Hello, you. Welcome to the fifth and final season of Netflix’s terminally addictive tale of Joe Goldberg, the You season 5 binge recap: Goodbye… you book lover, hopeless romantic, and prolific serial killer. When last we saw Joe (Penn Badgley), he was confessing his murderous history — well, some of it anyway — to new squeeze Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), the billionaire with skeletons of her own. Her vast resources paved the way for their fresh start in the U.S. Hopping across the pond may have allowed Joe to put some distance between himself and the Eat-the-Rich Killer, but there are plenty of potential landmines waiting for him back home. (Can’t remember who’s alive, who’s dead, and who might be plotting to take Joe down for good? Read up on the back half of season 4, then dive into the final 10 outings of You. Episode 1: “The Luckiest Guy in NY” Joe Goldberg, beloved philanthropist socialite. Doesn’t seem quite right, does it? Yet that's exactly where we find him when the final season of You opens three years after the events of season 4. “The world loves a good love story,” Joe tells us, so while Kate’s out doing “radical good” to atone for her role in a business deal that gave several children cancer, the public eats up Joe playing the role of devoted husband by her side. He’s caught on camera holding Kate’s purse behind the scenes at a Vanity Fair photoshoot, smiling like the besotted, supportive husband he thinks he is, and the public eats it up. They grace the covers of magazines and the front page of gossip sites, and on a flashbulb-lit red carpet, Joe performs a swoon-worthy dip-and-kiss move. Joe and Kate are everyone’s favorite couple, changing the world together. And all this money and goodwill allowed them to regain custody of Henry (Frankie DeMaio), Joe's son with the late Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). Never mind the nice Madre Linda couple who’d been Henry’s dads for the majority of his young life — or as Joe refers to them, the men who “looked after” him. Now, Henry's got Papa Joe, who quotes Thomas Wolfe and reads The Lord of the Rings at bedtime. The season truly gets underway during Kate’s splashy public announcement that Lockwood Corporation will now donate a quarter of its annual profits to fund a literacy and college scholarship initiative for children in the foster system. She intentionally kept the Lockwood board out of the loop about her plans, which raises several eyebrows. The highest brows belong to Reagan (Anna Camp), Kate’s half-sister and the heir apparent to run the family business before their father (Greg Kinnear) handed it to Kate before his sped-along-by-Joe death last season. Placing silver in the Anger Olympics is Buffalo Bob Cain (Michael Dempsey), a surrogate father figure known to the Lockwood family. And Uncle Bob does not care for Joe. Reagan's twin, Madison (also Anna Camp — hooray for double the Camp!), is less bothered by all of it. She’s thrice divorced and once widowed (he was in a billionaire astronaut accident, which is perfect), and she and Joe occupy a lower rung in the family hierarchy. But neither’s as low as Kate’s brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews), who's the product of Tom’s affair with “the help.” Teddy’s mixed race, parenting a child with his husband, and is forced to deal with the barely veiled racism and homophobia from Reagan and company. Perhaps because of all of this, Teddy seems to be the best of the bunch and gives Joe a quiet heads up about a hit piece brewing at Forbes accusing Kate of falsifying an environmental report to get that cancer-causing pipeline approved. I would argue that’s reporting, not a hit piece. But what’s a little semantic difference between friends? Joe’s concerned that the story will shake Kate’s confidence in her image rehab and weaken others’ trust in her ability to lead. And since he’s curbed his extra-curricular activities in favor of a virtuous public life, he’ll have to figure out a non-murdery solution to this problem. Teddy, meanwhile, knows that Kate’s the one who insisted he be welcomed into the family (and the family business), so he’ll do what it takes to bury the story, which Joe spins as Kate merely getting her hands dirty to help Tom. The silent benefit of Teddy’s calculus about where to place his loyalties: he’s less likely to become one of Joe’s victims because he's unlucky enough to know Kate’s secrets. Joe’s ruminating on all of this as he jogs past Mooney’s, which has been shuttered since Kate bought the building and its contents for him. He enters and wanders through the dark, dusty place, letting it kick up old memories… namely Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). Ah, Beck! Doesn’t it seem like we were all infants back in 2019 when she was the season 1 object of Joe’s affections andYou was just a show that aired on Lifetime? And look at us now. A little sadder, a little wiser, and burdened with the unholy knowledge of Gal Gadot's "Imagine" video. Well, Joe’s also sadder and wiser (unclear if he watched the "Imagine" video, though), and he and Teddy confront Reagan in her office for leaking the Kate story. While Reagan seems genuinely confused by their accusations, she loses any shred of sympathy by referring to Joe as “our sister’s weirdo hubby” and saying positively vile things about Teddy’s parentage. Okay, the Joe thing proves that her creep radar’s surprisingly strong. Also, I'm team Teddy, immediately, forever. Joe then turns to Maddie, who meets her Boo-Boo at a bar for a little day drinking and griping about the family and the company. The party girl drops some keen insights about Joe hiding some true part of himself, then zips to the bar for another round. So both twins' Spidey senses are tingling about Joe. Guess we'll see if that helps either of them survive whatever's to come. Joe takes the chance to snoop through her phone and finds a secret meeting on the books to call a no-confidence vote against Kate while she’s busy at a meeting Uncle Bob’s conjured for her. He's furious but not surprised; Uncle Bob was Tom’s No. 1 guy, after all. That night in their palatial, ice-blue bedroom, Joe breaks the news to Kate about the Forbes piece and Bob’s involvement. She doesn’t react well to being kept out of the loop and sidelines Joe, telling him she’ll handle it herself. But Joe, ever thoughtful, ever chivalrous, can’t possibly leave Kate to fight that battle on her own, so he slips out of bed that night, nabs Uncle Bob, and takes him to Mooney’s . (We know his location because Kate tracks it, which is either the smartest thing she’s ever done or will make it impossible for her to claim plausible deniability someday.) All of his good behavior falls away as he slices up Buffalo Bob in the name of protecting his wife. Except he doesn't. He’s actually hunched over his typewriter (OF COURSE Joe writes on a typewriter) spilling his fantasies about a fictional alter-ego who exacts the bloody revenge that Joe no longer carries out. Kate discovers his violent pages and is concerned. Joe assures her that all of his murders were necessary to protect his loved ones. And sure, the ones he told her about were: Love (yeah, mostly), Rhys (um, not really), Tom (kind of?), and his father (okay, I’ll give him that one). But puh-LENTY of his kills were for far less noble or necessary reasons — not that Kate knows about them. Joe defends his lurid murder fantasies as depicting the same kind of necessary kills, annoyed that she can’t see everything he’s done for her. I recognize that refrain, and you can sing it with me: Kate, you in danger, girl. Maybe not quite yet, but ungrateful is no way to stay breathing around Joe. Once Kate leaves, Joe hears someone creeping through the store and grabs a blunt object to protect himself. The intruder turns out to be a young woman (Madeline Brewer) who objects to being bludgeoned by a bust of Emily Dickinson, murmuring, “A cleaving in my head as if my brain had split.” Yes, all you lit scholars out there, that's a misquote of Dickinson, and Joe does eventually correct her: it’s “I felt a cleaving in my mind.” Honestly, she’s lucky he didn’t smash her skull right then and there for disrespecting the classics. The woman says she shimmied through a window because she felt bad for the neglected books. She even cops to borrowing one but insists, “I always bring them back.” Having implicated herself as a repeat offender, she starts to rage against the capitalist machine, all passionate fire and self-righteousness that Joe tunes out in disgust at this reminder of who he was before he grew up and entered the billionaire class. In the end, he lets her leave unharmed. Kate, meanwhile, confronts Uncle Bob, who admits to leaking the report. He tells her he doesn’t like her dull, cowardly leadership or her “simp of a husband” and his kid. Kate listens with a smile, then assures him that she’ll survive the upcoming vote. Yes, but will she survive him threatening to leak the way she covered up Rhys’ (Ed Speleers) murder? Uncle Bob’s been digging up some dirt, and he tells her that this is the Kate he wants running the company, not the charitable one. But neither version of Kate wants to be implicated in a murder cover-up, and she vents to Joe about her blind spot regarding Uncle Bob. Joe’s less pleased about being right and more concerned about Bob being aware of any details about Rhys’ death. Then he morphs into that "heavy breathing intensifies" cat meme as he “lets” Kate talk him into doing a tiny lil’ murder, one last time, for the good of the family. Feeling alive for the first time in ages, he creeps into Bob’s house, strangles him, stages it to look like a hanging, and types an email “from Bob” confessing to lying about Kate. Quick question: how the heck strong is Joe that he was able to lift Uncle Bob’s literal dead weight up and into a noose like that? Either he's actually Clark Kent (well, Bizarro Clark Kent) or he used a series of levers and pulleys, right? Still buzzing from finding his purpose again, Joe heads back to Mooney’s and discovers the intruder there again. With his encouragement, she talks and talks about Ibsen and feminism before he finally interrupts to offer her a job. The intruder, who introduces herself as Bronte, is delighted and jokes about her new boss wanting to make a book out of her skin. Gasp! Joe would never! Wait, sorry, what I meant was, with Joe, never say never! Sing it with me: Bronte, you in danger, girl. Finally feeling like himself again after killing to protect someone he loves, Joe moves the bookcase hiding the door to the basement and walks down the stairs to visit his old friend, the book cage. Bookbindings Well, we didn’t get through the first episode without a Goldberg killing. But hey, at least he didn’t immediately fall in love with Bronte, thereby marking her as his next victim, as is his wont. Personal growth, people! Per Teddy, Joe’s an otter, which is somewhere between a twink and a bear. And yes, that tracks. Imagine if Uncle Bob had a nanny cam embedded in that huge taxidermied leopard. What a way for Joe to finally be caught. A leopard never changes its spots, after all. Please allow me to say something that Taylor Swift only thought: “Who uses typewriters anyway?” Episode 2: “Blood Will Have Blood” Boy, did I speak too soon. Joe and Bronte are flirting. It was inevitable. The redhead brings her enthusiasm for cottagecore e-boy maximalism into the shop, along with an upholstered chair that she found on the street. And she SITS DOWN on it. In a SKIRT. WITHOUT CLEANING IT. Bronte, you’re gonna give me a menty-B. Joe’s equally horrified, then dials it up to 11 when she asks about the door hidden behind the bookshelf. Joe badly brushes it off as totes boring, which means she’s going to investigate the first chance she gets. And of course, she does the instant Joe’s called away for an emergency at Henry’s ritzy school. (Henry broke Reagan's daughter’s nose. The headmistress stirs up all kinds of feelings about Joe’s violent childhood and how it affects Henry. Don’t worry, we’ll circle back to this.) Bronte’s trying to pick the book cage lock when Joe and Henry return, and she scampers upstairs to aggressively flirt with her married boss in front of his kid. Cool vibes! Henry tells Joe that he hit Gretchen for saying that his mom was a killer. Joe’s furious that Reagan would’ve talked about Love in front of Gretchen before he was ready to explain all the circumstances to Henry. And he’ll have a chance to express all those feelings when he gets home and learns that Kate invited Reagan and her husband, Harrison (Pete Ploszek), a former NFL player with a lengthy concussion record, to dinner to smooth things over. But the guest list quickly expands to include Teddy, Maddie, and Maddie’s random date Kenton (Alex Benjamin), and Reagan wastes no time launching her attack. She describes Gretchen as “maimed,” insists that Henry be put in a school to deal with his special needs, and demands that Kate and Joe admit that they’ve failed as parents. I’m irate on their behalf until we learn that they didn’t get Henry into therapy after uprooting him from the only home he knew to raise him in New York? And that is wild. Don’t make me side with Reagan here! Kate smoothly apologizes; Joe’s is more grudging, and he flings Reagan's gossip about Henry’s birth mother at her. But no, Reagan was referring to her suspicions that Kate killed Uncle Bob. At this point, poor Kenton offers in vain to show himself out. You and me both, guy. Then the real MVP, Teddy, says he saw the security footage of Bob’s suicide and promptly erased it. Naturally, Joe’s alarmed by this, but now’s not the time. Reagan demands that Kate step down as CEO and calls Joe and his bad-seed son another of Kate’s charity projects, threatening to destroy everything. You know what would make this terrible dinner even worse? Henry bursting into the dining room to whip a knife at Reagan's head. (In Henry’s defense, it was a butter knife.) This brings a swift end to the evening, and once they’re alone, Joe offers to “talk” to Reagan the way he “talked” to Bob. Kate flatly rejects the idea of killing anyone who crosses them for the rest of their lives, and Joe interprets her concerns about their violent histories as a criticism of his own twisted DNA. He dumps the blame squarely on Reagan and is already at a lather when he notices alerts on his phone from the basement motion sensor at Mooney’s. It is, of course, Bronte, who’s accidentally locked herself in the book cage. Geez, we’ve all screwed up on the job at one point or another, but that’s truly above and beyond a work oopsie. When Joe arrives to let her out, she defensively says that he basically dared her to check out his “booby trapped rich-person panic room,” which is… not untrue. Joe also discovers that she was taking pictures of his rare books, planning to sell them to pay off her debts and finance a play. She says he’d never understand her desperation. He in turn fires her. But hey, he lets her out of the basement alive. Take the win and run, Bronte! Instead of leaving the married rich man and his weird book cage in the dust, she turns at the top of the stairs and says she read his typewritten pages and offers a critique: his character’s an antihero serial killer with no flaws, wounds, or backstory. She asks what Joe the author is hiding from. An unsolicited critique of a work in progress? Okay, Joe. You can kill her now. But no, a damn bursts in him, and years of resentment about his rough childhood, his own time in the cage, and his resentment of the Lockwoods pours out of him. Bronte takes it in, then says, “It’s nice to meet the real you.” This activates his insecurities about the people he loves not loving the darkest parts of him, but he convinces himself that those dark parts keep his family safe. And that means he needs to lock Reagan in his cage, interrogate and kill her, and tell Kate the truth… someday. When night falls, Joe lurks in the dark, empty Lockwood offices as Reagan pours herself some liquor and dances to some questionable music. But as he looks on, a masked man bursts into the room, throws the screaming woman on the couch, and starts to unbuckled his pants. Joe Goldberg, good guy that he is, doesn’t want his intended murder victim to be raped first, and he picks up a heavy paperweight to bash the guy on the head. BUT WAIT. That’s not a would-be rapist, it’s Harrison. Not wanting to watch consensual non-con sex between the sister-in-law he hates and her sweet, dopey husband, he bashes Reagan over the head, locks a pantsless Harrison into the supply closet, and puts the book cage to its intended use for the first time in ages. The next day, he’s back to writing thanks to Bronte’s critique and calls her back to get the rest of her things. While she’s there, he thanks her for the critique. “The world you live in wouldn't understand,” she replies, and he starts to get all rose-colored-glasses as his voiceover whispers that they wouldn’t, but Bronte would. He re-hires her on the spot and offers her the use of the apartment upstairs, where she gets all shifty and confesses that she read Sherry and Cary’s self-help book about being caged by Love in Madre Linda. Joe goes all sad puppy and says the person he trusted used his childhood trauma to hurt other people. Bronte softens and agrees to stay, but she warns Joe that she doesn’t sleep with married men. For her sake, I hope that helps… all of this. Oh, and Joe wants a live-in beta reader for his work-in-progress. Back home, Joe talks to Henry about “Mama Love” and asks if he’d like to talk with somebody about his big feelings. Hey, better late than never! Kate listens in, and afterward, she agrees they need to stop Reagan, but not through murder. Then she asks if Joe does what he does to protect them, or because it’s an impulse he can’t control, and Joe realizes that Kate doesn’t accept or understand him at all. Kate! Girl! I’m worried for you! Then a call from Reagan — yes, Reagan — threatening to sue all of them into oblivion sends Joe racing to Mooney’s. The blonde in the basement exclaims “Boo-Boo!” when she seems him, which explains Joe’s newest predicament: he caged the wrong twin. Bookbindings Aww, Sherry and Cary. I hope those two are thriving. Ditto Matthew and Theo, the father and son next door.In palace intrigue news, Kate offers Teddy Bob’s empty seat on the board and asks if he really saw the security footage. He says he was bluffing and carefully asks what he would’ve seen if he had watched. Kate carefully answers that she has no reason to doubt the official story, and they reaffirm their loyalty and gratitude for one another. It’s nice! Please stay alive, you two!When Joe met the prince of Denmark, they talked about Hamlet all night long, right?Okay, but what if Bronte’s the one stalking Joe? She knows who he is, what he did, she’s connected to someone he harmed in the past and knows just how to lure him in… Not sure how likely it is, but what a fun storyline to watch unspool. Episode 3: “Imposter Syndrome” When Maddie was 16, she and Reagan took a spring break trip to Brazil. It started with Gatoritas on the beach and Maddie’s jealousy that Reagan hooked up with her bodyguard, and ended with Maddie’s kidnapping. Her captors cut off her ear to send to Tom as ransom, but in the end, she reverse-Stockholm Syndrome’d her captor until he shot himself in the head and she walked herself back to the beach. The FBI had never seen anything like it. I mention this at the top of the recap for two reasons. One, Maddie didn’t know it then, but that harrowing incident prepared her to survive Joe’s cage. And two, she’s been harboring resentment for her sister for a long, long time. So Boo-Boo’s gonna have to figure out a way to fix this boo-boo because it’s not like he can kill both twins. Probably. But first, let’s turn to life in the Lockwood-Goldberg house, where tensions simmer under the luxe surface. Kate undermines Joe in front of Teddy when he suggests turning Gretchen against Reagan, and they clash over sending Henry to a different school or keeping him where he is. In the end, Kate insists on handling Reagan on her own. But at work? It’s all butterflies and rainbows and heart-eye emojis for Joe. Bronte teases him out of his writer’s block, and he teases her back about reading a Jessica Davis bodice ripper. It gives her an opening to suggest they expand Mooney’s romance section, starting with the books available at a big estate sale in Queens. Joe, who’d undoubtedly self-identify as a hopeless romantic, has no interest in stocking books in one of the consistently top-selling genres around, but he agrees to go along with Bronte simply to keep her away from the basement. She’s delighted and gets Joe to act out a scene from The Relentless Racher, with Maximus brushing a lock of hair off Calliope's face as she bites her lip. There’s quivering and shoving, growling and purring. It’s intense before they break away with a laugh. Joe and Bronte clean up at the Queens sale, and when she tries to leave for her “dirt-bag literary salon,” Joe ends up tagging along. And that’s how he meets her awful ex, Clayton (Tom Francis). Even before he opens his mouth, I hate his haircut. Then he starts hassling Bronte about bringing her patron with her, and I hate everything else about him, too. The salon is where these young writers read their works-in-progress, open-mic style, which makes every cell in my body shrink away in horror. Clayton harasses Bronte about not sharing her own work and reads one of the pieces she shared with him in confidence. It’s drenched in sex that’s more than a little uncomfortable to listen to, perhaps due to the absence of any other plot or context. Then he tells the room at large that Bronte’s really Louise Flannery, a dental hygienist from Ohio. This, at last, stirs Joe’s suspicions, and he wonders if he’s being conned. Some light internet stalking shows that her mother died, and she’s read Beck’s book. None of that dispels my hope that the player’s getting played here! But when he knocks on the apartment door, he finds Louise-turned-Bronte huddled on her bed in tears. They talk about the freedom of starting over as someone new, along with her mortification over having her writing read aloud and how difficult it was to be her mother’s caretaker during her terminal illness. Joe encourages her not to give up her writing dreams, which hopefully no longer include Clayton’s mentorship and support. He gets her to talk about her idolization of Beck and opens up about her himself, describing her beauty, her potential. He even admits to briefly dating her and says, “I wish I killed Dr. Nick.” Angsty pause. “Then maybe she would still be here.” Oh, Joe. As they talk about the satisfaction of writing poetic justice, Joe starts to realize that Bronte gets him like Kate doesn’t. He rests his hand on hers, and it’s a lot of proximity for a woman who said she doesn’t sleep with married guys. Joe finally pulls himself away, and Bronte follows him to the door to remind him that she’s too much of a mess to enjoy any affair they might have. But Joe’s too busy imagining the hallway light bathing her in an angelic glow as she gazes at him all wide-eyed and come-hither. He manages to pull himself away, and pours his feelings out to his typewriter (seriously, who uses typewriters anyway?) and when she comes up behind him, she likes what she sees on the page so much that she slides down the zipper on his pants and… Okay, it’s a dream sequence that makes the idea of masturbatory self-indulgent writing, um, literal. Afterward, he declares it either the best or worst thing he’s ever written, and he decides to leave Bronte at the store with his writing and hope that Kate can manage to embrace all of him, too. Joe, baby. This is a mid(-ish)life crisis. Leave the younger woman alone. While her husband’s out being a cliché, Kate finds Reagan in tears over Harrison being found half naked in a closet with Maddie’s phone. She sympathizes… and then she tells her the world doesn’t need to hear about her marital drama if she just drops the Henry/Gretchen stuff. Joe, of course, wants to embrace the violent solution, but Kate asks for more time. When he updates Maddie, she’s the opposite of overjoyed that the affair is out in the open. On the contrary, Reagan's prenup will ruin Harrison, and she’ll keep Maddie from ever seeing Gretchen again. (Reagan bullied Maddie into being her surrogate despite knowing how she felt about Harrison.) “There are fates worse than death,” she tells Joe. “You might as well kill me.” Her fury and despair moves Joe into entering the cage to give her the insulin. Kate’s also feeling big feelings — nightmares, guilt — since they “did the thing” with Uncle Bob, and she wonders why Joe isn't suffering the way she is. Joe answers honestly: he stopped feeling guilty for needing a purpose, like protecting her and Henry. In fact, that’s what makes him special. It’s been three long years of playing nice, and he suffers when Kate recoils from the real him. He calls her a powerful queen who needs her knight to make the world better. But Kate doesn’t want to do it Joe’s way. Clearly, Kate doesn’t realize that one doesn’t simply break up with Joe Goldberg. Before a fight can really erupt, they’re interrupted by a live stream from Maddie, confessing her affair with Harrison and ceding her board vote to Reagan. Kate is furious with the slacker twin, but Joe knows the truth: that’s a Reagan-wolf in Maddie-sheep’s clothing, so he slips to Mooney’s to make Maddie an offer she’d be a fool to refuse: become her sister. Bookbindings For the record, Tom paid for Maddie’s missing ear to be reconstructed. What a dad!As irked as I am at times by Bronte’s manic-pixie-dream-girl energy, her solution to Joe’s imposter’s syndrome is fantastic: everybody feels that way, which means he’s not special. Quit being so precious and write. And hey, maybe she is just a woman who wandered into the wrong bookstore by happenstance.Bronte guesses that Joe and Kate’s real-life romance-novel trope grumpy/sunshine (or maybe grumpy/grumpy). And although Joe says it’s enemies-to-lovers, both of them are wrong. All BookTok girlies know that Joe is, in fact, a toxic antihero, and you pick it up thinking it’s a taboo dark romance where the dangerous hero looks at the bruises on the heroine’s body and growls “who did this to you” before taking care of that for her, but the book turns out not to be a romance at all when the hero kills the heroine in the final chapter.Speaking of, Clayton’s days had better be numbered. Episode 4: “My Fair Maddie” That’s all Joe can think about, even while Henry’s chattering about his sessions with therapist George, and especially while Kate’s giving him the cold shoulder. Once they're alone, she tells Joe that she is a queen, and there’s more than one way to hurt someone. She leaves to take care of Reagan (yes, again, honestly, I might side with Joe on this), while he fantasizes about Bronte joining him in the shower. Truly, is it a season of You if Penn Badgley isn’t asked to film masturbation scenes in odd places? At least he’s at home this time. Next stop is Mooney’s, where he tries to get Maddie on board with this ‘90s family sitcom twin switch plan. He spins a nice story about Reagan being unreachable at a farm upstate — er, at a Santa Fe spa while Maddie-as-Reagan puts Teddy on the board, drops the nonsense with Henry, and undoes Harrison’s prenup so he and Maddie can ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately, the plan hits an immediate snag when Maddie can't control her up-speaking and introduces herself as Reagan Lockwood-Jacobs? A commotion upstairs pulls Joe away from the acting lessons to find Bronte planning Mooney’s grand re-opening for the following night. Surprise! Joe’s besotted enough that he agrees to it, even with Maddie in the cage downstairs. Bronte also reiterates that they’re just work friends and asks if he’s written any more pages. Joe stammers a non-answer because his prose has turned more erotic than thriller thanks to his growing obsession with her. Joe may not have pages, but Bronte does, and when she hands them over, he finds her work bold, insightful, personal, and lavishes it with praise. Her toxic male character’s based on a real person, and she jokes that watching an abuser get punished would be cathartic. It’s yet another sign that Bronte, not Kate, is the one for him. She then explains the D&D alignment chart to Joe, who somehow had never heard of it. Chaotic good is messy with a heart of gold. That’s Bronte and all the romance novel heroes who beast out to protect the people they love. Then there’s chaotic evil, the ones who want to hurt people. Joe recognizes Reagan immediately and heads downstairs with a new tactic. He tells Maddie that she’s chaotic neutral, while Reagan taking her hurt and lashing out at other people is chaotic evil, and that’s what Maddie needs to channel. He talks to her like Reagan would, poking and needling until Maddie screams that Reagan stole Harrison from her because she couldn't stand to see her happy. It transforms her briefly into Reagan, and Joe starts to think that this plan might actually work. Don’t you love watching actors get to stretch like this? Not only is Anna Camp playing two different characters, but she nails the depiction of Maddie playing Reagan. It never gets old! Meanwhile, the real Reagan refuses to resign quietly when Kate suggests that’s how she can avoid the embarrassment of embezzlement charges thanks to evidence Teddy dug up. Reagan suggests that it’s Kate who should resign, as she’s found evidence that Kate framed Joe’s student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) for killing Rhys. Furthermore, she’s having Uncle Bob’s body exhumed to look for evidence of foul play. That night, Kate tells Joe that she’s done. She realized how easy it would be to simply ask Joe to take care of Reagan. She finally says the word “murder” out loud and tells Joe she hates that part of herself, just like she hates that he doesn’t want to control that part of himself. She’s not a queen, he’s not a knight, and she doesn't want to become her father, so she’s done. Even though she was telling, not asking, Joe says that’s fine, but he’s thinking about Bronte praising those chaotic good romance heroes. So he does what he thinks is chaotic good by donning a ski cap and breaking into Reagan's house while she’s alone practicing yoga, clearly expecting her to be an easy capture. She is not, and she kicks the crap out of him, knocking him into the indoor pool before running to issue a threat over the house’s intercom system that the masked man picked the wrong house and the wrong woman. And for a second, it really looks like he did as an incredible fight scene unfolds in the recreation wing of Reagan's house. She wails on the intruder with a pool cue, a heavy crystal bowl, bowling balls, her fists. She’s got a lot of rage in her, and she pours it out onto the man threatening her, even grappling him to the ground and sinking her teeth into his groin. (It’s unclear which parts she actually chomps, but whatever fleshy bits she got, Joe howls.) She manages to get the upper hand long enough to yank his mask off and is only a little surprised that it’s her brother-in-law. She assumes Kate sent him and bolts out of the house, leaving Joe to chase her down and knock her out with a bowling pin. When he dumps Reagan's unconscious body into the book cage and gives Maddie a vial of insulin, she realizes this was the plan all along: Maddie either kills her sister, or Joe kills both of them. Marienne and Nadia would know how to handle this. While drama brews in the basement, Bronte’s getting Mooney’s ready for its open house and takes the chance to go through Joe’s desk drawers. In one, she finds fresh pages that he didn’t share with her. It takes her no time to realize he’s writing about her: her romance novels, her cardigan, her light, her personality. And then there are his feelings for her: “I could make a home in her broken heart,” Joe writes before his prose slides in an erotic direction that leaves Bronte flushed and breathless. Y’know, Joe’s gender has a terrible reputation for writing sex scenes (for good reason!), but he acquits himself pretty well here, based on the excerpt Bronte reads. Kate, meanwhile, has a tough conversation with Teddy, breaking the news that she’s stepping down, which means he won’t get that board seat and will undoubtedly be forced out of the company by the rest of the family. He’s hurt and mad and asks a question he probably shouldn’t: is all of this because Kate’s afraid of what Joe might do to Reagan? No, Teddy! Now is not the time to let on that you know more than you should! Speaking of sharing more than you should, Maddie tells Reagan everything, including the fact that Joe wants her to use her insulin to kill her sister. Reagan openly laughs at the thought of Maddie convincing anyone with a twin switch, which infuriates the chaotic neutral sister. Maddie shouts that Harrison loves her and doesn’t need Viagra when they’re together (ouch!). The chaotic evil sister tries to gaslight Maddie into thinking that the surrogacy was her idea, and if they’d had to choose between mother and baby during the delivery that left Maddie with a broken pelvis, it was no contest who’d win.“You are expendable, Maddie. The lesser twin. The spare,” Reagan spits. “You are completely and utterly irrelevant.” Maddie’s face tells us that Reagan may have just gone too far, but we cut back to the party before we can find out what happens next. It’s time for Mooney’s big opening. Bronte looks fabulous in a slinky green dress, but Clayton’s unwelcome arrival upsets her until Clayton manhandles her and Joe beasts out, shoving him into a bookcase and telling him to leave her alone. Clayton complies, and Bronte steps out immediately afterward, tears on her cheeks and Joe in pursuit. (Wait, who’s minding the books and freshening the drinks?) Joe catches up with her in an alley, where she admits she read his pages, but she can’t have this married father protecting her from bad dudes, and she certainly can’t be with him the way they both want. She proves herself the strongest of the pair by walking away, leaving Joe gazing helplessly after her. But he’s got the twins to check on, and the security feed on his phone shows the two cuddling. Joe heads back to break up the cozy scene, but what he actually finds is Reagan dead, her head in Maddie’s lap and the insulin needle in her neck. “You were right,” she tearfully tells Joe. “The one person in the whole world who was supposed to respect me? She respected me the least.” Then she stands and screams to be let out. Sooooo, we’re all thinking it, right? Is that Maddie, or is that Reagan in Maddie’s clothes? Let’s find out! The next day, Joe waits anxiously for Maddie-as-Reagan (probably!) to arrive. She insults Kate’s looks, then interrupts Kate’s resignation speech to announce that she’s stepping down as CFO to handle a personal matter and cedes all her votes to Maddie. It’s an extremely Reagan speech. Kate rolls with it, keeps her position as CEO, and nominates Teddy to fill the vacant board seat. Everyone raises their hands in a vote, with Reagan awkward-cutely raising both of hers to indicate Maddie’s vote too. It’s an extremely Maddie motion — like so much so that it removes any doubt about who OD’d on insulin in the cage. Afterward, instead of being happy that they won, Kate demands to know what Joe did to get Reagan to roll over. It’s the last piece of evidence he needs to know that their marriage is broken, and he heads straight to Mooney’s, where he finds Bronte packing her things to leave. She’s trying so hard to do the right thing, but Joe begs her to stay. When she relents, the last of their restraint falls away, and they have, it must be said, zero foreplay sex on his desk. Bookbindings Of course Joe fantasizes about rescuing Bronte from underneath a pile of books.Would we call Joe lawful evil? And is Kate… lawful neutral?Now and forever, justice. for. Nadia. Episode 5: “Last Dance” We’ve hit the halfway point of the final season. Buckle up! While Joe’s busy romanticizing having an affair, Kate’s got her investigator digging into the things about Joe she didn’t want to know before, and Maddie’s cracking under the weight of being Reagan. One second, she’s sweet Maddie with Harrison and Gretchen, then she flashes to Reagan-awful in order to maintain her cover, all while ignoring Kate’s demands to know what happened between her (well, Reagan) and Joe. One thing Kate does find out is what’s happening between Joe and Bronte. New York’s No. 1 romantic love bombs his new squeeze with grocery deliveries and an in-home masseuse visit, and Kate watches from the street as a pants-less Bronte runs out to tip the masseuse, who assures her that Joe Goldberg covered it all. The revelation sends her crying to Teddy, who finally gets her to come clean about, ya know, her husband. She says Joe’s hurt — and worse. And listen, if you didn’t jump back 10 seconds to rewatch Griffin Matthews’ disbelieving delivery of “Worse??” please go back to Netflix and do just that. I’ll wait. Kate mentions that Joe’s former squeeze Marienne (Tati Garbrielle) is missing, and she now suspects Love didn’t kill herself. Also, there’s the Uncle Bob of it all. Kate says she’s been asleep, but she’s not anymore, and she’s going to work on an exit plan that keeps them all safe, including Henry. Joe’s blissfully unaware of Kate’s awakening as he reads the pages Bronte wrote after his pampering, and he’s intrigued by her depictions of restraints, control, and possession in the bedroom. Joe asks if this is what she’s into and *taps microphone* listen up! Fiction is fiction, ya’ll. Maybe that’s what she’s into, maybe it’s not, but I beg all readers of spicy books to not assume anything about the authors’ interests. Once I’m off my soapbox, Bronte undercuts my point by saying yeah, she might be into restraints, control, and possession in the bedroom. So she lets Joe blindfold her, and he’s overwhelmed by how much trust and control she’s ceding to him as he congratulates himself for being a good guy who’d never take advantage of her like Clayton would. But just as things really start rolling, Bronte pulls away, leaving Joe wondering if he pushed too hard or asked too much. But it’s just as well; Maddie’s spinning out and feels haunted by her twin. She wants to speed up the timeline for faking Reagan's death. Joe tells her to give it one more month, and then “Reagan” will “travel” to the Philippines, where Joe’s friend in Manila will fake her death at sea. “Who?” Maddie asks. “You don’t have friends!” Heh. Joe manages to talk her down for now, but that woman is close to cracking. Joe returns to Mooney’s and finds a terse note in his typewriter from Bronte saying she’s leaving town. Her apartment’s stripped bare, her number’s disconnected, and Joe’s suspicion immediately falls on Clayton. He’s upset as he returns to his family, where he compares the cold and passionless Kate to Bronte. She may be chilly, but she’s careful and dumps out the tea he made for her. She really can’t be too careful. Never forget Benji’s peanut oil! When Henry settles into Kate’s side of the bed, he finds a truly enormous knife under her pillow, and Joe goes a little crazy around the eyes as he confronts her about it and she accuses him of murdering Love and schtupping his shopgirl. “I gave you my heart,” she shouts, and Joe retorts that she took it back when she saw his. If he’s killed a lot of people, so has she, and he shoves the knife into her hands and tells her to stop pretending that she’s a victim and just stick it in his chest. Instead, she starts planning for their divorce, which is pretty darn brave of her. He storms out and self-soothes by breaking into Clayton’s apartment. It’s empty, but he finds Clayton’s laptop — the wallpaper is a closeup of Clayton, which… yeesh — as well as an empty gun case. Then a call from an unknown number comes in, and he leaps to answer it. It’s Bronte. She wanted to hear his voice but won’t tell him where she is or what happened. She blurts out that he shouldn't worry about her and hangs up. Joe calls the number back, and reaches an Atlantic Beach diner. Assuming she called him for help knowing he’d come rescue her, he drives there the next day and gets the diner employee to confirm that Bronte was there arguing with a guy in a mullet. Diner guy directs Joe to one of the beach houses, and when he breaks in, Bronte drops him with a taser blast. She admits to calling Clayton in a moment of weakness, then running because she couldn’t handle being the other woman, particularly when he started treating her like the heroine in her own romance novel. Joe dials it up to 11, telling her that he’s getting divorced, and it’s only her now. He pulls her into a dance and unfurls novel-worthy dialogue about consuming fires and Bronte as the center of his universe. She frets that if he knew the real her, he wouldn’t feel the same. Ummm, what are the odds that Joe’s hooked up with yet another murderer? How many times can that happen to one guy? He’s not deterred, and he makes sure she feels in control of her lack of control as he ties her to the bedframe and they start exploring her fantasies. Meanwhile, Joe’s wife turns up at Reagan's house unannounced to find out how Joe got her to step down as CFO. What she finds instead is Maddie in full manic Maddie mode, burning sage in a messy, messy house. Maddie badly lies that Reagan's upstairs and scampers away to shut herself in the bathroom. As she starts to transform into Reagan, she has a shouted conversation with Kate through the door, playing the parts of both twins before starting to argue with her Reagan-self in the mirror. It’s ridiculous and fun, and I would’ve watched 30 more hours of exactly this. Maddie finally snaps and crumples to the bathroom floor as Kate lets herself in, and she unleashes a torrent of truth: she killed Reagan while locked in Joe’s bookstore cage. And she’s grateful for that! Joe may be a lunatic, but he made her realize how much trauma and abuse she’d suffered at her sister’s hands. “Things are better now,” she tearfully insists, asking Kate to pretend that none of this ever happened. Aww, sweet Maddie. I hope she’s able to come back from this. Kate reports this all to Teddy, who’s incredulous that she won’t go to the police with all of this. But how can she when she’s the one who asked Joe to kill Bob, and she played an outsized role in framing Nadia for Rhys’ death? That leaves Teddy, the Black guy from Harlem, looking like he’s profited the most off of Bob’s death, which he knows damn well could go badly for him. He’s upset as he heads out the door, and although he cares about Kate he says that she might, in fact, deserve to lose everything. Somebody please rescue Teddy from all of this. You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: Teddy, you in danger, girl. Finally, Joe’s reveling in the best sex of his life when he hears a disturbance downstairs. It’s Clayton, and he’s getting violent with Bronte. We can overhear snippets of their fight: Bronte's just as stupid as she was, and she shouldn't talk about his dad like that. When Joe intervenes, the men start to grapple, and Bronte pointedly looks at the stone fireplace hearth. Joe takes the hint and bashes Clayton’s head against it, killing him. And that’s when Dominique (Natasha Behnam) and Phoenix (b), two of Clayton’s dirtbag friends from the dirtbag literary salon, burst in with their cell phones pointed at the Joe Goldberg, who’s just done a murder. “The world needs to see this before TikTok takes it down,” Dominique says, and truly, no more influencier words have ever been spoken. When a wild-eyed Joe tells Bronte that they need to leave, she holds the taser out in front of her as Dominique says, “We got him, Louise!” Bookbindings Vindication! (Maybe!) Bronte/Louise was after Joe all along! (Possibly!)Line of the episode: “You're writing this for the ‘He’s a 10, but he wants to kill you’ crowd. They don’t want reality. They want to come thinking about murder sex and then feel weird afterward.” Again, dark romance BookTok has been seen and read for filth this season.Well this feels like a major pivot point in the series, no? Fingers crossed episode 6 has some answers for us… Episode 6: “The Dark Face of Love” Answers! We got ‘em! And maybe a little bit of Stockholm syndrome, too. But not the Maddie kind. The one where a woman yet again falls for Joe Goldberg’s charms. The difference is that unlike his other victims, Bronte/Louise should really know better. The back half of the final season begins, as any good narrative should, at the beginning, with Guinevere Beck. She’s alive and well, a grad student on the phone with her new boyfriend, insisting that she can’t skip town with him because she’s about to meet a student. Said student then speaks into the phone to tell the man on the other end that Beck’s all hers now. That man is Joe, and that student is Louise before she became Bronte, the woman who eyes Joe warily in the present as they pass one another in the police station after Clayton’s death. Detective Marquez (Nava Mau) handles the questioning of Louise, starting with whether it’s true that she moved to New York to catfish Joe Goldberg. It is. She did. And flashbacks tell us why. (We recognize these scenes as set in the past because Louise is rocking schoolgirlishly long hair.) Beck is Louise’s TA capacity, and she’s the first person to compliment Louise’s writing and to champion her work. When Louise says she’s dropping out to take care of her terminally ill mother in Ohio, Beck encourages her to continue on in a local creative writing program. But no, Louise plans to get her dental job back. Beck writes a Brontë quote in Louise’s book as a farewell, and months later in Ohio, Louise is shocked by the news that Beck’s been murdered. Then she’s puzzled when she reads her mentor’s posthumously published book and knows in her bones that parts of it weren’t written by Beck. (The inclusion of Isben is a dead giveaway; Beck wasn’t a fan. And no wonder that’s what Bronte rambles about during her second meeting with Joe.) To investigate who might have sent the manuscript anonymously after Beck’s death, Louise spends her nights trolling the various subreddits, eventually connecting with three other amateur detectives: Dominique, Phoenix, and Clayton. Yep, Clayton. He’s Dr. Nick Angovine’s son, and he wants to clear his dad’s name using recordings of Beck’s sessions, as well as the ones Joe had with Dr. Nicky under a fake name. The quartet is obsessed and spends years chasing down rumors about Joe, and after her mother’s death, Bronte considers them her new family. The revelation that Joe’s alive and married to the fabulous, wealthy Kate Lockwood energizes them all, and Louise moves to New York to help take him down. The plan is to watch him from a safe distance, but Louise can’t stay away and breaks into his bookstore. She’s squirrely about the subject of Joe the next day, so much so that Dom and Clayton follow her when she returns to Mooney’s. Her friends find her almost hyperventilating after her encounter with Joe. “I think he liked me,” she says, laughing in shock at what an effective cover story she created on the fly. And yeah, if that was Louise facing down a murderer and creating a character out of whole cloth with no prep? Slow clap, well done, bloody good show. Louis says she broke in to look for the book cage and found his fiction, which doesn’t match up with any details of his likely kills. But reading his words made her realize that Joe’s a romantic, and she’s pretty sure she can get him to fall in love with her. Be a bird with a broken wing, let him argue books with her, give him a villain to save her from. Yeah, she’s pretty much got his number, doesn’t she? So the group hatches a plan to “let” Joe discover her real name and the social media background they curated for her while setting Clayton up as her toxic ex. Although Dom warns her not to fall for Joe’s Prince Charming charms, Louise totally falls for Joe’s Prince Charming charms and starts insisting that they stop assuming and make sure Joe is actually guilty. Marquez asks when Louise started sleeping with Joe, and she only briefly (and weakly) tries to deny it. Because that’s what put cracks in the group’s foundation. Louise told Clayton not to come to the bookstore party, but he shows up anyway and got so into his role that he left finger-shaped bruises on her arms. As Clayton gets more aggressive in his attempts to bring Joe down, she’s shocked to find him kind, tender, protective. But she sticks with the plan since her friends are counting on her. Well, she does deviate when she calls Joe from that diner and confides in Dom that she’s all tangled up about who’s Louise and who’s Bronte. The stay in the beach house was supposed to clear their heads, and Joe wasn’t supposed to show up. But he does, in part because Clayton baited him on social media with hints that he and Bronte are back together. And realizing what all of this led to, Louise paces the interrogation room, stewing and doubting herself. Joe’s also having a bad, bad, night. He slinks home and finds Kate in full boss mode, putting out Joe’s fires. But she is done. She blames Joe for killing her sister (“Nu-uh, Maddie did it!” is not an acceptable excuse) and blames herself for taking Henry away from the two Madre Linda dads who loved him. And she’s going to fix things, starting with removing Henry from their home and tricking Joe into signing a temporary custody agreement at the police station that declares him unfit. Joe’s livid and vows to fight her for custody, but Kate asks what money he plans to use. Incensed, he lunges at her, but she knows him back and warns him that a) armed bodyguards are right outside her door waiting to take him down if necessary b) he’ll only retain access to her family’s resources if he plays nice. Otherwise, he’s on his own. Her threats delivered, Kate shuts herself in her bedroom and breaks down. Aww, Kate. Yeah yeah, she did many bad things, but I’m fond of that cool, competent queen. Enough of Joe’s flailing. Louise continues unspooling her story for Marquez, saying that she warned Dom to stay away from the beach house. Dom reluctantly agrees but says she’s got Clay’s gun and is calling Phoenix for backup. We know how things went down at this point, and Louise is basking in the afterglow downstairs when Clayton bursts in, incensed that she ruined his plan and dismissing the non-zero odds that Joe might actually have killed her. He accuses her of being as stupid as Beck and being a tourist in his plot to avenge his father. In the end, she tells Marquez, they’d set Joe up to think Clayton was dangerous, which makes his actions self-defense, not a murderous rage. And if Louise’s story can be believed (as much as anyone’s can in a show full of people with so little self-awareness), Clayton was dangerous, too. Louise looks small and deflated when Dom picks her up outside the police station the next day. Ditto Joe, who moves his sad little overnight bag into the apartment above Mooney’s, vowing to burn New York to the ground to keep Kate from taking away his son. He also finds the cameras Louise and company hid around the apartment, and holds up the one embedded in a book to say “Hi, Bronte,” as Louise watches in fear. Bookbindings Hi, Beck! Welcome back! I’m so sorry Joe added Ibsen to your book. Clayton does not look like Dr. Nicky. Like, at all. Soooo here’s to brilliant casting that kept us off the scent? Fun little shout out to Karen “Minty Fresh” Minty, who briefly dated Joe in season 1 and claims on the crime-solving boards to have seen the bookstore cage. Joe was right about one thing. Kate is a queen. Now let’s get her and Teddy to reconcile and we can all move forward. I owe Louise an apology. Apparently, her Bronte persona was exactly that, a persona. So if she was channeling Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State and putting her bare thighs on a stranger’s bed bug chair, it was all in service of trapping Joe. Mission accomplished! Episode 7: “#JoeGoldberg” From paparazzi darling to the most side-eyed man in New York. It’s enough to turn anybody into a media critic, and Joe wastes no time bemoaning the lack of context in the coverage of his involvement in Clayton’s murder. (To be fair, “Humanitarian or homicidal maniac?” is the kind of false dichotomy headline that’s generally frowned upon in responsible journalism.) With the city turning its cell phone cameras on him at all turns, he can’t go after Bronte to punish her for destroying his family and keeping him from his son, and his lawyer tells him to let the public attention die down before he tries to get Henry back. But Joe’s not one to sit idle, so he lurks outside of Henry’s school and begs the headmistress (Michelle Hurd) to give Henry a hardback copy of the book they were in the middle of reading — and that Joe hid a tracker inside of. Books have always been his savior, after all. Kate’s navigating the crisis with help from her PR consultant, Sloan. She swears to keep her siblings on her side but refuses to consider turning on Joe. Sure, it’s for self-preservation reasons, but Sloan doesn’t need to know that. Kate offers to send Maddie to a spa to recover from her recent ordeals and says she’ll make it so Maddie can live her life with Harrison and Gretchen. So that’s one sibling handled. Kate leans on Teddy a little harder, asking him to keep Henry in a secret apartment she’s rented in the West Village. He reluctantly agrees, but he had every reason to be wary. Joe tracks Henry's location, distracts the security guard stationed outside with fake texts from a woman, and forces his way into the apartment. Teddy makes it clear he knows how dangerous Joe really is and pulls a knife. After a struggle, it ends up in Joe’s hands, which is when Henry descends the stairs. Teddy sends a quick 911 to summon an army of guards to drag Joe away, and that’s enough for him. He tells Kate that he doesn’t want to be part of this toxic family, and he won’t be complicit in anything happening now. Returning to running that kennel will be a relief after all of this. Stay safe, Teddy! Louise is also opting out. She refuses to be the face of the Joe Goldberg takedown videos her friends have planned, and she also rejects Dom's suggestion that she return to Ohio and leave “Bronte” behind. The women argue when Dom realizes that Louise is in love with Joe and convinced the police that he killed Clayton in self-defense. Thing is, Joe did kind of act in self-defense. Clayton attacked her and Joe both and had been showing wild disregard for her safety prior to that. I’ll leave it up to a high-priced defense attorney to decide if that final act of bashing Clayton’s head into the hearth was “necessary,” but everything else feels at least a little self-defensey. (Sure, sure, Joe’s a murderer, so that changes the equation. I’m just saying, it wasn't a violent scene before Joe got down there.) Since Louise won’t help, Dom and Phoenix put out their own social media campaign against Joe, identifying him as the killer of Candace Stone, Benjamin Ashby III, and Guinevere Beck, then concluding with, “Stitch this, leave a comment, or slide into our DMs.” It’s Dom’s parting “Pop off, fam” that adds insult to injury for Joe. But things are about to get even worse for him. Dottie Quinn (Saffron Burrows) stitches the original video to accuse Joe of killing Love and Forty, and then Sherry and Cary clap back, reminding Dottie that it was her daughter who locked them in that cage in Madre Linda. (Don’t forget they wrote a book about their ordeal; link in bio!) Next, it’s Annika (Kathryn Gallagher), popping up online to accuse Joe of killing her best friend Peach, and one of his Darcy College students complains about him cancelling classes left and right. “I was dissociating!” Joe shouts at his phone. Paco (Luca Padovan), Joe’s former next-door neighbor, posts a video praising Joe for saving him and his mother, which inevitably leads Phoenix and Dom to connect the dots to a Ron Baker who did, in fact, date the woman next door to Joe and has since disappeared. Hey, there’s former Mooney’s employee Ethan (Zach Cherry)! His video says Joe was always a good dude, but his policy is to believe victims. Aww, Ethan! We love an ally. The final voice we see chiming in is Beck’s brother, Clyde. Although Joe never met him, Clyde’s not shy about casting blame in his direction. This onslaught of accusation, anger, and condemnation has Joe seething. After all the good he’s done for people, this is all anyone will remember. Not only is this montage a fun send-up of social media sleuthing and the resulting pile-ons, but what a clever way to bring back this parade of familiar faces. Louise also finds herself the target of media curiosity, with lengthy articles written about “Bronte” and her involvement in Clayton’s death. She wants to reach out to Joe and apologize, take the blame, but she can’t bring herself to actually push the button and make contact. Maddie’s also not done with Joe. He threatens her with book cage footage of her killing Reagan to force her to help him clean up his image. Maddie, ever the survivor, suggests appearing on the Kim Kramer Show. This journo-influencer (Heidi Gardner) shapes the Gen Z court of public opinion with her takedowns of toxic men. Joe’s alarmed by this, but Maddie assures him, “You're a charming white man with really great hair. Your work is mostly done for you.” All he has to do is follow the playbook: admit to unspecific mistakes; apologize if he hurt anyone; tease a childhood trauma; be noble and stoic; and whatever you do, don’t cry. There’s nothing worse than a man crying on TV. Joe’s disgusted but agrees to do it — for Henry’s sake, and Maddie’s “sure, Jan” face is extremely loud. After all, Joe’s nothing if not a series of excuses for doing what he wants to do. Louise watches from the street as Joe sits down with Kim in Mooney’s. She watches Joe say that Louise and her friends tried to goad him into being what they thought he was, and she is the biggest regret of his life. It gets her to finally book that one-way ticket to Toledo, but before that, she taps out a text to Joe. Hope his phone’s on silent, because they are actively streaming live. Inside Mooney’s, Kim asks Joe about the other allegations, and he leads her and her crew downstairs to the book cage. He explains that it’s for the protection of rare books and has been a refuge his whole life. At first, he follows the guidelines, stating that his father figure, Mr. Mooney, built it and could be harsh, but before long, he’s in tears over being locked in the cage for days. When Kim takes a quick break so Maddie can get Joe back together again, he spots the text from Louise: “FWIW I told the police the truth. You were protecting me.” She saved him. And it turns everything around. When they’re streaming again, he tells Kim that he was in love with Louise. Not a victim, someone with great privilege, but he was vulnerable and in love. But Clayton was hurting Bronte — Louise — always Bronte to him. He doesn’t want pity. He wants people to know that he’s the luckiest man alive to have had that, even if it was snatched away. It works. Social media is full of the expected “Wish Joe Goldberg would kill for me” sentiments, and Kate seethes as she takes it all in. Henry asks what’s happening, and she explains that daddy did something bad and hurt people. Mommy did bad things too, so they’re going to London to make it better. Joe wanders into the Men's Rights Activists side of social media, and they’re turning on Louise: find her, dox her, punish her. There’s even video of her on the streets, and Joe’s protective instincts fire up. And then it happens. Louise stops to help a man struggling to load boxes into his van. Van Man (Jefferson White) confirms that she’s Louise and tosses her in the back. (Ladies, did we learn nothing from Ted Bundy?) Thankfully, Joe’s there to see it happen, and he beats the van driver’s head in with a brick. Um. Not "thankfully" on that last part, but you get it. Freshly arrived in London, Kate pays a visit to Nadia and offers to help get her out since she’s the one who helped put her there in the first place. After that, “we’re gonna take Joe Goldberg down.” With the dominant narrative now praising Joe for doing it all for love, he’s suddenly a fan of the media. He’s got a spring in his step as he comes home to Louise, who’s handcuffed to the bed. Doing it all for love, indeed. Bookbindings Yes, Nadia!! So glad she’ll be back in action — and she’s teaming up with Kate? I die. (Hopefully not literally.) Who knew what this show was lacking was a little Heidi Gardner energy? If she ever wants to switch from comedy to clickbait outrage journalism, there’s a future for her. I now present, for your entertainment, the best thirsty tweets about Joe: ”I thought he was John Mayer’s evil twin.” “My heart belongs to Joe Smolderberg.” “Trying not to swoon bc a man is dead but that SPEECH?!” And let’s not overlook this gem from real-life You fan Cardi B: “When there are allegations but he’s a 10 #JoeGoldberg Episode 8: “Folie a Deux” Ah, the joys of waking up in your own bed only to discover you're handcuffed to the metal frame while your serial killer ex-boyfriend cooks you breakfast. Joe explains that he cuffed her to keep her from walking on her sprained ankle following the attempted abduction by van man, but really, he needs to know if she can love all of him or if she’s just the woman who ruined his life. He fills her in on what the manosphere’s saying about her and ponders aloud how strange it is that people will believe whatever they see online. She in turn acknowledges that it may have started off as a catfish situation, but their relationship did become real. They relax into a cozy morning, reading the best/worst of their social media mentions to each other until Joe pushes for actual honesty. Louise confesses to wishing for her mother to die and sometimes wonders if an overdose of morphine might’ve been the kinder option. Joe admits that he wanted to kill Clayton, and he thinks part of her wanted it, too. Listen, that’s exactly how it looked from my couch. Louise doesn’t directly answer that, which seems like an answer in itself. But she does confirm that she wants to be there with Joe. Louise! I’ll say it again: You! Are! In! Danger! Next up on their morning of love, Joe takes her to the basement to show her the surprise he arranged for her. It’s Dane, aka van man, tossed in the book cage so Louise can determine his fate. Joe offers her a range of tools to choose from and says he’s gambling that she won’t call the cops. When Maddie calls in a panic, he leaves Bronte alone with Mr. Men’s rights, saying she can kill him, let him go, leave for Ohio, whatever. He says she should take her power back, but of course, he really wants her to prove she’s the one for him. Joe, meanwhile, will be occupied playing referee to a domestic drama. Maddie-as-Reagan suggests that she and Harrison, erm, get up to s