You Should’ve Aimed Higher

Spoilers follow for the You series finale.

So this is how Joe Goldberg’s story ends: with a public trial that condemns him to life in prison, devoid of touch and women to obsess over, but not before Bronte, his latest infatuation, shoots off his dick and his gored groin becomes the centerpiece for a viral video of his arrest. This arrangement of justice is true to form for You, which traffics in swooning gestures and cute, tidy outcomes for its protago-villain. Speaking with Deadline, Penn Badgley, who plays Joe, contextualized the choice against a larger cultural reckoning with “bad men.” “It does become a question of, ‘What do we do with people like Joe?’” he says. “If somebody was to kill him — and it would be a woman, right — well then actually now what you’ve burdened her with is having committed murder. Torture? Uh, okay, same thing. Prison? Eh, feels a bit not enough. So what do you do?” And thus they landed on the ruination of his junk.

It’s a splashy climax, and pretty amusing, too. Clad in nothing but his underwear, Joe pursues Bronte through the woods like a demon, and Badgley goes hard on making Joe sound like a teeny, whiny baby. “Kill me,” he says, voice squeaking once he realizes he’s been caught. “Please. I know you have it in you!” (Badgley has been consistently great throughout the series, and in a just world he would be in the Emmys conversation.) The move to maim his member also places Joe within the long tradition of castration as the worst possible thing you could do to a dude onscreen. Think back to Theon Greyjoy’s neutering on Game of Thrones, which plays out as the central pillar of his torturer’s campaign to annihilate the character’s sense of self, or the famously thorny scene in Pulp Fiction where Marsellus Wallace exacts revenge on his rapist by firing a shotgun at the guy’s genitals. Castration recurs in pop culture as comeuppance for men who inflict or threaten violence on women: Recall Robocop blasting the family jewels off a nameless criminal attempting to sexually assault a woman on the street or the sequence in Hard Candy where 14-year-old Hayley convinces the pedophile she’s torturing that she’s surgically removing his testicles.

There’s a straightforward logic in subjecting Joe to the same fate; the guy is a warped embodiment of the “but I’m one of the good ones” softboi misogynist who in this case also happens to be a serial killer. There’s narrative justice in lumping him with the weasel, the depraved, the criminal, the pedophile. Yet given everything creators Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti have communicated about Joe over the show’s five seasons, castration doesn’t quite feel satisfying as a proportional symbolic response to Joe’s tenure of terror. Shooting his dick off is a great punchline, but it’s imprecise.

What made Joe so distinctive as the show’s central figure isn’t just that he’s a serial killer. It’s that he constructs fantasies and narratives about himself to justify his actions. In his mind, he kidnaps, tortures, and kills countless others in the service of love, reframing his use of violence within an internal logic of self-defense or an expression of trauma-induced mental sickness. In this final season, Joe’s internal narrative takes on a valence of self-determination: His violent urges are immutable parts of himself, so leaning into them amounts to a form of radical self-acceptance, and unleashing them against people who “deserve it” (abusive boyfriends, evil executives, smarmy therapists) is analogous to a harm-reduction technique. When it comes to the lovers he’s destroyed, well, there’s plenty to rationalize there, too: Beck didn’t measure up, Love also turned out to be a killer, Kate never accepted him anyway. (Though Marienne didn’t actually die at the end of the fourth season, you figure he’d chalk up her apparent overdose as an accident. Whoopsie.) The beating heart of his monstrosity isn’t his sexual cravings but his sense of romanticism and righteousness, the things that make Joe so compelling as a metaphor for very real men.

Dickless Joe would’ve been a satisfying payoff if You was just contained to its first season. There’s a magic trick to building a story around the villain, and if justice is the endgame, it really should be doled out expeditiously; otherwise, the narrative loses its moral authority of fundamental opposition to its central character. But You went on for four more seasons, and the task of producing a proportionally satisfying comeuppance grew more complicated with each Joe getaway. There’s also the fact that the series is so darn entertaining, an outcome predicated on eliciting an affinity for Joe by virtue of his positioning as the story’s main point of view, his (perfectly reasonable!) class critiques as he infiltrates various glamorous worlds, and the procession of idiots who parade into his life as plot hurdles to navigate (or kill). It’s slippery to make a villain both your protagonist and your target of deconstruction, and the more story You gives Joe, the harder it becomes for it to also challenge the mythologies protecting dangerous men like him. It also gets more difficult to point the finger at society for creating conditions that enable behavior like this when that really means you’re pointing the finger at viewers for wanting to root for someone like Joe. You can’t reap the rewards of successfully making him a protagonist while angsting against the audience feedback loop producing those rewards.

If you boil down Joe’s romantic fantasies as a mere cover for what he always was — a predator acting on violent sexual urges — you could argue that castration serves as a fitting symbol for his atrocities. But for that to really work, You needed to spend a lot more time unpacking Joe’s downfall, which is ultimately compressed into a ten-minute-ish coda slapped on the very end of the series finale. If the fundamental project was to deconstruct Joe’s self-mythologizing, there should’ve been a whole episode forcing him to confront his own monstrosity. (I guess I’m saying You’s series finale should’ve taken a thing or two from Seinfeld’s.)

The more You fleshed Joe out as a character, the bigger the distance grew between him and what he symbolizes: the threat of how any decent-seeming man could, within the space of a heartbeat, reveal himself to be a monster all along, a monster who believes himself to be the hero of his own romantic story with such ferocity that he’s able to convince others to join him in his fantasy. “What is wrong with me that I know who you are and part of me can still feel this good?” Bronte wonders in the finale, even as she prepares to take Joe down. “But who doesn’t love to be loved?” Of course, it’s not really her fault, or the fault of any of the other women who fell victim to his carnage. As she later screams, the fantasy of men like him is how women deal with the reality of men like him — a fantasy he’s all too eager to speak into being. She should’ve aimed for his mouth instead.