This article contains discussions of child abuse and suicide.
Stop reading this right now if you haven’t finished all of “You” — spoilers are coming!
The fifth and final season of “You,” the Netflix series that lets noted Taylor Swift fan Penn Badgley play a serial killer convinced he’s actually some sort of white knight, is finally out … which means we can finally assess Joe Goldberg’s (Badgley) body count. No, I don’t mean how many people Joe has dated throughout the series; I’m talking about how many people he’s killed.
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In case you’ve forgotten exactly what went down in the show’s first four seasons, here’s the overview. Joe Goldberg, who presents himself as a hopeless romantic but actually seems to love murder much more than he loves love, had a very difficult childhood; his biological father abused both him and his mother, and ultimately, a young Joe shoots and kills him. Joe is then adopted by Mark Blum’s bookstore owner Mr. Mooney, which is why Joe is running the New York City store, Mooney’s, at the outset of season 1 when he meets a charming, beautiful aspiring writer named Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). He kills her too (once she figures out that he’s a creep and murderer by discovering that he has a plexiglass cage in the basement of the bookstore where he keeps his victims).
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That cage is Joe’s constant. It goes with him to Los Angeles in season 2, the fictional community of Madre Linda, California when he settles down with his wife Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) in season 3, to London in season 4 when he assumes a new identity across the pond after killing Love (and her brother), and back to New York in season 5 when he returns to the Big Apple with his wealthy and seemingly understanding wife Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie). All in all, before season 5 of “You,” Joe kills 18 people, including Beck’s friend Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell), Kate’s boyfriend Malcolm (Stephen Hagan), author Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), and more. So what about season 5?
Who does Joe Goldberg kill in Season 5 of You?
When Joe and Kate settle in New York, the two are working together to ensure that nobody finds out that Joe has ever murdered anyone, including Rhys Montrose (and Kate’s own father Tom Lockwood, played in season 4 by Greg Kinnear). Unfortunately, a high-ranking executive at Lockwood Industries — which Kate now runs — named Bob (Michael Dempsey) indicates that he knows a thing or two about Joe’s sordid past and the fact that Kate is covering it up, so what does Joe do? Obviously, he kills the guy and makes it look like Bob died by suicide.
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As season 5 progresses, Joe, true to form, becomes infatuated with a young aspiring playwright named Bronte (Madeline Brewer), who starts working with him at Mooney’s; after deciding that he is, in fact, in love with Bronte, he starts an affair with her and is characteristically driven absolutely nuts when she ghosts him. He tracks her down to a remote house owned by the parents of one of her friends, and when he finds Bronte there, he talks her back into the relationship … only to encounter her apparently cruel ex-boyfriend Clayton (Tom Francis) there. Joe cracks the guy’s skull like an egg during a physical fight, only to find a hostile Bronte — who targeted him because she was once friends with Beck and wanted to hold him accountable — and one of her friends recording the entire thing.
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Those are Joe’s two major kills during season 5 (he also kills a state trooper in the series finale in a desperate attempt to escape). So what happens to him as the series ends?
What happens to Joe Goldberg at the end of You?
Here’s the thing. Joe solves pretty much all of his problems by committing murder, and at a certain point, people are going to catch on. Eventually, Kate, Bronte, one of Joe’s former flames Marianne (Tati Gabrielle, rocking the same shaved head she sports in her role on “The Last of Us”), and a British university student he framed for her murder of her boyfriend named Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) all basically team up to trick him and take him down, though Bronte seems to have a change of heart after a fire at Mooney’s nearly kills her, Joe, and Kate. (We’re actually led to believe that Kate dies in the inferno, but it’s later revealed that she survived, albeit with some scarring that she wears as a badge of honor.) Bronte and Joe abscond to a house together to start a new life — after Joe, “freed” from his marriage to Kate, proposes to Bronte — but what he doesn’t know is that Bronte is still determined to reveal his true nature to the entire world.
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Bronte and Joe have a showdown at the rural property where he also appears to kill her by drowning her (after shooting her) — but like Kate, Bronte survives and gets the last word when she shoots Joe in, uh, his family jewels. Bronte ensures that justice is served, Kate raises Joe’s son Henry (Frankie DeMaio) in peace, and everyone gets a happy ending … except for Joe, who appears to be in solitary confinement with only letters from very intense female fans to keep him company. Considering that he’s killed over 20 people, this seems pretty reasonable.
“You” is streaming in its entirety on Netflix now.
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.
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