You Season 5 TV Review: Joe is back in New York for the final season of the Netflix serial killer series

Plot: In the epic fifth and final season, Joe Goldberg returns to New York to enjoy his happily ever after… until his perfect life is threatened by the ghosts of his past and his own dark desires.

Review: The Netflix series You has been a consistent hit for the streaming platform after it acquired the series from Lifetime after the network aired the first season in 2018. Based on the novel by Caroline Kepnes, You follows bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), who falls in love with the beautiful Guinivere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), only to be revealed as a serial killer. The twist on conventional romance with a murderous thriller element made for unique storytelling. The subsequent seasons raised the bar on twisted love stories and buckets of blood, with each new chapter getting progressively more complex and bordering on humorous. For the fourth season, You shifted its setting to Europe and adopted more of a mystery tone with Joe as something of an anti-hero. For the fifth and final season, Joe returns to his old killing grounds of New York City for a mix of over-the-top plotlines that connect everything back to the first season to bring closure for audiences. The result is an uneven but entertaining blend of narratives that brings back references across the entire series with a powerful ending that works far better than I anticipated.

Joe Goldberg is a monster. He is undoubtedly a bad guy, despite the voice-over narration that gives the audience a glimpse inside his twisted logic for his actions. Joe easily falls in love multiple times across the five seasons of You, but his marriage to Kate Galvin-Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie) at the end of the fourth season finally seemed to put a balance in place that removed his need to kill. The beginning of the fifth season finds Joe and Kate living the perfect life in NYC as a power couple. Kate is CEO of her family company, and Joe, her adoring husband, appears on magazine covers and lives life amongst the upper one percent. Kate’s family is full of challenging personalities, including CFO Raegan, PR rep Maddie (played by Anna Camp), and her half-brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews). Joe can feed his inner demons when a challenge arises that could risk their life and security. At first, the final season of You feels like Succession crossed with Dexter, but it is just the beginning of what is in store.

While Joe’s idyllic life is undergoing some challenges, he returns periodically to the shuttered bookstore, Mooney’s, where the series began. There, Joe runs into Bronte (Madeline Brewer) with whom he shares an immediate spark and connection. I immediately felt “here we go again” as Joe’s hopeless romantic tendencies kick back into gear, and You balances Joe’s rich lifestyle with Kate alongside a burgeoning dynamic with Bronte. Over the ten-episode season, both relationships converge unexpectedly, bringing back Joe’s past victims from all four prior seasons into a showdown that could mean the end of Joe’s secret world. Madeline Brewer is fantastic as Bronte, and she gets a presence that no other character has gotten on You before, which makes her the strongest partner Joe has yet shared the screen with. That contrasts with Charlotte Ritchie’s balance with Joe and gives the series a triangle similar to the one Joe shared with Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle) in the third season.

You has long relied on audiences loving Joe Goldberg, or at least hating that they love him. Penn Badgley effortlessly becomes Joe and transforms from season to season as the need for shifts arises. This season has a solid ensemble, especially thanks to Anna Camp and Madeline Brewer, who bring some much-needed energy to the series. This season is darkly funnier than ever, but sometimes I am unsure if the series is working as a satire or if it is pure pulpy fun. Either way, Badgley brings back moments from throughout the series that combine for one hell of a final episode. What happens to Joe and how it happens will divide audiences, but few series have stuck the landing, and the final fifteen minutes of the series finale manage to. That being said, a lot is thrown into this run of story that sometimes feels overstuffed and jammed with everything the writing team felt needed to be said and could have benefited from streamlining some elements or adding another episode in the middle.

While series co-creator Sera Gamble left after the fourth season, there was concern that this final run would feel out of sync with the rest of the series. Thankfully, showrunners Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo do justice by giving You a proper send-off that works as fan service for commitment to the first four seasons while incorporating a solid original narrative that brings everything full circle. There are a lot of connections and cameos I will not spoil here, but fans of You will be very happy with them. The writing team, led by Foley and Lo, includes Hillary Benefiel, Kelli Breslin, Neil Reynolds, Maren Caldwell, Kara Lee Corthron, Dylan Cohen, Amanda Johnson-Zetterstrom, Mairin Reed, AB Chao, and Leo Richardson. Directors include Marcos Siega, Pete Chatmon, So Yong Kim, Maggie Carey, Gaby Dellal, Erica Dunton, Charyl Dunye, and Lee Toland Krieger. This crew does a solid job of returning You to New York City and delivering a full circle season connected back to how it all started.

You has always been a twisted sibling to Dexter, another series with a dedicated fanbase that never quite worked for me like it did for general audiences. The constant narration sometimes grates, but I appreciated how Penn Badgley approached his commentary through the years. The final season of You tends to shift tone and approach multiple times through the ten-episode run, which means lots of twists and cliffhangers leading to the story’s conclusion. Some of them work better than others, but while the journey may be uneven, the final episode is one of the better series finales I have seen in a while. Fans will have their own take on whether they like how You closes out, but I appreciate the commitment to telling this story in a way that is bold and unexpected.

The final season of You premieres on April 24th on Netflix.

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