You Season 5 Ending Explained: Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg Meets His Fate (2025)

Brontë ultimately rescued Joe from the blaze at Mooney's bookstore and started formulating a plan to bring him down once and for all. And when Joe proposed, her internal monologue revealed her true motivation for saying yes: "I’m the only person in the world that can stop you.”

Once the pair fled to upstate New York, Brontë began devising her plan, wondering,“How do I give you the ending you deserve?”

They broke into a cabin to stay overnight, and Brontë was briefly tempted to live happily ever after with Joe during a nighttime boat ride that she deemed "peak romance."

But when Joe took her to bed, she pulled out a gun from behind the pillow and demanded he tell her what really happened to her friend Beck, also forcing him to redact Beck's posthumous book with all of the parts he wrote.

Her interrogation was briefly interrupted when Joe got a call from his son Henry, who accused Joe of trying to kill his mom Kate and called his dad the true "monster" under his bed.

The accusation sent Joe into a breakdown, as he said through tears, "I love him so much. Maybe he deserves better than me. Why? How? How did I become this person?”

Joe lunged at Brontë, shooting her in the side, and the couple battled it out in the woods. Brontë managed to call 911, and as police closed in on the couple, Joe begged her to kill him.

"Kill me. I deserve it. You know you have it in you. Please, you’re more like me than you want to admit," he told her. "You get to be the one who kills me Brontë, this is how our story ends."

Brontë refused, saying she'd rather see him spend the rest of his life alone in prison.

"I have been asking myself over and over, 'Why?' And I finally see it clearly now," she said. "The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you."

He leapt at her and she shot his penis off, before both were carted away by police.

In the aftermath of the altercation, Joe was convicted in court of killing his wife Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and Beck, as well as the latter's friends Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Peach (Shay Mitchell).

"In the end, Joe Goldberg was made to see all of himself," Brontë explained in a final narration. "The trial was messy, the evidence horrific, and the truth undeniable. Although I suspect the real reason the public turned on him is that I accidentally turned him into a walking d--k joke."

The conclusion also revealed that his wife Kate survived the fire and became "reborn," focusing on boosting Marienne's career as an artist while her brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews) turned Lockwood Corp into a nonprofit.

And in the final scene, Joe rotted away in prison while reading "The Executioner's Song" by Norman Mailer.

"So in the end, my punishment is even worse than I imagined. The loneliness, oh my god. The loneliness," he said in a voiceover. "No hope of being held. Knowing this is forever. It’s unfair. Putting all of this on me. Aren’t we all just products of our environment? Hurt people hurt people. I never stood a chance."

But as it cut to Joe reading a fan letter, he added, "Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s you."