YOU season 5: Penn Badgley on Joe’s series finale ending, fate
The entirety of YOU season 5 has now aired over at Netflix and with that, we’ve got answers to one fundamental question. What actually happened to Joe Goldberg?
We recognize entering the final episodes here that there were a few different ways the show could have gone. It felt impossible to imagine a world in where the character had a happy ending; you could have claimed that killing him off was the best ending to the story. For us personally, though, we appreciate exactly what the show did: Having him arrested, exposed to the public, and then forced to live out his days in a box receiving letters from people obsessed with him. He then gets reminded that he is not the person he wants to be almost constantly.
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Speaking in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, here is some of what star Penn Badgley had to say about the ending that was devised:
“The finale, to me, it’s doing everything that could possibly be done in a satisfying manner … I think he’s delivered to his truly appropriate end. And then the only thing left is to realize [that] there is no ending that could satisfy anyone 100 percent, because justice for a man like Joe isn’t in and of itself satisfying. I mean, he’s an abuser. He’s a killer. He’s a bad person. So I think being satisfied is a positive thing.”
Badgley is right that series finales are almost impossible to nail but in general, we tend to think this is as close to perfect as you can get. Can you quibble over the fact that it was Louise / Bronte who ended up taking Joe down instead of Kate or Marienne? Sure, but at least the two women were involved by some measure. Even though Joe was the main character of the story, we were never
Related – Get some more thoughts on who did NOT appear on YOU season 5
What did you think of how YOU season 5 ended?
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This article was written by Jessica BunBun.