‘You’ Season 5 Review: It’s Joever for Your Serial Killer’s Favorite Serial Killer [B]

“The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you.”

The story has come full circle for Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) as the murderous protagonist returns to New York City in the fifth and final season of You. Three years after Joe and his British bride Kate Lockwood promised to put the past behind them and make each other into good people, Kate has become the CEO of her dearly departed father’s company, enjoying fame and wealth as she quiets her conscience with corporate do-gooding. Joe is happy to be the supportive husband (“Get caught at one Vanity Fair photoshoot holding your wife’s purse and the world idealizes you…”) while she rebuilds their lives. Thanks to the protective cushion and privilege of affluence, not only does Joe get to return home, he is also freed from the burden of aliases and false personal histories, and reunited with Henry (Frankie DeMaio), the son he abandoned when he absconded to Europe.

Adapted from the novels by Caroline Kepnes, Joe’s story began in New York in 2018 when the bookshop owner met and fell in love with grad student and writer Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). Their ill-fated romance unleashed the murderer inside Joe. After killing Beck, he changed his name to Will and hid out in Los Angeles where he found love again, this time in the form of Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). But he got more than he bargained for with Love who had violent secrets of her own and their story ended in a quiet California suburb when Joe murdered Love, left Henry with two foster dads and followed yet another doomed lady, Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle) to Paris. But that ended poorly and quickly and Joe became Jonathan, a professor of English literature at a London university. There he was welcomed into a circle of trust fund babies and social climbers including Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), an art curator who, unsurprisingly, also hid a shameful past.

One of the immediate differences that sets You’s fifth season from the four prior is Joe’s own voice-over. In each previous season Joe narrates his inner monologue, an unending soliloquy always directed at the object of his desires, communicating to us the viewers the supposedly romantic and chivalrous ways he inserted himself into women’s stories, telling them their value while protecting them from undeserving men. But there is a shift now. All the years Joe has been behaving himself, the inner monologue has receded even more inward. Now he talks to himself. Reading books with Henry at bedtime, he vows to himself that he’ll give his son the childhood he never had. When he encounters an uncooperative city employee in a fancy restroom, he praises himself for listening to his wife and walking away. It is a new tone. For the first time we aren’t just listening to what Joe thinks about other people. Now we hear what he truly thinks and believes about himself. It is unnerving to listen to a sociopath who has become totally convinced of his own mythological heroism.

Of course, after three years of peace and plenty, something has to upset the balance. Kate’s half-brother Teddy (a great but underutilized Griffin Matthews) has gotten wind of a forthcoming hit piece. Someone close to Kate has gone to the press with the pipeline story, the very thing that motivates all of Kate’s philanthropy. The already precarious Lockwood family dynamics are thrown fully out of balance when it appears Uncle Bob (Michael Dempsey), one of Kate’s most ardent supporters, has been working with her twin half-sisters Maddie and Reagan (both played by Anna Camp) to oust Kate and get the corporation back to what it’s supposed to be doing: making money instead of giving it away.

Anna Camp is in full soap opera glory, relishing the dual roles of Maddie, the lovably ditzy party girl, and Reagan, the evil twin who bullies and belittles and harbors a grudge against Kate for taking over the company she has devoted her life to. Camp navigates the two very different women with so much melodramatic humor that it’s mesmerizing watching her shift from one personality to the other and back. Give these ladies their own show!

On the other hand, we need more of Griffin Matthews’s Teddy, not only because he’s good, but because the character just deserves more time. Teddy is Kate’s right hand, and because the only reason the illegitimate (and gay and Black) son of Tom Lockwood has any place in the family is because Kate demanded it, he remains her unfailingly loyal protector. It would have been nice to see him follow through on this loyalty in more significant ways than cleaning up a media leak and babysitting.

When we met Kate last season, she wanted nothing to do with the family business. A child prodigy with a brain for math and science, teenage Kate designed a pipeline that was responsible for causing cancer in children. Her age and the fact that her father was the one who falsified a report about water toxicity does not assuage her guilt and the idea of the story becoming public proves to be too much. Especially for a billionaire CEO with a murderer for a husband who could easily make sure it never becomes a front page story. Kate and Joe have their own version of catch-and-kill when it comes to scandalous news.

The choice creates a fracture in the bonds forged from shared dark pasts. Kate wants to move on from the situation. Murder cannot be the way forward. They promised each other they wouldn’t be those people. But Joe is reawakened. After three years of suppression, he’s ready to be himself – truly himself – again.

On his path to self-rediscovery, Joe spends time inside his shuttered – but not empty – bookstore, Mooney’s. One night he encounters Bronte (Madeline Brewer), a young transient who has been breaking into the shop to borrow old books and occasionally crash on nights she’s been fighting with her terrible boyfriend. While the stability of Joe’s home life is a bit less sure now, Bronte arrives as a manic pixie dream girl, an orphaned wisp who debates Ibsen’s feminism, misquotes Emily Dickinson, and rhapsodizes over a manuscript of Joe’s she found in a drawer. Charmed by the old store, she convinces him not to sell the place but to reopen it.

The store is one of many ghosts from the past that show up throughout season five. For Joe Goldberg, the series ends where it began, not only in physical location but with the resurfacing of past bad deeds. He finds himself confronted with memories, with facts, with people he hurt. It’s surprising that after four seasons inside Joe’s head, there is still more for us to learn about him. To learn what he was really thinking when he committed his various crimes, realizing that he was gaslighting us, the audience, all along. It is Badgley’s best season because he is finally unleashed to show off a full range of passion, desperation, and fear in addition to his usual infatuation, angst, and self-preservation. There is something deeper and Badgley brings it screaming to the surface.

One of the things that has made You a strange experience over the last seven years has been in listening to how people discuss the show. It could be a blurring of the lines between Joe Goldberg and Penn Badgley, but early on it was a common refrain to hear fans say things like, “Yes he’s a stalker but I love him anyway.”  Countless articles and interviews have been devoted to questions about Joe’s potential for redemption and the belief that he really does just love so deeply that he can’t help himself. The final season seems almost obsessed with setting the record straight on Joe, making sure there is no room to question whether he is good or bad. The storytelling starts to get a bit repetitive but the payoff comes from watching the people around him navigate what they know and what they feel. In the end the real question is not whether Joe deserves to pay for his crimes but rather what is a fitting punishment? And who gets to decide?

In its fifth season, You manages a few final surprises. It is trashy television at its finest, campy and over-the-top, yet provocative and delicious. It is a satisfying conclusion at the end of a very twisted tale.

Grade: B

The fifth and final season of You is now available to stream on Netflix.

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Karen Peterson

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