After Joe tells him he loves him, Henry is quiet. “What did you do to mommy?” he asks. Teddy has told Henry what Joe did to Kate. “Do you remember when you used to tell me there were no monsters in my room? You lied. It was you. You’re the monster.” Henry, crying, hangs up.
Joe crumbles, and he remembers Love’s dying words: “He’ll know what you are.”
Then he explodes, questioning his whole life—“I try to love, every time it falls apart!”—and sobbing on the floor. He ultimately comes to the same conclusion that allowed him to skirt any responsibility for his actions: that he is fundamentally unlovable, regardless of anything he does. And then he attacks.
Does Joe kill Brontë/Louise?
At first, it really seems like he does. Joe attacks Brontë in the house, shoots her and she runs. She manages to call 911 despite her broken phone, throws herself out the window, and he chases her into the yard—revealing that it was him who broke her ankle just so she would stay and talk with him, an injury that is currently helping him kill her.
“It was always gonna end this way, wasn’t it?” she asks. She then calls him a “pathetic misogynist” and he tackles her to the ground.
He says he’ll show her how he killed Beck, and he begins to strangle her. She pulls out the cat ear self-defence device she grabbed from the gas station, stabs him, and runs into the lake, where he strangles her some more, until she’s seeming very much dead. “Goodbye, Brontë,” he says.
Except… she’s alive! “It’s over Joe,” she says in the woods, gun pointed at his head. He begs her to kill him, she refuses, and she finally reclaims her name, Louise. He lunges for the gun, she shoots him on instinct with a bullet straight to his d*ck, and everyone lives to see another day.
What happens to Joe Goldberg at the end of You? Does Joe die or go to prison?
“If I can wake up, so can the world,” Louise manifests in the final episode about Joe’s toxicity, and society’s implicit approval of men like him. She somewhat gets her wish: Joe is made to see all of himself in a trial and viral social media meme mocking his “blown off d*ck.”
He is convicted for the murders of Love Quinn and Guinevere Beck, as well as Benji and Peach, among others, and given life without parole. Dr. Nicky has his conviction overturned. But as the band of internet sleuths warn on a podcast about Joe’s demise, “There are other Joes out there.”
Meanwhile, the show ends with Joe’s perspective, as he sits in a cell reading The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. (A relevant quote from the novel: “Maybe it’s not what we learn that’s crucial, but the questions we’re left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?”)
