able to be such a big part of the end of Joe Goldberg's story.
Foley: I think it would've started to get repetitive and we would've been going to this same well in many ways, narratively. I don't know a single person in the writer's room who felt like, "Oh, if only we had one more season, we could tell this story or that story."
I think we are really happy that we brought it full circle. Rarely do TV writer-producers get to finish the story. And we got to, we did it in a satisfying way, we got to bring it back to New York. So as a viewer and as a writer, I don't have an appetite for more, but it's only because I'm so sated. I'm very satisfied with how this story was told.
Lo: I hope they're very satisfied. I see a lot of stuff online about like, "This show will have to end with Joe either in prison or dead." A lot of people are saying that, and so I'm really curious to see what they will think of the ending, which is, of course, he's not dead, but he is shot. And I guess there are some people who want him to get away with it. I am excited to see what they have to say the most, because we did not let him get away with it.
Foley: We won't escape unscathed, and that's fine. People really hated that the character Love had to die. And guess what? I loved writing that character. I loved being on set with Victoria Pedretti, who's incredibly talented, but what was best for the story was where the story went.
So, hopefully, if people can be objective, they could say this was the right way and the best way to end it. And if not, then all the power to 'em.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.