SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 4 of “You,” now streaming on Netflix.
“You” can go home again: At the conclusion of Season 4 of the Netflix thriller, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is back in New York City, alongside his billionaire girlfriend Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) — sitting on top of the world.
He nearly died by suicide earlier in the episode, in some warped attempt at redemption. But by the finale’s ending, Joe, who’s has killed his way through London (in his fake identity of Professor Jonathan Moore), has emerged exultant. He’s fused with his murderous side, and seemingly happier than he’s ever been on “You.”
“I thought it was the only way it could go,” said Badgley during an interview for the Feb. 15 cover of Variety about where Joe ends up. “I thought it was brilliant.”
Sera Gamble — the “You” showrunner, who created the series with Greg Berlanti (based on a book by Caroline Kepnes) — told Variety that any justice coming for Joe Goldberg will have to wait. “Unfortunately, while we all may desire to see this man punished, what actually tends to happen with men like this is that they don’t necessarily — karma doesn’t display itself obviously, as far as I can see,” she said of how the writers saw the ending of Season 4. “We were joking about it as his triumphant homecoming, where he ultimately would be able to come back and reclaim his name — reclaim his name, reclaim his family, meaning, his son that he left behind. And also be able to move through the circles in New York that he could barely even observe from afar earlier, because he was pretty poor when we met him.”
Yes, Joe has emerged not only unscathed after reaching his lowest point, but victorious. Having set about trying to start a new life as Jonathan in Season 4, as a professor at a London university, he soon found out that there was a serial killer in his midst. By the end of Episode 5 of “You,” where Netflix divided the season in two, Joe thought that the killer was Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), a brilliant writer and upstart politician. Rhys, in Joe’s absolutely unreliable version of events, was setting him up as the Eat the Rich killer who was murdering members of the upper class social set that Joe had infiltrated.
But Joe, of course, is the serial killer. How could it be otherwise? He’s the problem; it’s him. In the show’s seventh episode twist, we learn that Joe barely even knows the real Rhys, and he’s imagined him as his enemy: Joe’s “you,” the person he addresses his narrative to in the template of the series, is, in fact, himself. (He discovers this fact after he murders a completely innocent Rhys.)
Four seasons into “You,” Joe’s “you” is him. “I think it’s the only way it could go,” Badgley said.
Gamble said the writers have been building up to Joe’s personality splitting. “Joe goes crazier every season. And if you if you trace back, he’s always been delusional in his thoughts,” she said. He’s hallucinated before, she pointed out, when “he saw another version of himself” in Season 3.
“We’ve been quietly building to the twist in the second half of the season since the beginning of Season 1 — we’ve always had this in our pocket as something we wanted to do: just make him go full crazy,” Gamble said.
Badgley was thrilled, though, that he wasn’t playing his darker half. Acting against Speleers as Joe’s split-off Mr. Hyde meant “we get to see the fun of it not literally being me playing me,” he said.
For Badgley, after three and a half seasons of delivering most of his lines in Joe’s voiceover, which he records in a booth alone, having a scene partner like Speleers’ Rhys was completely novel. “No one experiences how little Joe speaks as much as I do,” he said. “No one is aware, actually, of how little he speaks other than me — because I have to go and never speak!”
“It is true,” Gamble said. “There are many days when he shows up and he has no actual dialogue. Somebody is reading the voiceover, and Penn is moving his eyeline.”
Over a breakfast interview in Brooklyn, Badgley was amused when he remembered a conversation he’d with Ritchie at a party for the show, when she asked him how his day on set had gone. He replied, “‘Oh, it was nice, because I finally got to shoot a normal scene,’” Badgley recalled. “I realized that scene was waking up and deciding I had to kill myself, and speak to my split-personality figure in the kitchen. When I said that, I laughed like, ‘Oh, that’s a normal scene.’”
By the finale, Joe has realized what he’s done — that is, he’s killed a bunch of people, kidnapped his Season 3 love Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) and put her in a cage in the basement of a condemned building. He decides he needs to end his life. But really, he wants to kill Rhys, whom he feels plagued by.
“Yes, Joe is suicidal; technically what he’s doing is trying to kill Rhys,” Badgley said. “What he’s trying to do is to kill a killer.”
In the logic of “You,” and in the twisted mind of Joe Goldberg, this rationale makes sense to him. “He’s coming up with a logical solution to save people,” Badgley said. “This is the thing: He still actually wants to save these people!”
As Joe stands on a bridge over the Thames talking to Rhys, he appears to have faced the reality that everything Joe does, no matter what his intentions, leads to death. “Every time, I try: I make it perfect, it’s never enough,” Joe says in anguish, before he pushes “Rhys” off, and then jumps himself. (He survives, of course, and wakes up in a hospital with Kate at his bedside.)
“I think it does kind of feel like a redemption arc to the viewer,” Badgley said.
Badgley directed the show’s ninth episode, which neatly sets up the events of the finale: Joe wants to free Marienne but doesn’t know how, his student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) has discovered Marienne in the basement, and is onto him — and Joe is really sick of Rhys badgering him. By the finale’s conclusion, Joe has framed &md