I get it, but You season 5 lets two characters off the hook too easily

Netflix’s You Season 5 marks the long-awaited end of the twisted saga of Joe Goldberg. After seasons of obsession, deceit, and bloodshed, Joe finally faces some form of accountability. As disturbing as it was, there is a certain satisfaction in the conclusion of Joe’s arc.

But alongside the justice that is served to the central antihero, two other characters, Kate and Maddie Lockwood, manage to slip through the ‘remorseless’ loophole.

While not as violent as Joe, these characters reside in the morally ambiguous world of manipulation, and in Maddie's case, murder. Still, both of these women are offered something close to redemption.

For a show that takes such pride in revealing the layers of its characters, this feels like a loss – we’re left without any semblance of a logical explanation after refusing to hold all characters accountable.

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Kate Lockwood: Lover, enabler, beneficiary

Charlotte Ritchie plays Kate Lockwood with wonderful stillness. She enters the story as an art gallery director with a troubled family history who seems sharp and guarded. She helps Joe escape the consequences by the end of season four. Their relationship evolves from suspicious to intimate.

In season five, she restructures Joe as an American businessman and public figure. This is before learning unsettling truths about his past. Although Kate ultimately turns on Joe and backstabs him, the story conveniently ignores her previous overt complicity. Her decision to leverage when it suited her and look away when it didn’t is deeply flawed.

Sure, she ends up married, but these outcomes pale in comparison to the suffering she inadvertently made possible for others. In a story about accountability, Kate Adams is granted forgiveness for stopping the spiral of chaos a “little” too late. The moral math doesn’t quite add up.

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Maddie Lockwood: From survivor to impostor

Most perplexing of all is Maddie Lockwood. She is introduced as Kate’s half-sister, and to some extent, she seems like a victim—just another tragic player in the merciless chess match of trauma, power, inheritance, and everything in-between. That is before her shocking reveal of killing her twin sister Reagan in an attempt to survive and later, taking her place in the family structure.

That move alone—identity theft of such a degree that it can only be classified as murder—should have earned her both legal and societal repercussions of unspeakable proportions. However, the serial takes a more sympathetic approach to Maddie’s story as she becomes incorporated into the Lockwood family with ease. It becomes, in a sense, pity disguised as empathy.

Such betrayal and its aftermath should have been explored deeply; however, Maddie’s resolution feels unfinished, which adds to the pages of emotionally and psychologically intricate analysis the writers have yet to tell.

For a show that dives deep into fractured psyches, she is simply forgiven by Reagan’s husband and daughter without a thought, forgotten. Her reasoning for choosing to become Reagan isn’t even considered the least bit illogical.

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The Lockwoods walk free while others rot

As Joe festers in prison, other victims like Nadia—who attempted to stop him—continue to suffer. She remains a victim, manipulated and abandoned by Joe, who has left her trapped in this situation. Unlike her, Kate, who sheltered Joe without any qualms, and Maddie, who murdered someone, both get to escape free with emotional complexity as their alibi.

Nadia’s suffering and Joe’s manipulation return like a ghost only for him to slightly dust off. Joe’s ghost tracks off in her direction as focus changes to his ridding attempt in the weak attempt of absolution, rest being left off at the series end.

He claims his burden by having Kate be put through the face-holding part of the disposing nomination process of T.R. Lockwood Corporation as a non-profit. Sure, the act seems charitable and generous on paper, but she drastically misses the penance boundary.

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A strong ending undermined by selective justice

You has always grasped that no one is innocent in its world. That’s what made it engaging. Yet, in its final season, the show appears to disregard its own premise. It’s not that Kate and Maddie had to die or go to prison, but their “happy endings” should have come at a much greater sacrifice.

You err in letting these two characters get off the hook. This moral slip weakens the boundaries that once defined it. Joe’s ending is effective and powerful, but the rest? It feels a bit too tidy for a series designed around disorder.