Spoilers ahead.
How many more times can Joe Goldberg get away with murder?
With the fourth season of You now streaming on Netflix, the future of the hit drama—and the serial killer it follows—may well be on viewers’ minds. In the latest installment of the series, Joe (Penn Badgley) turns over a new leaf in London, where he’s now working as a professor, but his past catches up to him when a not-so-anonymous killer starts targeting members of his rich new friend group and pinning the murders on him. By the end of the season, he discovers who’s been framing him—himself!—and things only get wilder from there.
Here’s what we know of Joe’s next chapter.
Has You been renewed for season 5?
Not yet, but a renewal seems highly likely considering the show’s popularity. Showrunner Sera Gamble has also expressed her plans for the series to span multiple seasons. She told The Hollywood Reporter back in 2019 after season 2, “I am not scared at all of saying that we definitely could follow Joe for several more seasons.”
What would season 5 be about?
“You’ll know what the next season would be when you see the end of this season,” Gamble told The Hollywood Reporter in February. “We tell you what the idea is.”
Sure enough, the setup becomes clear in the season 4 finale (again, be warned of spoilers): Joe reveals his true identity and murderous past to his girlfriend Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), who not only accepts him for who he is, but also protects him and his reputation. With the help of her, her wealth, and connections, he’s able to return to New York with a clean record and new narrative: that he is a survivor of a violent partner (Love Quinn), and now hopes to change the world with his new #girlboss GF.
Under Kate’s protection, Joe would be untouchable. He even says in the finale that the killing will be a lot easier now. And after spending the whole season trying to suppress his dark side and become a good person, he’s learned to accept his identity as a murderer. (Hooray for self-love, I guess?) It’s still unclear, though, if Kate knows that Joe killed her billionaire father, Tom Lockwood (Greg Kinnear). That could possibly lead to some drama in season 5.
And then there’s Nadia. Joe’s intelligent literature student figures out that he’s the Eat the Rich killer, but before she can turn him in, he kills her boyfriend Edward and frames her for the murder. By the end of the finale, poor Nadia is in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Here’s to hoping she gets out, and maybe gets some revenge, in season 5.
Despite the long wait ahead for a potential fifth season, Gamble is already playing with plot ideas for what comes next. She told THR:
“We have an idea for season five that we’re excited about. It was never anyone’s intention to run this one into the ground. When we’re done, we’ll be done. And we’ll pack it up. Even in the early conversations with Penn, the idea was not to crank out episodes forever; it’s to feel like we have told the complete story. And though I feel like tonally, we’re very different and we are not trying to sell Joe as any kind of a hero with a straight face. This is a show that is in the tradition of these single-lead shows with a guy who does increasingly bad things. The beautiful thing about it is that when his arc is complete, so is the show.”
Who will be in the cast?
Unless the You team throws us a total curveball, we’re banking on Penn Badgley to continue leading the show as Joe. As we’ve seen in the past, he usually finds himself in a new crowd—sometimes even in a new city—each season, so we wouldn’t be surprised to hear of new casting announcements once season 5 is confirmed. As for the current season 4 cast, which ranges from Lukas Gage to Charlotte Ritchie to Tati Gabrielle, we’ll have to wait to see who returns.
Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she’s listening to Lorde right now.
