You Season 5 Review: Penn Badgley Delivers, But The Final Season Falls Flat

In "You," the show that had its first season on Lifetime but quickly moved to Netflix for every subsequent season, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is a trope of both love stories and tales of horror, both a white knight and the villain in a slasher tale — it just depends on how you look at him. In past seasons, he's managed to get young maidens to fall in love with him right up until they found out who he truly was, or alternatively, his eye drifted and he managed to find fault with the women he once loved obsessively so he could love someone else obsessively. Either way, it ended the same. That is, until Joe met Kate Galvin (Charlotte Richie) in Season 4 when he moved to London.

Kate hated Joe at first, but he soon won her over — and overcame his own demons — to tell her the truth about his past (mostly). We start the fifth and final season three years into their marriage, a marriage that Joe seems to have completely embraced along with their pledge to do good with all their (ahem, Kate's) money. But Joe has a way of giving in to his baser instincts, and even though he's managed to be good for a long time, when Kate asks him to kill Bob (Michael Dempsey), a member of her board of directors, how could he refuse?

Thus starts Season 5's tale of sex, manipulation, love, obsession, and murder. Though Kate unleashes Joe to start killing again to secure her place as CEO of the company that Kate's father founded (and Joe killed last season), she quickly balks at further murder. It turns out she feels guilty, but Joe feels fine, and he can't figure out why Kate doesn't want the same thing as he does. So he turns his attention to another love interest: Bronte (Madeline Brewer), a younger woman who shares his passion for books and appreciates a little chaos in her life.

However, the fifth season, more than others, is less interested in the psychology of Joe Goldberg and more interested in bringing him down. Thus, Bronte is ultimately positioned as the final girl in the series, much like the final girl in any slasher movie, as the show turns entirely to horror instead of the strange mix of horror and romance that marked other seasons. It's more straightforward but also less rewarding, and the show suffers for it.

It's not entirely surprising that we ended up here. There were some keys shifts in personnel this season, and they may not have been able to bring the level of nuance to "You." Sera Gamble, who had been showrunner on Seasons 1 through 4, stepped back, leaving Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo to showrun in her place. Plus, as Penn Badgely has said repeatedly, Joe Goldberg is a reprehensible character, and he deserves his comeuppance. This season, everyone involved behind the scenes seemed determined to give him that just punishment, and that meant a fundamental shift in their focus in the story. In particular, Bronte takes over the voiceovers for large sections of the show.

But Bronte isn't as interesting a character as the showrunners think she is. She's a lot like Beck (Elizabeth Lail) from Season 1, except worse because she initially believes Joe's not as bad as people are telling her. In fact, the last five episodes of the season are all about how Bronte comes to believe what all the other women in Joe's life have already concluded. It's tedious and exhausting. And while it could be that 10 episodes was just too long for this season, even then the emphasis of those final episodes feels like a betrayal of what came before it. There's too much focus on others and too little focus on Joe, and though Joe certainly deserves his fate, I want to see what Joe thinks about others turning on him, how he fights their fury, and what twisted ways he makes sense of his situation. Not Bronte's tidy summation at the end.

Despite those final five episodes, I still love "You." Not because Joe is a lovable character, but because the show presented a chilling vision of a sociopathic man who mistakes obsession for love and murder for protection, insisting that he wanted to be a savoir for the woman he loves while he managed to curate a version of her life through killing. Every season but the first diverged from the books more and more over time, but most of them were also wildly successful. While I prefer Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 are great too, and Season 4 is more good than bad. Even Season 5 has its moments, especially in the first five episodes.

The legacy of Joe Goldberg is somewhat tarnished by his final season; he goes out with a whimper instead of a bang. However, his impact has still been felt by those who enjoyed this series. Joe does wrong things for the wrong reasons, but he presents a fascinating character study of a disturbed white man. Like the teenager on "Adolescence," also on Netflix, he's a noxious male who doesn't completely understand his power or his place in society. "Adolescence" does this in a different way, but ultimately they both share a similar focus on toxic masculinity and a desire to understand what drives it.

"You" may not be entirely successful in its fifth season, but the series as a whole is bigger than the final installment. Ultimately, that's why fans will want to find out what happens to Joe, and that will guide their viewing far more than anything I have to say here. Love him or hate him, getting to hear Joe's thoughts as he goes about his business is creepy and intoxicating. I've loved the hangover it's given me, even as I'm glad there's no one in my real life like him.

All 10 episodes of "You" Season 5 hit Netflix on April 24.