You went into its final season knowing it would be its last, which means that the Netflix series was able to do whatever it wanted on the way to the inevitable conclusion You was preparing for: the downfall of Joe Goldberg. A final season of a series can be a tall order, and You meets its expectations in many ways. The fifth season follows the show's predictable format, where Joe meets a woman, becomes obsessed with her, and ultimately follows a path of brutal violence that results in her death, or a near-death experience. As in each season, Penn Badgley offers a captivating performance, delivering the dangerous charm and emotional vulnerability of his sociopathic character. Joe Goldberg is not a hero, and Penn Badgley beautifully performs Joe's personal delusions of being the hero to those around him while still making sure it is understood that the man he is portraying is not a good person. The final season is also helped by the solid performances by the rest of the supporting cast, including Anna Camp, who delivers in season five with her dual roles of identical twins, Reagan and Maddie.
The main overarching plot line behind season five is the steps that need to fall into place for Joe's inevitable capture. To acknowledge the closing in of who Joe really is, the final season brings back many familiar faces from seasons past to discuss many of Joe's most suspicious attributes. There is no pretending anymore, and Joe's violent nature is finally out in the world to see. These decisions are slowly built into the fifth season's narrative, but tease an explosive finale, given the number of characters that the series was willing to bring back. Unfortunately, while You did bring back many characters, the series also refused to use them in a way that really would have offered a significant sense of payoff to them or the audience.
Joe Goldberg is the only character to appear in all five seasons of the series, and thus it makes sense that the show's biggest element of finality would be entirely surrounding how his story ends. Yet, You goes through the trouble of bringing back so many characters toward the end of the season just to disregard most of them in the series finale. The show's final episode is one of the biggest letdowns of the series due to its isolated nature. The finality of Joe's violence should have had more to do with the many characters he had harmed in the past, instead of being brought to justice by his final obsession alone.
Joe's last obsession, Bronte, initially appears as a kind and slightly out-of-luck young woman with a love for novels. In the end, it is she who brings Joe to his knees and is responsible for his arrest. While Bronte is given a present character arc throughout the season, the decision to earlier portray Kate's team-up with Nadia and Marienne, two other women wronged by Joe, was a far more captivating approach to handling Joe's downfall in comparison to how the series finale handles Joe and Bronte's final stand-off. Ultimately, everything comes down to a chase sequence through the woods at a remote home. The decision is fairly cliche, and the sequence goes on too long for it to be anything other than frustrating. Joe being caught was never a matter of "if" and more of a matter of "when." So, the idea that the show created stakes surrounding Joe's downfall, and turning it into a physical brawl instead of a thought-out plan, was fairly anti-climactic when thinking about how this stalker was brought down.
The idea of turning the tables on Joe, having the women he stalked turn his own techniques against him in the scheme of bringing him to justice, could have allowed for a unique sense of teamwork. These women would not have interacted much, but what they did have in common would have allowed for a strong enough bond to let them work together, at least temporarily, to see Joe being beaten at his own game. Ultimately, keeping Joe alive and forced into loneliness may be a worse fate for Joe than death. Yet, turning the show's final episode into a remote setting that turns away from every other character who had tried to bring Joe down, instead of allowing Joe's downfall to come from all those he had hurt coming together against him, was a missed opportunity.