You Season 5 Review: A Conclusion that Reflects on Obsession and Society’s Dark Fascinations

Netflix’s You has always been a series that attracts as much introspection as it does suspense. Now, with its fifth and final season, it pulls viewers back to the city where Joe Goldberg’s journey began. This season closes the chapter with a story that is both chilling and startlingly self-aware, asking us to reflect not just on the character’s descent, but on why we have found ourselves captivated by it in the first place. Our review of You season 5 examines how well it works as a conclusion for the series.

Joe returns to New York City, theoretically reformed and seeking normalcy. Married to the successful and powerful Kate Lockwood, he is anchored by their young son Henry, and works at the familiar Mooney’s bookstore. This setup hints at stability, a life reset after years of chaos and violence. The details are convincing: Joe seems grounded, committed to being a good father, and his relationship carries the aura of respectability. Yet beneath this quiet surface, the show seeds unease. A new arrival, Bronte, a young writer, stirs up the familiar specter of obsession that has followed Joe everywhere. In Joe’s world, every attempt at redemption or self-control eventually slips back into destructive habit. This sense of inevitability hangs over the entire season, grounding every seeming moment of peace in the threat of relapse.

Penn Badgley’s performance remains central, playing Joe with a quiet, haunted quality that refuses easy categorization. Joe is neither a simple monster nor a redeemed antihero. Instead, his contradictions—his longing for love, his capacity for violence, his desperate rationalizations—are foregrounded and examined.

Where earlier seasons sometimes lingered on his charisma or romantic potential, this final arc strips away any lingering illusions. Joe’s habits are revealed as compulsive wounds that never heal, cycling through the same patterns despite every promise of change.

The season’s most compelling developments lie not in Joe himself, but in those he orbits. Here, the series pivots with new urgency, placing female empowerment and survivor voices at center stage. Kate emerges as a significant foil. Unlike women in Joe’s past, she does not passively fall into the role of victim or savior. Instead, she is assertive, complex, and resolutely in control of her own story. Her marriage with Joe—propped up by her money and influence—appears pristine on the outside but is rife with suppressed conflict and emotional withdrawal. Kate senses Joe’s capacity for harm and, rather than succumbing to it, creates boundaries for her own survival.

Supporting characters add further layers. Kate’s twin sisters, played energetically by Anna Camp, complicate Joe’s world in unexpected ways. Reagan is composed, disciplined, and calculating, while Maddie radiates fragility and need. Joe’s manipulations, as always, set off a chain reaction, forcing Maddie into impersonating Reagan and escalating the psychological tension. These dynamics freshen the narrative, preventing the story from falling into familiar traps and offering a spotlight to female agency and resistance.

The writers show a keen understanding of audience expectations. This season is deeply self-aware, often poking fun at the conventions it has employed in the past. For example, Joe tries his hand at writing a vampire novel—a direct and frequently witty allusion to his own predatory nature that nods to the tradition of metafiction. This meta-commentary both entertains and teases, sometimes veering into self-parody but mostly reminding us of the blurred lines between entertainment and critique.

At its heart, season five is an exploration of toxic masculinity and the cultural narratives that allow it to slip by unchallenged. Joe’s charisma, as rendered by Badgley’s careful performance, is deeply unsettling. The story resists easy condemnation—it doesn’t present Joe as a monster so much as a mirror held up to a society that is deeply conflicted about its own values. The show refuses both easy villainy and cheap redemption. This refusal creates space for genuine ambiguity, challenging viewers to examine their own attraction to dark, flawed men and the media that lifts them up.

Visually, the season sticks to the show’s reliable palette. The cinematography is crisp, the lighting moody—shadows pool around the characters, while careful framing keeps the suspense taut. The use of atmospheric music maintains tension even as some story arcs struggle with repetition or pacing. Badgley brings subtle intensity, while new supporting players lend energy where needed, especially through Anna Camp’s dynamic rendering of Kate’s sisters.

Yet beneath the surface polish, the writing doesn’t always leap out. Joe’s internal narration, which was once darkly witty and revealing, becomes increasingly repetitive. The script circles the same trains of thought, indicating the exhaustion of both character and premise. Joe’s inability to change is mirrored in the series’ struggle to reinvigorate a story built around his unchanging nature.

As the finale approaches, the narrative focus shifts. The victims, not Joe, come to occupy center stage—especially Beck, who serves almost as a guiding conscience, appearing in fragments of memory and guilt. Joe’s final fate is paradoxical: locked away, physically isolated, but still exalted by a cohort of public admirers. The show’s last wink at the audience is explicit—Joe turns the accusation back on us, suggesting that our appetite for his story is not so different from the cult mentality that allowed him to thrive.

This closing choice feels necessary. To grant Joe neat justice—either ruin or absolution—would risk simplifying what the show has always been about. Instead, the unresolved ending forces us to remain uncomfortable, to look at the systems that enable toxic masculinity and the cultural air that continues to romanticize harm. By not resolving Joe completely, the show becomes a cautionary fable, asking us to reexamine the very stories we consume.

Despite moments of fatigue and meta self-indulgence, the series ends on a striking affirmation of resilience. Kate’s growing confidence, Bronte’s ingenuity, and the unified voices of those harmed chart a way forward. Their collective healing feels authentic, if not always easy, and suggests that lasting change depends on making space for survivor narratives—on listening, validating, and believing the stories that have too often been buried beneath a focus on abusers.

Parallel to these onscreen events, the show also addresses why audiences—including those of us with feminist instincts—find ourselves drawn in by toxic stories. Joe’s appeal is, in some ways, a reflection of broader cultural programming: the fantasy of a flawed romantic savior, the allure of danger masquerading as love. Unpacking this is not easy; it means owning up to the ways we have all internalized and perpetuated damaging myths. Joe, as the show reveals, is attractive not for who he is, but for the longing he represents—and for the fantasies that so often paper over real violence and danger.

The narrative is unflinching about what’s at stake. Society, it suggests, is all too willing to downplay male aggression, to romanticize predation in the guise of passion.

The story shows how “love” is used as a smokescreen for controlling and harmful behavior, and how cultural scripts for men reward dominance, often at the expense of vulnerable women. Joe’s manipulations, though dramatized, echo far too many real situations where abusers are shielded by their own privilege and social camouflage.

The myth of the calculating genius, the seductive master manipulator, is also upended. Joe’s supposed intelligence is revealed as little more than an absence of fear and a knack for exploiting systems built to protect him—a sharp comment on how privilege, not talent, is what often shields predators from consequences.

In addition, the show confronts the messy reality of cycles of abuse. Not all harm is constant or obvious. Most abusers alternate affection and harm, creating tangled traps that make escape and even recognition difficult for victims. The story shows why denial is often the hardest barrier to break—when love and violence are intertwined, the lines become perilously blurred.

The conclusion is quietly radical. Survival, the show insists, does not hinge on rescue by someone else—not a lover, not a family member, not a knight in shining armor.

Instead, real safety and happiness are found in self-acceptance and the steady work of healing. Joe’s story is laid to rest not by defeating him, but by shifting the narrative to those who are left behind—and allowing them sufficient space to find peace on their own terms.

The legacy of You is ultimately mixed but vital. Despite some repetition and the occasional stumble into spectacle, the series succeeds in holding up a mirror to the stories we love—and the dangers they carry when we forget to interrogate them. By shifting the focus to survivor voices, by warning against the myths that keep cycles of harm in place, it offers not just a conclusion, but a challenge. It asks us to think more carefully, to listen more closely, and to be wary of what lies beneath the myths we create.

Goodbye, Joe. Goodbye, You.