May 26: You S5

[kinetic_elaboration]

I’ve spent most of the day cleaning and watching the rest of You S5 during breaks. I feel about it pretty much as I’ve anticipated I would feel since the end of S4: yeah, this was needed to tie up loose ends but it’s good for the show to draw to its conclusion at long last. The fun of it was always its balance of formula (comforting, familiar) and twist, but each season had a harder time convincing me that the formula was still interesting and the twists still plausible. Joe is also a very difficult tightrope as a character: he has to be sympathetic enough to continue watching, the only connecting thread across the seasons, and yet, still a villain. Looking at the show as a whole, and having only seen each season once when it first came out, I think it sustained itself decently, given these challenges. Did it really need to be 5 seasons? Eh. But it is. Here we are.

[spoilers for You S5 below]

 

Each one was definitely a little worse than the one before but even the last couple had enough in them to make them worth watching, at least for me. What I remember from S4 is that it was noticeably more boring for a lot of the first part and then got better/more interesting in the second part, and honestly if a show isn’t going to have an all-around stellar season, that’s the preferable trajectory–versus starting off promising and then nose-diving.

So I felt similarly with S5. The early episodes were pretty dull. But it got better. I read a review early on that said essentially this so I was prepared. But it also said, iirc, that the last episode was the one that was mainly worth watching and everything else could kind of be skipped. For me, the season peaked in ep 9. Ep 10 was a little slow for me, and I didn’t feel like it said anything, really, that hadn’t already been said. There were like 8 climaxes here–did we need ALL of them? It’s always somewhat frustrating for me when I can see a work that doesn’t know how to complete itself.

Also… I don’t know that I think Louise, though she improved as a character over the season, really deserved to be the last one standing. The one who got to narrate half the finale, never mind actually take Joe down. I think if any one singular person deserved that honor, it was Kate. The show could never give us a Joe redemption arc and it could also never show Joe demonstrating remorse. It was satisfying, then, to see such a story play out with someone else and to have that person be a woman. She also had the resources and the smarts to go head to head with Joe in a satisfying way and some of the best parts of the season were about them as equal adversaries. So if the whole season had ended with his surviving victims banding together to take him down, with Kate at their head, and Kate as the sacrifice who nevertheless dies a hero–basically, episode 9–I think that would have been the best possible ending.

Episode 10 imo was probably really most satisfying if you’re into survival horror, which I’m not really.

As for Joe ending up in prison. I’ve always sort of wondered what his fate would be and I think I assumed he’d die, if for no other reason than his wily nature makes me doubt any cell could hold him. Every season ends with him somehow slipping out of the way of any sort of justice. Do I completely believe anything short of death is the end?

That said…I think there’s something to be said about death being too good for him. The show has always been partially about social media, public/private lives, etc, and it’s played increasingly with the idea of justice in the court of public opinion and in the literal justice system, and with truth telling as a form of justice. Joe’s story can only end with the truth being out there. His surviving victims could kill him but the slander against them, and the deceased, would still stand. The most optimistic thing you could say at the end of the story is that the system that has failed others, and that he has endlessly manipulated, ultimately does catch up to him. So, I see the vision.

Aside from that, I found the end a little treacly. I do think Kate should have died to be honest. But, again, I can see why they went the feel-good route for all of the survivors. And if some rando who’d only appeared in this season got the last word/last voiceover that would have been annoying so at least that didn’t happen. Joe’s ending was more depressing than cathartic but, as I said, this was always going to be a tough one to end in any sort of satisfying way so–I think that was better than anything I would have come up with, and sort of encapsulated the show and its unsubtlety well.