Diksha Sundriyal
The final season of Netflix’s ‘You’ wraps up the story of Joe Goldberg by referencing all the crimes he has committed in the series. It begins three years following the last season, when Joe and Kate left London and returned to New York to start anew. Now, Joe has everything he could ever want. He has a loving and powerful wife. He has his son, Henry, whose custody he got back, courtesy of the Lockwood family’s power. He even gets back Mooney’s after a fierce financial negotiation with the previous owner. Still, this is not enough for Joe.
There are days when Joe misses the man he used to be. He misses killing people, bad people, to be specific. This is why, when the opportunity strikes, Joe jumps at it. Kate’s decision to turn the Lockwood enterprise more philanthropic leads her family to turn against her. Her uncle, who used to back all of her choices, calls a no-confidence motion against her, behind her back. Moreover, he also digs up dirt from the pipeline project where several people, including kids, died, and it was all because of Kate. Discovering that her whole life can be derailed, Kate asks Joe to do his thing, even though she hesitates. After Joe kills her uncle, he is ecstatic because he gets to work on his dark impulses. But it scares away Kate, who cannot comprehend how he can enjoy such a thing.
This distance from Kate makes Joe fall in love with Bronte, a girl who enters his bookstore and immediately catches his fancy. She is passionate about the things Kate doesn’t care about. Moreover, she seems to have the same dark side as Joe, and he feels she is the only one who can understand him. The more he turns to her, the more he turns away from Kate. In the end, however, things go awry pretty fast as all the demons from Joe’s past come back to haunt him. Ultimately, he wishes to be killed, but fate has something else. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Bronte Spares Joe’s Life to Bring Him to Justice
In a major twist this season, Bronte is a deceiver. Her chance meeting with Joe wasn’t quite as she had already been working to expose him. It turns out that she used to be Beck’s student around the same time that she was dating Joe. Due to her mother’s bad health, she had to leave New York, but years later, when she discovered that Joe was back in town and was the most likely one to have murdered Beck, she decided to take revenge on him. Still, revenge didn’t mean killing him. Over time, Bronte discovered that the list of Joe’s crimes was incredibly long. Simply killing him would let him out too easily. She wanted him to stand trial for his crimes, to answer to the victims and their families, rather than get an easy way out by getting himself killed.
This is why she saves him from the fire started by Maddie. She helps him escape, letting him think he has gotten away with all his crimes and will receive a happy ending. More than all this, she wants his mark to be removed, especially from Beck’s book. So, she forces him to remove everything he had added to the book. However, before she can call the cops, he turns the tables on her and shoots her instead. It looks like Bronte will not survive the ordeal. But she placed a 911 call, and the cops arrived just in time. Joe even kills one of the cops. Bronte subdues him using the cop’s gun, but she does not shoot him. Even when he begs her to, she refuses to kill him, because she knows that this is his nightmare: to be thrown into a jail cell and suffer for the rest of his life, away from his son and no one to love him.
Meanwhile, the women he terrorised get another chance at life. Beck’s book is re-released with all of Joe’s lines cut out, and it sells even better than the first edition. Thus, Bronte pulls Beck out of Joe’s shadow, while also doing the same for herself. Kate flourishes in her life, and Nadia, too, turns around her life by going back to her writing and working with women who are processing their trauma. With Joe gone, Marienne is free to come back to public life. She does not have to fear being hunted down again. She comes into her own as she becomes the artist she was always meant to be. Kate encourages and supports her art, which truly showcases the bond the women have forged while trying to deal with the guy who did his best to destroy their lives.
Joe’s Popularity Soars as He Prepares to Spend the Rest of His Life in Prison
The thing that kept Joe and his crimes going all this time is that no one believed he was as bad as he was. Despite knowing about his dark side, women fell for him, either because they thought they could fix him or were just as bad as he was. The same seems to happen this season, too. Bronte enters the picture with the thought of bringing Joe to justice. But the more time she spends with him, the more she is caught up in his charms, and at one point, even she starts to wonder if he is innocent of all the crimes people say he has committed.
In the end, she has to learn the lesson the hard way when she is almost killed by him. When Joe goes to prison, all his crimes come to light, and the brutality of his actions is proven beyond a doubt. He is sent to jail for life, but even then, he receives fan mail from women who either believe they can fix him or those who think that he is innocent and did not commit any of those crimes. They fall for his charm even when he hasn’t met them. And then others fall for him because of his crimes. Ultimately, he gets a letter from one such woman as he rots in prison. He looks at the letters and wonders if this is the problem.
He wonders if the women in his life have pushed this behaviour on him, if they encouraged him when they should have stopped him. They idealised him when they should have held him accountable. In a classic Joe Goldberg fashion, he points the finger towards the audience, towards you, to reveal the audience’s nature and dark side, which they felt reflected through him and enjoyed when they should have abhorred him. This also shows that he has not learned anything so far. He continues to blame others for his follies. His mother, Beck, Love, Kate, and Bronte- he wanted all these women to love him for who he is, but he never bothered to reflect upon himself and ask if he should tame his dark side and work to be worthy of their acceptance.
What Happens to Kate and Her Company?
The season begins with Kate wanting to separate from her dark deeds and turn her father’s company into a philanthropic organisation. All this happens with significant resistance from her friends and family, but she is adamant about revamping herself and being a good person from now on. Amidst this, when she discovers what Joe is, she vows to make him pay, but she is also aware of her complicity. Still, she decides to do whatever it takes to bring him down. She goes as far as to decide to kill him, and she almost succeeds at it. But Joe, being Joe, ends up shooting her, and Maddie burns down the building, even though she didn’t know that Kate was also in there.
Eventually, Bronte manages to have Joe arrested, and Kate plays her part. While in Mooney’s basement, she gets Joe to talk about poisoning Love. She records his confession and sends it to Nadia, and later, the same recording becomes a part of the overwhelming mountain of evidence against him. The scars of the ordeal, physical and mental, take a toll on her. However, Kate does not allow herself to be bogged down by any of it. She wears the scars of the fire as a proud sign of having survived something catastrophic and come out of it a winner. She continues her philanthropic work and manages to make her company completely non-profit in the coming years. She enjoys the support of her friends and loved ones, and that’s all she cares for now.
Her half-sister, Maddie, also gets the happy ending she had always vied for. With Joe getting arrested, the truth about her twin’s death comes to light. Harrison, who had confessed to killing Raegan, is given his freedom. He and Maddie get married and soon get pregnant with twins. Maddie’s relationship with Kate has also improved significantly, and the sisters are on much better terms than they were before things went south with Joe committing his string of crimes. In all this, Joe becomes a distant memory for Kate, a reminder of the bad person she used to be and the good that has come from all her struggles.
What Happens to Henry? Does He Find the Truth About Joe?
A significant motivation for Joe this season was to stay with his son. He had left Henry previously when he had to flee to London. But now that he has his son back, he doesn’t want to separate from him under any circumstances. However, in the three years she spent with the boy, Kate became a mother figure to him, and she knew that leaving him in Joe’s care was not ideal. She doesn’t want to send the boy away, but if that’s what it takes to keep him away from his serial killer of a father, then that’s what she is ready to do. What works in her favor and against Joe is that Henry is old enough to understand all sorts of things now. This means that when his father is sent to prison for killing so many people, he has some inkling of what it means.
Previously, Joe kept the truth about Love’s crimes and her death a secret from Henry because he didn’t want to scar his son just yet. On the other hand, Kate is much more open with the truth, and it seems that Henry knows precisely what his father has done, even if he doesn’t fully understand it yet. So, when Joe calls him and tries to explain the situation, Henry confronts him. He straightforwardly tells him everything he has heard about him and what it means. At the time, Joe had not yet been arrested and sent to prison. So, if Henry knew so much about him, it would have also made sense for him to follow the trial. Fortunately, Kate survives the fire and is there to be with Henry, or he would have been sent back to the couple he was living with when Joe left him the first time around.
We see Joe looking at Kate’s scars with sympathy and concern in his eyes. He feels bad for his mother, the only one he has ever known, and is traumatised by the fact that those scars happened due to his father, the one who was supposed to protect both of them. Henry has a lot of trauma following the events that transpired, even though he wasn’t directly connected to them. The boy will have to spend years in therapy to resolve the issues caused by his father’s actions. Perhaps he might even start to wonder if he will also turn out like his father, something that Joe, too, wondered about a short while ago. The good thing is that his mother is there to support him and help him through it all.
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