‘You’ brought Joe Goldberg’s story to a fitting conclusion. The showrunners explain why he got what he deserved

Editor’s Note: This story mentions plot points from series finale of “You.”

It was only fitting that Joe Goldberg, the twisted central character in Netflix’s soapy psychological thriller series “You” starring Penn Badgley, would get what he had coming at the end of the show’s fifth and final season.

The 10-episode fifth season, released Thursday on Netflix, concluded Joe’s seven-year journey of being a murderous but oddly charming man with a penchant for stalkery and obsessive behavior.

This, however, did not mean death; it meant living with his crimes – and a pretty gnarly injury.

Showrunners Michael Foley and Justin Lo didn’t know exactly how that would unfold, they told CNN in a recent interview that they knew Joe (Badgley) would “get his comeuppance” and would not be “redeemed.”

“We knew that we wanted him to face people whose lives he ruined,” Foley said. “We wanted to show him at his most horrific and make him face what he really is and, in doing so, make us all face what we’ve been rooting for all these years.”

The show debuted in 2018 and is based on the book series of the same name by Caroline Kepnes.

Season 5 featured Joe living a high-profile life while married to Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), the high-powered CEO who became privy to his deadly extracurriculars in Season 4. His new status robbed Joe of the anonymity he enjoyed in the past but did nothing to take away his killer instincts.

After a harrowing fight with his love interest du jour Bronte (Madeline Brewer), which resulted, in part, in her ironically shooting Joe in his netherregion and him becoming an internet meme, Joe was arrested and later charged with the murder of Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti).

He was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, finding himself confined to a cage much like the one he kept many of his victims in throughout the series.

During the show’s final scene, Joe sat in his jail cell and read a piece of mail he received from a woman he described as a “fan.”

“Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all the depraved things they want me to do to them,” Goldberg’s inner monologue asked in the final scene. “Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe, it’s you.”

The fan’s letter was an opportunity to “indict” the show’s audience, according to Lo, who said the point of this final scene was “to show that Joe doesn’t take responsibility for any of his actions and he has to keep blaming people.”

“If it’s not the women, it’s society,” Lo added. “It sort of opens up the lens at the very end of the show and turns a mirror on all of us.”

In terms of Joe being even more of a monster this season than he has been in the past, this was something that Foley, Lo and Badgley, who also served as an executive producer on the series, were all very much aligned on. Badgley usually takes an active role in helping craft his character’s journey each season, according to Lo and Foley, and he had some ideas of his own for Season 5, including having Joe be shirtless in the mud and the rain in the final episode’s showdown with Bronte.

“That was very much him saying, ‘I need the world to see him at his worst, most horrific as an animal in the woods.’ That was really important to him, like, please pull no punches,” Foley said of Badgley’s requests. “All those things that we don’t want to see in Joe, let’s show those things.”

Ultimately, several of Joe’s victims, dead or alive, wound up having a voice throughout Season 5, including Marianne (Tati Gabrielle), who returns to help Kate and a now-freed Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) take Joe down. Even Bronte helped give her friend Beck a voice by republishing her book with Joe’s edits and additions removed.

Bringing these characters back into the fold, as well as having Joe return to New York and the bookstore where it all began, were integral for Foley and Lo to help close out Joe’s journey.

“It was definitely important to us to give a voice to some of the victims of Joe that had survived,” Lo said. “That’s the beauty of knowing your final season is the final season, is that we could choose which characters really felt like they deserved to have an ending.”