You, in which a serial killer and stalker of women, but a sexy one, is somehow fashioned into the hero of the piece, is a fundamentally preposterous show. It washes its hands of plausibility in favour of vocal fry, phones without passwords and quasi-literary second-person monologues. Perhaps most preposterous of all is that it has stretched the story over five seasons. You used to be fun, at least: a guilty-ish pleasure, aware of its own over-the-top silliness, that once gave the impression of knowing that it wasn’t so much pushing at the edges of credulity as body-barging it into an abyss. But as the seasons have ticked away, the satire has seeped out, leaving a mess of its own making that it tries, and inevitably struggles, to clear up.
The main problem is that Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is both the hero and the villain. In this final – and that really is a mercy – season, You falls back on its old habit of not knowing which it would prefer him to be. After a predictably murderous stint as a lecturer at an English university, Joe is now married to billionaire and philanthropist Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), living in New York with her and with his newly returned son Henry. He is no longer pretending to be dead and another person. Instead, he is a public figure, hiding from his many misdeeds in plain sight.
This feels like a necessary shift: the old pattern of Joe falling for a new woman, stalking her, finding that love isn’t quite the romantic image in his mind, then realising that he simply must violently murder her, was growing old. The idea that he can finally be himself – literally, as a celebrity; and with Kate, in that he can be more open about his Dexter-ish tendencies – drives the early part of the season. Joe presents himself as a good guy, expressing how fine it feels to “rid the world of assholes”.
This is a contrivance the show has had to build in, to counter the fundamental ickiness of its premise. Naturally, despite his happy marriage, another young woman moves into Joe’s line of sight and the familiar cycle, in which the “good” guy falls for a woman and we are forced to wonder if he is in fact the asshole, begins again. Bronte (Madeline Brewer) is an Ibsen-loving lost soul and playwright who wanders into Joe’s bookshop, talks about literature and wins his heart. Will the reformed Joe Goldberg return to old habits, one last time?
You is going back to the beginning for its finale, and not just because it returns Joe to New York City and his creepy murder cage in the basement. There is a hint that it has regained the focus of the first season, and reminded itself that it is supposed to be a satire. Initially, in Joe’s fame and Kate’s attempts to atone for her own sins, its dark humour is aimed at the ultra-rich. Anna Camp puts in an extra shift as Kate’s twin siblings Reagan and Maddie. With them, You occasionally finds fun mode again, somewhere between corps and corpse.
But largely it plods towards the end, through a series of increasingly convoluted and repetitive plot twists that are silly even by You’s standards. Around halfway through, it kicks into gear with a twist that gives some much-needed propulsion, and fittingly, for a swansong, there are plenty of fan-pleasing cameos and callbacks to earlier storylines. There is talk of misogyny, of Joe’s delusional tendencies, and it even brings in “incels” and online mobs – though You-ishly, it merely glances at that world, rather than addressing it in any meaningful way.
Shining a light on the central tangle – is Joe a white knight, or an abuser of women? – doesn’t disguise the fact that it remains a real issue that you have to ask the question in the first place. You was always going to find it difficult to square its love of Joe with his flaws; it is never clear whether it really wants him to get his comeuppance, or if that is a tedious obligation it must fulfil. The early seasons were daft and twisty enough to rush you through in the hope that you might not notice their shaky foundations. But as it signs off forever, You has no choice but to deal with Joe. It does so with a final scene that manages to be borderline insulting to the viewers who have stuck with it. It’s not You, but you, it suggests, that is the problem. Ironically, for a season all about elites, I found that a bit rich.