TL;DR: Joe Goldberg is back in New York, and You Season 5 is a sharp, unsettling, and unexpectedly emotional return to form that digs into the character’s roots while setting the stage for his final act. With strong performances, a back-to-basics structure, and enough twists to make your therapist nervous, this final season pulls off a disturbingly satisfying goodbye.

Chapter One: Back in the Big Apple

Let me be clear: Joe Goldberg is not someone you want to root for. And yet, for five seasons now, we’ve been complicit. We’ve leaned in, eyes wide, knuckles white, watching him seduce, stalk, manipulate, and murder his way through cities and identities like a blood-splattered Zelig. Season 4 stumbled hard with its tonally confused London excursion and the limp twist that made Fight Club feel subtle, but You Season 5? Oh, it’s a return — and not just to form, but to the very place that birthed Joe: New York City.

It’s poetic, really. After zigzagging across continents and personalities (Jonathan Moore, Will Bettelheim — just pick a name and gaslight me already), Joe Goldberg comes home. And not just geographically, but spiritually. Mooney’s Bookstore, that mausoleum of dusty ambition and locked-glass cases, breathes again. And so does Joe, now polished up as the philanthropist husband of Kate Lockwood, playing house with a child he didn’t exactly win Father of the Year for raising.

But like an alcoholic staring down a whiskey neat, Joe can’t resist the itch. Not when Kate’s WASP nest of a family is begging to be exterminated. Not when a pretty young playwright named Bronte quotes Beck to him and flicks the lighter under his dormant mania. It’s the most deliciously dark callback this series has made in years, and it works. Because Youis finally about Joe again — not his hallucinations, not his delusions of class warfare, just the sick, magnetic spiral of a man who cannot stop consuming the lives of women he claims to love.

Chapter Two: The Theater of Obsession

Madeline Brewer’s Bronte is not a woman — she’s a trap, and she knows it. There’s an intoxicating cleverness to her performance, and more importantly, a spark that makes the slow-burn affair with Joe feel earned, not obligatory. She reads Beck’s book like it’s gospel. She romanticizes Joe’s past like a true crime junkie with a thirst for proximity. And still, you think maybe — maybe — she’ll survive him.

Their chemistry sizzles in a way the Joe-Kate pairing never did. Not to knock Charlotte Ritchie, whose posh ice-queen demeanor gave Season 4 some semblance of gravity, but she was never Joe’s match. Bronte, with her bohemian sexuality and backstage secrets, feels like the first woman in the series who actually understands Joe — and that should terrify us.

Chapter Three: Reagan, Maddie, and the American Nightmare

Let’s talk about Anna Camp, because what she pulls off this season should come with an Emmy nomination and a stiff drink. Playing both Reagan and Maddie, the cutthroat half-sister and her clownish twin, Camp shifts so seamlessly between venom and vacuity that it feels like you’re watching two actresses. Reagan is Succession‘s Shiv if she were raised by Hannibal Lecter. Maddie is a Real Housewife with a Xanax prescription and a heart of gold.

Their presence injects the season with camp and class warfare, and Reagan in particular becomes the antagonist Joe didn’t know he needed. She’s the mirror of entitlement and cruelty, a reminder that he’s not the only sociopath in the room — just the most charming one.

Chapter Four: Less Blood, More Bile

Now here’s the surprising thing: Season 5 isn’t all that gory. Sure, there are murders (this is You, not The Great British Bake Off), but compared to the meat locker of past seasons, the body count is relatively modest. Instead, the show digs into Joe’s past — not through therapy (God forbid), but through the ghosts he can’t shake.

We get callbacks to Beck, Love, and even Marienne, not as cheap cameos, but as psychological hauntings. Joe is unraveling not because he’s killing too much, but because he’s remembering why he started killing in the first place. It’s brilliant. It’s sad. It’s exactly what the finale needed.

Chapter Five: The Ending That Isn’t an Ending

I won’t spoil the twist, but let’s just say: You doesn’t end so much as it breathes its final breath — then opens one eye. It’s a satisfying conclusion narratively, emotionally, and thematically. And yet, like Joe himself, you get the sense the story isn’t really over. Netflix might be done, but this character? He’s still out there. Watching. Waiting.

Final Thoughts

For fans of the early seasons who fell in love with the seductive menace of Season 1 and the gleeful carnage of Season 2, this final run feels like a love letter — stained with ink and blood. Joe Goldberg hasn’t changed. But maybe, just maybe, we have.

You Season 5 is a moody, magnetic finale that reminds us why we fell for Joe Goldberg in the first place — and why we should’ve known better. It’s a dangerous, delicious ride home.