I definitely needed another season of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) lovingly stalking his girlfriends. He once again managed to make me obsess over his obsessiveness in season five of You. The new season was released on April 24, and it felt like I had waited forever to find out what finally happened to Joe. However, I’m not sure if the season finale actually satisfied me in the way I was expecting it to.
The season starts with Goldberg, a completely renewed man. His new wife, Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), has surrounded him in money and fame as he is now known as “Prince Charming,” and her riches brought him back his son, Henry (Frankie DeMaio). Goldberg has everything, but it’s not really the life he always wanted. Plus, he has to deal with Lockwood’s insane family: her Uncle Bob (Michael Dempsey), her twin sisters Regan Lockwood-Jacobs and Maddie Lockwood (Anna Camp), and her brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews). The acting continues to be consistently good.
Camp does a phenomenal job playing two different roles with completely opposite personalities. I was intrigued by the depth of her characters, which I was not initially expecting. Not surprisingly,
Badgley continues to make audiences fall in love with a serial killer. His acting is amazing in season four, but this time it’s just as good — maybe even better.
He manages to capture so much complexity and emotion in one single frame of his face. It’s clear, especially in season four, that Goldberg has psychological issues. However, his erotomania (a false belief that someone is in love with you) was never touched on in season five nor explained. It was just skipped over, yet that was the entire plot for the previous season. But the common theme
of his obsessiveness, code pendency, and narcissism within romantic relationships still remains, especially when he meets Bronte (Madeline Brewer), as he fixes up the infamous Mooney’s bookstore.
I do not like Bronte. Social media is absolutely slamming her for her physical appearance, which I do not agree with. Instead, I do not like her character because of her cringey dialogue. An example is when she made Goldberg act out a lip biting scene from her book.
That said, most of the dialogue throughout the whole new season is cringe-worthy. I could tell that they were trying to use a lot of Gen Z humor and slang like using the term “baddie,” and honestly I thought it took away from the complexity of the show. Adding on to the appeal to Gen Z audiences, in one episode, the viewer basically watches TikTok for 15 minutes, which also slightly
weirded me out.
Overall, the last two episodes of the new season are the only ones I truly enjoyed because of the suspense, action, and the lingering doom of Joe Goldberg’s fate awaiting just any second. Furthermore, the music helped enhance the last episodes. I did like the consistently good soundtrack a lot, which included Mitski, Hozier, Charli XCX, Radiohead, Billie Eilish, Elton John and more. This final season actually made me realize how bad Goldberg is.
Despite him being a serial killer, you sort of root for him the entire time, but the last season shows how mentally ill and insanely scary he actually is.
I’m sad one of my favorite shows is over, but I think that the music, amazing acting and the long-awaited ending to Goldberg’s storyline was binge-worthy.
