Does Kate Lockwood Die In Netflix's You Season 5?

Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Richie) is Joe Goldberg's (Penn Badgley) obsession in Season 4 of "You" — the messed-up but compelling series from Netflix — and she hearts him right back. In fact, the pair gets married and moves to New York City by the end of the season so Kate can take over her father's company (after Joe kills him). But the path of true love never did run smoothly, and even though the two are still married in Season 5, Kate wants him dead after he kills her uncle at her bidding. Somehow that act makes her snap out of it; she now realizes that Joe is no prince. 

No longer under Joe's spell anymore, she, along with Season 4 character Nadia Farran (Amy-Leigh Hickman) and Season 3 love interest Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle), has him in the glass cage in the basement of his bookstore, Mooney's. Kate is about to shoot Joe, until he turns the tables on them. Joe not only manages to escape, he also gets the gun away from Kate and shoots her in the abdomen. Then Maddie Lockwood (Anna Camp) comes along and sets the whole bookstore on fire, making matters much worse.

But while things look dire, somehow Kate makes it out alive — no thanks to Joe or his new love, Bronte (Madeline Brewer). And even though Kate and Joe made an earlier pact to make each other better, that went up in smoke too, so Kate doesn't mourn Joe's eventual incarceration. Instead, she celebrates walking through the fire to reclaim her life.

We don't really know how Kate survived the fire, just that she did. She appears in a coda in the Season 5 finale episode, titled "Finale," and we see a glimpse of her life after Joe goes to jail — but in the bookstore in Episode 9, "Trial of the Furies," things don't look so good.

Bronte comes into the bookstore after it goes up in flames and finds Joe and Kate lying side by side. Bronte tries to save Kate first, but between the fact that Joe shot her and the subsequent fire, Kate is unresponsive. So Bronte helps Joe out of the store while leaving Kate behind. Kate's prognosis doesn't seem rosy, and since the fire department and paramedics don't make it to the bookstore that quickly, it seems surprising that she survives at all. However, we don't know how much time passes until that day when we see her in the coda or what she had to do to survive, so it's possible, it just doesn't seem exceedingly likely.

Charlotte Richie, who has played Kate since Season 4, said she would have been fine with Kate dying, because like Joe, her character did some truly terrible things. "I really don't believe in people dying because they've done bad things, but in the world of the justice of this show, there's such a redemptive element to Kate's demise that it would've been OK," she told Business Insider. "She's done some pretty dastardly things and she's got herself into scrapes and been responsible for a lot of people's downfalls."

Bronte narrates the coda at the end of the "You" Season 5 finale, covering everyone who survived Joe's reign of terror. And though it's the first we hear of Kate since we saw her passed out as the bookstore went up in flames around her, it turns out she's just fine. Kate does have burn scars from the incident, but Bronte informs us that she wears them proudly, like a badge of penance for what she survived.

Kate doesn't take over the CEO job at her family's company again. Instead, she leaves that to Teddy (Griffin Matthews), her half-brother, who informs her in the coda that he's taken the company fully nonprofit. Kate is thrilled by this, though she herself is more interested in returning to her first love and what she was doing in London: running an art gallery. She's particularly interested in helping Marienne, an artist that was affected by Joe but no longer fears for her life when she puts out her paintings.

Kate also gets custody of Joe's son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio), who is a happy, seemingly well-adjusted child who will hopefully not make any of the mistakes that his father did.