Joe Goldberg's Final Reckoning: 'You' Season 5 Delivers a Poetic End

After five seasons of obsession, manipulation, and straight-up murder, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) finally met his match -- and no, it wasn't a scorned lover or a savvy detective. It was the aptly named Brontë (Madeline Brewer), a new flame with a bone to pick and a plan to end his reign of terror once and for all.

The series finale of You, which dropped along with the show's entire fifth and final season April 24, wasted no time diving into the aftermath of Joe's fiery showdown in the basement of his bookstore.

While viewers were led to believe that both Joe and his estranged wife, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), were left to meet their end at Mooney's, it was the ever-conflicted Brontë who seemed to let her love for Joe save him from himself once more.

But, as it turns out, the fellow author had a secret agenda -- to forge ahead for justice on behalf of her friend Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Joe's very first victim way back in Season 1.

On the run from the law and towards the Canadian border, Joe and Brontë headed to upstate New York while waiting for their new passports to start their new life, but while Brontë was pretending to play house, she was also plotting Joe's downfall.

A steamy boat ride and romantic cabin getaway later, she pulled a gun from under her pillow and forced Joe to confess to killing Beck and to edit her posthumous book -- erasing the parts he secretly wrote.

Just as things hit a boiling point, Joe got a heartbreaking call from his son Henry, who labeled him the real "monster under the bed."

Cue Joe spiraling into a sobbing mess, and back to the killer he's always been, this time with his sights set on the one he loved -- Brontë.

The two brawled in the woods, and Joe begged her to end him. Instead, she delivered a brutal blow: a gunshot straight to the groin.

"The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you," she said, before letting the police take him away alive.

While she could've let Joe die -- a fitting end for someone who delivered death, cruelly and unjustly, to so many -- Brontë wanted him to take responsibility for what he's done and face his ultimate fear: loneliness.

In a shocking turn of events, Kate survived the fire and turned her life around, launching Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) into the art world while her brother transformed their family's empire into a nonprofit.

And Joe? Well, he was ultimately convicted for the murders of Beck, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), and several others, with Brontë narrating his downfall.

"In the end, Joe Goldberg was made to see all of himself… although I suspect the real reason the public turned on him is that I accidentally turned him into a walking d--k joke," she said.

Even as he sat behind bars reading The Executioners Song, Joe couldn't help but whine about how "unfair" everything turned out to be.

And while he was forced to come to terms with his sins, in the end, he never fully took accountability for what he did, instead gaslighting the audience to believe that maybe he wasn't the one to blame after all.

"Maybe the problem isn't me. Maybe it's you," he says in his final delusional voiceover to viewers before the credits roll.

Season 5 of You is streaming now on Netflix.