You Series-Finale Recap: The Once and Future Lonely Boy

What would be a fitting end for Joe and our series? We are asked this meta question several times throughout the finale, as if to prepare us for a conclusion the show knows won’t satisfy us. Is there such a thing as a satisfying conclusion to his story? Death is too easy; getting away with it is too bleak. Door number three is prison, but how does he get there?

As the finale begins, Joe’s a man on the lam with his beloved in the passenger seat. She fantasizes about shooting him, but she talks herself down: She wants answers first. As she puts it via voice-over, just to make sure we all get it, “How do I give you the ending you deserve?” I feel like a different show would be making a commentary on the female-coded desire for “closure” at the end of a toxic relationship: the delusion that if you ask the right questions in the right order, you will magically get the right answers. Then, and only then, will you be able to move on with your life — when in reality, you rarely, if ever, are going to get that, and if you insist upon it or wait for it, you will be trapped in that relationship (psychologically, if not physically) forever. But I think we’re supposed to be rooting for her, even though we already have all the answers she wants and she goes about this in the dumbest way possible. Sorry!!!

At least “Trial of the Furies” had a kind of poetic energy to it: Joe’s whole deal is that he operates alone and makes his romantic conquests feel alone, too; he isolates all of his female partners (and/or murders their friends) to convince them that he is their whole world. And the episode just before this one argued that an abusive man in that mold can be bested by women, plural, who are looking out for and working alongside one another. Whereas this episode asks, What if this one friendless girl took her serial-killer boyfriend someplace off the grid with nothing but a gun in her backpack, a song in her heart, and the deluded belief that she would be able to get him to … confess? And then she’d just kill him, except actually she realizes along the way that death is too easy for him and she doesn’t want to be a murderer? Truly, what was the vision here? And did she not even tell Dom where she was going? Kate and Nadia’s plan had flaws, but at least they had a plan and each other. Bronte’s got nothing; in this instance, she has no one to blame for that but herself!

Even Joe has an ally here: his old buddy Will Bettleheim (Robin Lord Taylor), whose identity he stole when he moved to L.A. but whom Joe allowed to live because he proved himself to be useful in the crafting-a-new-identity department. Will is the guy who would have arranged that fake boating accident for Reagan; now he’s making Joe and Louise new passports with the names Ezra and Ella (from their vampire erotica, barf) and figuring out a way for Joe to speak to his son one last time.

At a gas station, Louise goes inside to buy snacks and bumps into a state trooper. Does she tell him, “Tail this car because this guy is going to kill me?” No. Instead, she just buys Beck’s book, which is miraculously available for sale here, and eyes one of those hot-pink stabby rings for girls to fight off would-be assailants. Then she and Joe drive to the rental they’ll be squatting in. Boy, will those hosts regret not installing more security!

Louise sees the primary bedroom and knows that her serial-killer fiancé will want to have sex with her, but she can barely fake her way through a kiss, so she has to “end this” tonight. Over dinner, which is delicious (Louise, via voice-over: “Probably learned this from your first dead wife”), these two have a loaded conversation about how the stories they’re writing will end. Louise says Joe’s protagonist should probably face “some kind of reckoning,” prompting Joe to drop the pretense that they are talking about fiction. Isn’t losing his SON and his BOOKSTORE enough RECKONING?! His human aquarium was in there!! Louise pivots to saying she’s worried about her fate: Immortality isn’t real. In Joe’s story, does she make it?

Joe, enchanted again by the broken-bird bit that reeled him in in the first place, wants to reassure her. He offers “a taste of our future,” and takes her out in a rowboat. Sure, cute, whatever. She is still thinking about Beck. Is anyone else finding these hyperliteral needle drops a little bit distracting? “Guilty As Sin” followed by “Happier Than Ever”? Sounds expensive!

We get back to the house and to Louise’s big plan, which is to pull the gun on Joe when he is going down on her. WHY? He could so easily grab that gun from her!! Just an incredibly weak position from which to do this. She demands he tell her how he killed Beck; then she chucks Beck’s book at him and orders him to redact himself from it. Wow, this is how it feels to be told to make cuts from your draft, I say to myself as Joe strikes through his precious prose at gunpoint. I laughed out loud at Joe saying, “She wrote this one in the cage.” Is he nostalgic for Beck’s time in the human aquarium?

Even as Louise aims a gun at his head, Joe can sense her deeper weakness for him. Why did she come here with him alone when she could’ve let him die in the fire? GREAT QUESTION, JOE. He says he knows it’s because she doesn’t really want him gone: “No one will ever love you like I do!” Yeah, she can only hope! Joe professes his devotion as Louise weeps and I go insane. Then Joe’s phone buzzes, and he pleads with Louise to be allowed to answer because it could be his son, and it is: Will hacked into Henry’s video game. Good thing your pretentious child was allowed some much-needed therapeutic screen time, Joe!

Henry, who is going to be so deeply messed up by all of this, reports that he is at home with Uncle Teddy, who we see talking to U.S. Marshals. Henry asks, “What did you do to Mommy?” Joe is utterly unprepared for this, which … you really didn’t think that was going to come up? Henry says something implausibly poignant about monsters in his room and how Joe was the monster all along. You know, the sort of thing kids say. Then, he disconnects the call. This is the perfect time to shoot him in the head and make it look like a suicide. Joe is busy blaming this on Henry’s mother — and this time he means Love, not Kate; Love’s dying words to Joe were that his son would know Joe was a monster. Say what you will about Love Quinn (she was my favorite!), but she really knew what she was talking about.

Ignoring Maddie’s counsel, Joe breaks down in sobs. “I try to love! Every time, it falls apart!” Passive voice doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Finally, Joe concludes: “It’s me. I’m unlovable.” Louise still has the gun aimed at him. “I don’t know what you deserve, Joe,” she says, but she shouts that he is “not the fucking victim.” At long last, she says she is calling the cops. Joe warns her that it won’t make any difference; after all, he killed Clayton on-camera, and he’s still here. Because Louise is committed to saying some big important thing rather than just, you know, incapacitating him by shooting him in the leg to secure her own safety until the police arrive, she announces that she has turned on him so the world can too. So Joe attacks her.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I appreciated the light going in and out here, so we did not need to watch this violent, disturbing assault directly. The rest of this sequence obeys my Inviolable Rules of Television Health and Medicine, which includes this stipulation regarding gunshots: No matter how wounded someone is, they will always be able to run to keep the suspense up and to speak clearly until their last breath. As Joe chases Louise in and out of the house, we hear Joe’s voice-over confirming what I suspected: He did fuck up her ankle! Even though “I didn’t actually think it would help me kill you one day.”

Louise manages to call 911. The phone is lost in the grass, but I believe we can trust it’s picking up their audio. A storm is coming, and so are the police. Just one more time, in case we’ve all missed the memo, Louise calls Joe “a pathetic misogynist.” Joe sprints at her and tackles her. With the craziest of crazy eyes, he says, “You want to know how I killed Beck? I’ll show you!” But then she stabs him in the neck with the stabby thing from the gas station! Joe chases her into the pond, where she appears to drown; sirens wail as the cops arrive. Joe kills the first officer who finds him with the shockingly versatile stabby thing from the gas station — strong product placement for gas-station stabby things here.

Joe hears the sound of a gun cocking. When he turns around, he sees Louise, who is extremely not drowned, proclaiming that her name is LOUISE. She can see the light: “The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you.” He begs to be killed, but she refuses. She wants to resign Joe to his idea of hell: living alone forever, subject to relentless media attention from a trial, shown to all the world as exactly who he really is. It’s all very muddy and dramatic. He lunges at her one last time, she shoots him, and …

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” starts playing, and I, again, burst out laughing. Are these music cues intended to be comedic? Please discuss in the comments! Anyway, we’re in court. Joe is in a suit. Though I get why Louise went this route, I do think people are going to looooove him. He’s going to get the “sexy psycho killer” media treatment for sure. Ironically, given the platform where this series is airing, someone like Joe would 100 percent be the subject of several Netflix documentaries.

The best part of this — true to You, in that it’s almost eye-rollingly literal, but it’s the right amount of gruesome and fun, so it’s actually perfect — is that Louise’s last bullet shot Joe’s dick off. After a whole season of crying about being emasculated! Even if he were free, Joe would never be able to dickmatize a woman again, and I think that’s beautiful.

Louise tells us via voice-over that Joe was convicted for the murders of Love and Beck; later we learn that Joe also got life without parole for the murders of Benji and Peach. More convictions are coming in; he’ll be in prison forever. Dr. Nicky’s conviction was vacated. Dom and Phoenix are on the podcast circuit, looking for their next Joe Goldberg, and I do think it’s … a choice … for this show to put internet sleuths and true-crime obsessives on a pedestal. Nadia is writing again and teaches English in women’s prisons. Harrison and Maddie are both free and clear; she’s expecting twins. Gretchen looks improbably blissful, but I sure do worry about her!

Kate survived (!) the fire that the media inaccurately monikered “Bronte’s Inferno.” As is required by my beloved Inviolable Rules of Television Health and Medicine, the scars from the fire left her beautiful face unscathed. She’s gone back to her gallerist work, championing the art of a no-longer-in-hiding Marienne. Teddy is CEO of some Lockwood corporation, which will be an entirely nonprofit. And look: His husband exists! How thrilling for him. Kate also has custody of Henry; so much for the Madre Linda dads, LOL. Joe’s “contributions” were pulled from Beck’s book and the new version is flying off the shelves.

Let’s catch up with Joe, shall we? He’s in a maximum-security prison. (I actually interviewed Penn Badgley a few days after he finished shooting You, and I wondered if the buzzcut was a character choice or just a post-series-healing thing. It was, in fact, a prison shave!) We spend what, for this show, is a stunning amount of time — a full minute! — in total silence.

Understandably, the series wants to go out with its signature voice-over, and so we hear from Joe one last time. He is reading The Executioner’s Song — can someone get this guy a book by a female author? The last person he needs to be reading is Norman Mailer, who famously, literally stabbed his wife — along with plenty of fan mail. I am not at all surprised to see that Joe is the object of many a prison pen pal’s affection. I was hoping we would see him with the (far more likely) avalanche of fan mail and that the last moment of the series would be Joe responding to one of these lustful fans with a letter that opened, “Hello, You.”

Instead we get Joe saying his punishment is worse than he could have imagined. He knows he’ll be lonely forever. (Full circle/Leo pointing moment!) Just one more aggressively on-the-nose needle drop before we go as “Creep,” by Radiohead, starts to play, and Joe contemplates how maybe the problem is, like, society. Maybe he’s not the problem, okay? Maybe we’re the problem.

Okay, no bad ideas in brainstorming, but … are we, Joe? I’ve never built a human aquarium. Delusional ‘til the last. In the end, You looks at the timeless “I can fix him” misconception and definitively says, “No, you really can’t.”