Just before Louise/Bronte was discovered as Catfish, Joe wanted to kill Clayton to protect her. As a result, Louise convinces herself that Joe acted in self-defense, and has also developed feelings for him. Now, of course, she wants to find out why he’s doing all this and if she can really love him.

Joe doesn’t just kill because he’s a psychopath and likes to do it. He kills because his mother forced him to murder his father when he was a child because he was not a good person. But his mother left him for this very reason and in a state of shock. Now he wants to show by killing her that he loves her and would do anything to protect her. This is enough for Bronte to see him as a sympathetic character and forgive him his sins. She continues to get involved with him, until she realizes that he is not the person she had imagined.

Will Joe die at the end of You season 5?

Joe would probably like it. In the end, Joe kneels before Bronte/Louise and asks her to kill him. Because? He wants her to end her story. He will never have the romantic ending he seeks, so he prefers death. In their world, that’s also a romantic ending, so they would be together forever.

But Louise doesn’t do him the favor. She knows that life behind bars is worse for him than death. That is why he must receive his just punishment. In prison, he now has to deal with himself and no longer has anyone to obsess over. Before the premiere of the series, Penn Badgley spoke out in favor of him receiving his just punishment and said that he also imagined killing him. Now he tells her to Tudum: «I’ve always thought that if someone killed Joe, it wouldn’t be justice. It would be revenge. Anyone who killed him would be brought down to his level, and that’s not justice for him.»

You season 5: This is what the final phrase of the Netflix series means

So Joe doesn’t die, he goes behind bars. Do we feel bad for him now or was this his just punishment? Everyone has to decide for themselves. But the writers of the Netflix series had a certain emotional journey in mind that they wanted to take viewers on.

In an interview with the Tudum blog, actor Penn Badgley explains that Bronte aims to be a character that viewers can identify with. Like Bronte, fans of the series would have accepted Joe’s adventures despite being aware of all the bad things he has done. Now viewers are supposed to wake up and realize that they were always on this horrible guy’s side.

Despite seeing how ruthless Joe is in the first season, viewers tuned back in for the second. “Bronte was our way of exploring that and ultimately realizing how passionate we are about love, so even giving someone like Joe Goldberg a second chance,” Michael Foley, one of the showrunners, told Tudum. He also claims that they didn’t want to embarrass viewers, but rather show them what a terrible guy we were rooting for.

We should keep that in mind when we rewatch the last scene of You season 5. Joe is in jail and is reading a letter from a fan who thinks she’s cool and wants to be locked up and do dirty things to her. He reads it and then tells the camera—that is, the viewers—that he can’t be entirely blamed. “Maybe we have a problem as a society,” he says. “Maybe the problem is not me, but you,” he adds. In the background you can hear a voice singing “but I’m disgusting.” Is it directed at us (the audience, myself included)?