one identity crisis at a time, baby

Can’t believe I spent my first day off after a week-long work binge to then binge whatever the hell this was.

I’ve had dwindling faith in You since the first season, after which Lifetime dropped it and Netflix picked it up. You think Netflix can deliver on Lifetime material?? Please. They can barely sustain their own series, forget about matching Lifetime’s freak.

My thoughts are, as usual, haphazard but I swear there’s a connection between these dots, possibly only visible if you live in my brain, so I’ll do my best to articulate that connection.

Godspeed to me, as I’ve been writing fuck-all of my own stuff lately, but let’s get into it.

My thesis (or whatever): We didn’t need a new leading lady in the whacked-out personal narrative Joe writes for himself. We needed to bring someone back.

This is no reflection on the actress—everyone on this show has always knocked it outta the park—but the character. Bronte is lackluster at best, with no real stake in the game. Her relationship with Beck is a ho-hum effort for a plot twist that’s almost as underwhelming as the later reveal that Joe is the one who busted her ankle (like, no shit he busted her ankle, I can’t believe they tried to plot-twist that in the finale, but anyway…).

Bronte isn’t really a character in her own right, but an amalgamation of all Joe’s obsessions. This was either on purpose to give the illusion of a satisfying ending, or it’s a personal problem the writers need to address in themselves.

Allow me to demonstrate:

• Candace: The aggressively red hair, sharp attitude
• Beck: Struggling writer with a fuckboy beau
• Love: Tough but secretly vulnerable due to various family struggles; also, into murder
• Marienne: Bohemian artist, working class, calls Joe out on his privilege
• Kate: She can take care of herself (I don’t remember the exact line, but Joe uses it to describe both Kate and Bronte at various points in the season. I’m assuming this was intentional, otherwise they should have shelled out for a copy edit.)

There’s nothing about Bronte that’s really hers, however much the writers try to convince us. Because for all Joe’s fascination with Bronte’s acceptance of “the darkest parts” of him… Love Quinn did it first. You didn’t like it so much then, huh, Joseph?

Probably because Joe never wanted someone to do as he did, because that would mean she has the capacity to turn it around on him and kill his dumb ass. He just wanted a woman who would let him do whatever he wants, hence his fixation on Bronte.

But since Joe doesn’t even acknowledge that Love accepted his homicidal tendencies, preferring to act like no one ever understood him, this remains one of the season’s glaring issues. The writers ascribe all of Love’s darker qualities to Bronte, in a way that seems like an attempt to scrub Love from existence. Like they wanted to backpedal Love’s arc so as to give Bronte a point. And even then, Bronte isn’t half as fucked up.

Personally, I didn’t feel Love’s ghost hovering around the season in any way that really impacts Joe. To then do a sloppy, demonstrably less interesting rewrite of her psyche in Bronte…

Look, I don’t know what they were doing. We can’t logic our way out of this one, boys, I genuinely think it was just bad writing.

All of these women tried to take Joe down in one way or another. All of them have fully-formed backstories and motivations. Bronte was ostensibly behind the scenes the whole time, theorizing and investigating, but the audience has no connection with her; telling us after the fact doesn’t make us feel for her.

No, instead Bronte just swans in at the eleventh hour and pulls a “No one could beat you before, but this time is different because now it’s ME.” Fucking insufferable pseudo-feminism at its finest.

Sure, most of the rest of them are dead, but You has pulled plot twists before. Bring Love back for all I care.

(Quick aside, since we’re on the topic of twists: I don’t mind Kate’s miraculous escape from certain death, mostly because I found burning in the basement of Joe’s bookstore to be an unearned last call for her. I do think she should have taken Henry back to Madre Linda, though. Justice for Dante and Lansing.)

Back to the fucking insufferable pseudo-feminism.

This season got too on-the-nose, in such a way that the message feels more like an after-school special than an honest conversation about the many shades of toxic masculinity and abusive relationships.

The show was already feminist in its portrayal of Joe as the ultimate Nice Guy who gets laid but still adopts his woe-is-me incel attitude. Bronte doesn’t need to tell him he’s a misogynist; the audience already knows. And those who need to be told (like Joe) are the ones who don’t care—they’ve accepted Joe for what he is, and any argument to the contrary will be met with a “Yeah, but…”, so why are we catering to their lack of media literacy and real-world compassion?

Obviously I’m a feminist, because I like having rights and my own bank account and also I’m not some hateful, ignorant chump. I shouldn’t have to explain why I’m a feminist; people should have to explain why they’re not. Because, like, how embarrassing for you to be this willfully stupid.

However. Feminism isn’t simplistic; it’s a movement, an ideology, with layers and nuance and flaws (e.g. white feminism and TERFs and all that accompanying junk, ya know). You can’t strip it down to some “Girl Power” manifesto, and I think that’s what season five of You does.

There are times when I’ve agreed with Joe. I’m here for Ron’s murder, for being sick of rich people, for railing against a system that doesn’t protect the people who need it. There’s a whole debate to be had here about vigilante justice, and in that debate we find the core and obvious problem with Joe:

He thinks he’s different, better, good, in comparison to the Benjis and the Rons and the Nickys, the Hendersons and the Ryans and the Claytons—and, sometimes, we believe him. Such is the way of an abuser.

Joe’s protection ends when a woman’s compliance does. He decides what women need, orchestrates their lives to his liking, and when they’ve had enough and say no? He hits women, beats them, murders them. And he justifies this, ultimately, the same way he justifies taking out those other abusive men: Because he “has to.” So it doesn’t really matter what you do; it’s about how Joe interprets it in relation to himself.

See, I figured all that out before this season stopped showing me and started telling me.

Now, I’m fine with Joe never accepting who he really is. I don’t think a Nice Guy of this magnitude ever realizes the reality that, actually, he fuckin’ sucks.

But I think we could’ve seen him grapple a little more. Writing yet another love interest who has no real link to the rest of the story—and, no, I’m not counting “Beck was my TA” as any kind of emotional punch—detracts from that opportunity.

Netflix has touted this show as a dark romance. Which, by definition, it’s not, since Joe never ends up happily-ever-after with someone. A dark romance would have been giving Joe and Love an HEA but, as previously discussed, the show wants us to forget all about that.

Anyway, the dark romance angle was shoved down our throats this season, with Bronte’s obnoxious BookTok persona (read whatever you want, but stop acting like you’re oppressed; it’s not about the fairy smut that goes viral, it’s that it’s badly written and authors should be better at their jobs. But anyway, I digress).

In the end, Joe’s obsession with Bronte is perhaps his most tame. He doesn’t even lock her in the cage. So it is, at least, no more wildly dark than any of his others. And yet she’s the tipping point, because… why? To reiterate, “This time is different because now it’s ME”? Is that really all you’re gonna give us, Netflix?

You want to go actual dark with a narrative purpose? I’ve got one for you: Maybe up the time jump a little and bring Ellie back. She seduces Joe as a means to destroy him. And it works, no matter how much Joe pretends to protest, and despite his preconceived notions about his fatherly/brotherly/platonic role in her life, thus showcasing his downward spiral in a way that he can’t rationalize. Force him to reckon with something about himself that he can’t forgive.

(I think they tried to do this with his relationship with Henry, but. Whatever, color me unimpressed by that play.)

(I also know that Jenna Ortega’s schedule reportedly did not allow for a return, apparently not even for like a ten-second TikTok, but allow me to imagine anyway.)

Ellie would have been an adult, likely around whatever age they tried to convince us Bronte was. It’s mentioned more than once that she’s Joe’s “young” employee, with no further specification, but a quick IMDb search gives you a not-so-whopping six years’ difference between Penn Badgley and Madeline Brewer, the latter of whom is thirty-three years old. Bronte can fuck a fellow adult, what are we even talking about??

I think they want us to believe she’s in her twenties, which Ellie would have actually been, so no real qualms there. It’s not like I’m suggesting Joe turn his sexual obsessions on a teenager.

He may have still seen Ellie that way, as the kid he had to protect. But now she’d be a woman, an adult, however young. And don’t hit me with that “your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re twenty-seven” thing, because it’s categorically Untrue; kindly do a Google search instead of building your personal moral hierarchy on the backs of memes.

I’m just saying, force Joe to face the reality that he’s only a (debatably) “good guy” when it comes to protecting children, but once that child becomes a full-grown adult woman? She’s not a person to him; she’s a possession.

Maybe that’s better left to fanfiction, but it’s still more compelling than Bronte’s role in the story. Someone like Ellie has been around, was directly and deeply affected by the bombs Joe dropped in her life, she had a score to settle and the social media savvy to stalk/investigate/threaten him…

Christ. Maybe I’ll write the fanfic.

Like I said, my solution falls apart before it can come together due to Ortega’s availability, but my point is that there were better options. The hot PI from season one is out, as is Delilah’s cop boyfriend(ish), because, while they have the resources, I do agree that a woman needed to be Joe’s downfall.

Beck had an older sister we never saw. Hell, nix Clayton as Dr. Nicky’s son and make Bronte his daughter. She could have had a whole contentious relationship with who her father is but if nothing else he’s not a murderer, thereby reinstating honest conversations about these issues—i.e., the aforementioned different shades of toxic masculinity—instead of the black-and-white moral dichotomy of TikTok.

This would have brought us back full-circle to Beck’s storyline, as well as given Bronte’s character some actual motivation and agency and complexity. Make her deplore her father’s unethical actions, but want to save him from a murder rap that’s not his. Make her see herself in Beck—loving a man who puts his wants above your well-being (which reflects on both Dr. Nicky and Joe). Make her challenge the system, and take on the truth they won’t. Make her the seeker of vigilante justice Joe thinks he is.

Just make something better, god damn.

Alas, my pitches have come too late. I didn’t think I’d need them.

Yeah, the show’s been losing steam from the Netflix jump, but I still thought the ending would be satisfying. We didn’t even get to see any of the trial, which would have hit the show’s usual psychological examination beats better than the TikTok montage and chase scene/showdown in the woods.

Seriously, why did that go on so long? This isn’t an action show, it’s a psychological drama. Show me the courtroom scenes!!!!

But. Oh, well.

I’m not saying the last season is completely without merit, and I do think Joe’s final lines are note-perfect. But there were more riveting ways to go, more interesting paths to reach that end. We took none of them.

Underwhelming, disappointing, forgettable in its finale, You is likely to join the ranks of former pop culture hits like How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones—a true trifecta of how to ruin a good run in one season or less, no matter the genre.