You Almost Ended With This Paranormal Twist, But It Got Changed

Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you haven’t watched the You series finale.

Taking down Joe Goldberg was no easy feat — and neither was concocting the perfect punishment for a killer so dangerously manipulative, he could even convince himself he was a good guy. The You showrunners knew that Joe had to pay for his crimes in the end, but as they began putting the fifth and final season together, the issue became exactly how to give him the unimaginable torture that he’s inflicted on so many others. Initially, they had a very different idea for Joe’s karmic ending than what ended up being used.

The final few episodes of You were devoted to Joe’s murders and manipulations finally being uncovered, thanks largely to his well-connected wife Kate and his final love interest, Bronte. At several points, it seemed like the show was ready to kill Joe off, trapping him in the basement of a burning building and holding him at gunpoint in a secluded lake-house. But Bronte was adamant that Joe shouldn’t get off too easily, intent on giving him the ending “he deserves.”

Instead of death, she decides that a lifetime alone in prison is more fitting for Joe, depriving him of a martyred narrative and forcing him to finally confront the truth of his actions, without any more women around him to latch another distracting obsession onto.

But this life sentence wasn’t the first ending plan that You’s team had come up with.

Showrunners Michael Foley and Justin Lo revealed they had a bit of a supernatural twist in mind for Joe’s last moments at first.

“We went through many different options, one of which being that he did die at the hands of Bronte,” Lo told the New York Post on April 28. “I was even remembering a version where he was shot. And [the audience] didn’t realize that he [got] shot until the very last episode, and then he realizes he’s a ghost.”

Foley explained that they wound up deciding death would be “too easy” of an ending for Joe, and gravitated instead towards a more poetically fitting fate for him. “We liked putting him in a veritable cage [in prison]. We liked him not knowing the touch of a lover.”