You season 5 on Netflix: Does Joe die or go to prison in the series finale?
After Joe told him that he loves him, Henry is calm. “What have you done to Maman?” he asks. Teddy told Henry what Joe had done to Kate. “Do you remember when you told me that there was no monsters in my room?” You lied. It was you. You are the monster. Henry, crying, hangs up.
Joe collapses, and he remembers the dying words of Love: “He will know what you are.”
Then he explodes, questioning his whole life – “I try to love, whenever he disintegrates!” – and sob on the ground. He finally arrives at the same conclusion which allowed him to bypass any responsibility for his actions: that he is fundamentally unmanageable, whatever he does. And then he attacks.
Joe killed Brontë / Louise?
At first, it really seems to do it. Joe attacks Brontë in the house, shoots him and she runs. She manages to call 911 despite her broken phone, throws herself out the window, and he pursues her in the courtyard – revealing that it was he who broke his ankle just so that she stays and speaks to her, an injury that currently helped her kill her.
“It was always going to finish this way, right?” she asked. She then calls him a “pathetic misogynist” and he attacks her on the ground.
He says he will show him how he killed Beck and that he is starting to strangle him. She takes out the cat self-defense device that she caught from the service station, dagger and run in the lake, where he strangles her a little more, until she seems very dead. “Goodbye, Brontë,” he says.
Except that … she is alive! “It’s over Joe,” she said in the woods, the pistol pointed her head. He begs her to kill him, she refuses, and she finally resumes her name, Louise. He rushes for the pistol, she pulls him on the instinct with a bullet directly at his CK, and everyone lives to see another day.
What happens to Joe Goldberg at the end of You? Does Joe die or is he going to prison?
“If I can wake up, the world too”, Louise manifests himself in the last episode on the toxicity of Joe, and the implicit approval of the society of men like him. She gets her wish a little: Joe is made to see herself all in a trial and a viral meme on social networks mocking her “Blown off of CK”.
He is condemned for the murders of Love Quinn and Guinevere Beck, as well as Benji and Peach, among others, and gave life without parole. Dr. Nicky overturned his conviction. But as the Internet detective group warns against a podcast on the disappearance of Joe, “there are other Joes there.”
Meanwhile, the show ends with Joe’s prospect, while sitting in a cell reading The Chant du Bourreau by Norman Mailer. (A relevant quote from the novel: “Maybe it is not what we learn that is crucial, but the questions that find us. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of astronauts and mass murders?”)
