You Season 5 review: The plot is the victim in this blazing mess of a finale

*Sputters incoherently*

So You Season 5, has ended.

For five years, we followed Joe Goldberg, a man who murdered, manipulated, and gaslit his way through cities and psyches. Surely, such a character deserved a final reckoning. He gets one, technically. But the audience feels cheated.

The final season sets fire to its plot—literally and metaphorically—abandoning the grounded psychological menace that once made You terrifying. What starts as a character study ends in voiceover-infested chaos, with nuance replaced by narrative shortcuts.

Let’s back it up. Season 5 follows Joe Goldberg reclaiming his identity, playing dutiful, do-gooder husband to his wife Kate Lockwood, a corporate princess practically. He is back with his child, Henry, after leaving him to better parents in Season 3 in the aftermath of murdering his first wife Love Quinn…sounds like a dream, doesn’t he?

Kate knows ‘parts’ of what Joe has done; he maintains a firm stance: He killed people but only in self-defence.  But Kate chooses to conveniently believe it as one of the characters point out later, because it just suits her. To be sure, Kate is one of those compelling characters in the show and Charlotte Ritchie is an absolute delight on screen, with her cold, steely glares and fabulous fashion sense. She is brilliant, period, with all her nuances as she clearly is the example of someone who takes disastrous actions that align with her reality.

Another character, who echoes the same sentiment but in a less riveting manner, is the manic pixie Bronte (Madeline Brewer), who camps out at Joe’s bookstore. Obviously, she becomes his new love interest as they both share a rather disturbing interest in writing passions and the dark genre that’s as unsettling as Joe’s ice cage in the basement.

Lies within lies, Bronte isn’t who she says she is. She has her own motivations to chase Joe down, but unfortunately, she succumbs to Joe’s buttery charm.  Nevertheless, in a badly written finale, she shows promise and everyone goes home a winner, barring Joe and the audience.

The thing about You is that it thrived in subtlety—when it didn’t bludgeon its messages into your skull with Joe’s metaphorical brickbat. The first season, which now seems absolutely stellar, compared to this chaos, had made the point about deceptive appearances, ‘nice guys’ was made. It played on the cruel idea, that the devil doesn’t come with horns and a tail. It’s everything that you wished for. And that’s what Joe was. The smooth, helpful saviour. Sharp funny, and just seemed like the ideal man, without venturing into perfection. He was so real that it was terrifying, almost.

He knew how to win over the broken and the battered, and that’s how unfortunate Beck fell into his clutches. Later, he met his match with Quinn, who probably was the only one that actually scared the living daylights out of him, because, she was almost the male version of him. Joe couldn’t be with people whom he couldn’t really save; he had to feel needed and important.

At its best, You was never just about murder—it was about masks. About how evil hides in charm, and how victims are drawn in not because they’re weak, but because predators like Joe know exactly what stories to tell. This sentiment, is what a tearful Marienne tells Bronte as they sit on the floor in the bookstore. It’s probably the actual frightening dialogue and scarring moment of the series, because it feels so visceral.

Marienne whispers the quiet insidiousness of Joe: How he messes with your head, twisting your reality out of shape, till you can only believe his. And by the time, you try to find your way out of this hellscape, you’re probably dead. This dialogue is the actual crux of the series: A seeping, painful realisation about the horror of gaslighting and escalating crimes.

This is where You could have shined the most: These subtle nuances of gravitating towards such men. There is a little promise in Bronte’s character, however unnerving she is: The constant habit of falling under Joe’s hypnotic charm and trying to snap out of it. At these points, you see what the show is trying to get at in all the campiness and madness: How the lies are so much alluring than truths.

But, by the finale, everything goes off the rails. The campiness that we had enjoyed for most of the season, despite several slip-ups, is just buried under hasty, lazy writing. What had earlier been left to understand and interpret, is suddenly barked at you in voiceovers. The story becomes as subtle as a battering ram.

You had never made promises, about being a completely dark psychological thriller, which in parts it was, mixed with satire and campiness. But Season 5 loses control of the plot, the threads and is in a rush to see the final result.

What could have ended with a chilling whisper goes out with an incoherent scream. In the end, Joe Goldberg got the ending he deserved. Too bad we didn’t.