Penn Badgley Dissects Joe Goldberg’s Shocking End
Penn Badgley isn’t shy about addressing the raw, unsettling conclusion to Joe Goldberg’s story in the final moments of Netflix’s cult hit You. After four seasons of manipulation, murder, and deceptive romance, the story doesn’t wrap up with Joe slipping away into the shadows. Instead, there’s a jarring final confrontation in which Bronté does something nobody expected: she shoots Joe in the penis. That image, as Badgley describes it, acts as a symbolic moment that’s as far from the delusional romantic narratives that defined earlier seasons as you can get.
Badgley has always seemed uncomfortable with viewers swooning over Joe’s carefully crafted charm. In his breakdown of the finale, he points out that the real damage Joe inflicts isn’t about violence in locked cages or behind closed doors. It’s what goes on in the intimate, vulnerable moments—those places where Joe twists people’s emotions and blurs the lines between love, obsession, and power. By the show’s final act, the fantasy is over. With Joe exposed and humiliated on multiple levels, the entire mess gets dragged out under bright, uncompromising lights.
The Real Villainy: Romance as a Weapon
Throughout You, Joe’s tactics have always been about more than physical violence. He draws people in with calculated sensitivity, uses romance as a smokescreen, and builds a story where he’s the hero—both for himself and for the audience. Badgley makes it clear: the show has always been a critique, not a celebration, of this kind of possessiveness. When the ending strips Joe of his ability to hide (quite literally), it’s not just a narrative twist. It’s a statement about what we let ourselves believe about dangerous men because their charisma makes us feel special or wanted.
By putting Joe in prison and making him the target of the kind of humiliation he once used to control others, the finale holds up a mirror. It’s not just Joe who faces consequences; it asks uncomfortable questions about why audiences found themselves rooting for him. Badgley sees this as a hard reset—a way to force us to look at how mainstream stories often glamorize possessive, toxic behavior as ‘passion’ or ‘romance’. Even the act of Bronté shooting Joe becomes less about physical injury and more about dismantling the power Joe’s sexuality and masculine presence carried throughout the series.
The ending leaves viewers with a Joe that’s fully exposed—not just to his victims, but to the audience. The show refuses to offer neat redemption or easy escapes. Instead, it makes the uncomfortable point that sometimes the most dangerous men are hiding in plain sight, not behind bars or cages, but behind the stories we choose to tell ourselves about love and desire.
