You: the end of the series explained and validated by Penn Badgley
After five seasons of lies, murders and illusions, Joe Goldberg found his epilogue. And Penn Badgley is lucid at the end of his character.
It took five seasons, a good dozen corpses and as many passionate looks in front of the camera so that Joe Goldberg arrives at the end of the road. So was it out, again? Or did he, finally, paid the price of his crimes?
Attention spoilers!
In the last season of You (which has just been released on Netflix) Joe, embodied by Penn BadgleyBronte meeting (interpreted by Madeline Brewer), an old secret knowledge of Beck (Elizabeth Lail), and lets himself be, once again, trapped by his obsessive need to love – or rather to own. But this time, the loop is complete. Bronte can neither be seduced or manipulated. It even helps to make it fall. Literally. And in a final gesture as symbolic as it is brutal, she shoots him … in the middle of a crotch. Net cut. The monster is finally disarmed. In the last moments of the series, Joe, behind bars, reads a love letter from a stranger. Another one. And he looks at the camera – one last time – to launch this final provocation: “Maybe the problem is not me. It’s you.” This is where the creator Michael Foley take the floor to explain in EW:
“It was necessary that Joe faces what he really is. He is approaching … But he still fails. He ends up blaming us. The goal was to wake up the public from his illusion, to show him once and for all this type is a monster. Bronte hands us a mirror as if to say that the fantasy of a man like him exists because of the reality of men like him.”
This end is also an echo to the sometimes embarrassing perception of Joe Goldberg on the networks. A vision often misunderstood by Penn Badgleywhich therefore fully assumes this conclusion without spectacular trial, without Hollywood punishment. Just a cell, loneliness, and less sex:
“The final, for me, does all that could be hoped for more satisfactory” He explains to Entertainment Weekly. “”Joe receives the end he really deserves. But you have to understand one thing: no end could satisfy everyone 100 %. Because justice, facing a guy like Joe, will never be really satisfactory. “
And he insists: a bloodier spell would only have offered him what he secretly wanted: a victim posture: “If Joe had finished torn apart, killed by one of his ex, it would have been worse. For them. For us. It would have been lowering them to his level.
Penn Badgley rather sees this conclusion as a form of balance. Joe is neither glorified nor martyred. It is simply exposed. Unmasked. And this justice, it also involves a final humiliation: castration.
“It’s a little twist of the final knife. Literally. And that participates in the idea that justice is done.”
At 38, the actor does not seek to sweeten the end of You : it is hard, bitter, but consistent.
“The only real appeasement is not revenge. It is time. On condition that justice is done. And there, I think we are there.”
