After a recap of the four seasons that led to this moment, You season 5 begins where it all started: in the greatest city in the world, New York City. With Kate’s help — namely, her deep pockets and social status — Joe has not only been able to return to New York City with his name, and she’s even helped him get his son, Henry, back.
Surprisingly, while Joe once tried to stay outside of the limelight and keep a very low profile, he’s now become a public figure and embraced the lifestyle of gracing magazine covers, tabloid websites, and becoming a literal trendsetter. Though we'll see how long he can keep up appearances.
At a T.R. Lockwood Foundation charity gala, it becomes clear our foils of the season are likely going to be the T.R. Lockwood Corporation board members – who are none too pleased when Kate announces to the world that the foundation will be earmarking up to a quarter of its annual profits to fund a new charity effort to help foster children. This includes Kate’s sister, Reagan, who we learn, was not exactly thrilled when Kate became their father’s successor as the CEO of the family corporation.
Following the introduction of Reagan, we quickly meet a few other key players in the season from Kate’s family. There’s Reagan’s twin sister, Maddie, who works in PR at the company. Then we have Uncle Bob, T.R. Lockwood Corporation’s COO, who we learn has been a champion of Kate from the moment she took over as CEO, and is like a surrogate father to her. And finally, we meet Kate’s brother, Teddy, whom she brought on as her chief of staff at the company and considered the black sheep of the family, born from an affair between Kate’s father and a household employee.
You season 5 takes us back to where it all began: Mooney’s bookstore
As the charity gala winds down, Joe learns from Teddy that a contact from Forbes has notified him that they’re working on a hit piece about Kate centered around some illegal actions she took to help her father bury environmental reports so that they could proceed with the building of a pipeline. Needless to say, Joe isn’t about to let a hit piece ruin Kate’s – and more importantly, his – life.
Cut to the next day, Joe is out for a run in the city when he just so happens to bring us back to where it all began: Mooney’s bookstore. Fans will recall, Mooney’s is where Joe was working back in season 1 when he met Beck and… well, you know how things went from there.
We learn that Mr. Mooney passed away, and when the bookstore hit the market, Kate opened her wallet to buy the building for Joe. He’s recently agreed to put the store on the market in an effort to truly put that part of his life behind him, as he doesn’t need another reason to be haunted anymore.
While wandering through the bookstore, Joe hears a noise, and his paranoia sinks in as he quickly looks around to make sure no one is present. He finds the noise to be coming from the wind catching the lid of an open box, but as Joe leaves to meet with Teddy, who has since heard back from his source at Forbes.
Just as he’s about to leave, we discover that he actually has a reason to be paranoid as the camera cuts to an open window and shows handprints in the dust, hinting someone has indeed recently been in the bookstore.
Who is behind the article targeting Kate?
Joe heads home, where Teddy and Kate are gearing up to head into the office. Once Kate leaves the room, Teddy fills Joe in on the latest intel about the hit piece, which seems to be a very serious threat as their legal team is pressing hard to make sure the reporting is airtight. Teddy wants to read Kate in and Joe fills him in on the details of the pipeline. Their theory is that this had to be an inside job, and they set out to find the source and shut them down.
Understandably, Reagan is their first suspect, so Teddy and Joe pay her a visit. Teddy pushes hard in hopes of getting a confession out of her as Joe observes, but Reagan claims to have no clue what he’s talking about and promptly kicks them both out of her office. Joe actually believes Reagan and decides to go see Maddie, hoping she might know who could be the source.
While Maddie is getting drinks from the bar, Joe looks through her phone and finds a text thread with code names. He quickly deciphers that the thread includes Maddie, Reagan, and a third individual listed in the thread as “FOT,” who Joe assumes must be Uncle Bob. In the thread, the trio talks about an emergency meeting for a no-confidence vote.
At home, Joe looks through Kate’s tablet, which is when he notices a message from Bob arranging a meeting for Kate on Friday, and believes that it could be a diversion to make sure Kate is not there for the no-confidence meeting. Joe finally tells Kate about the hit piece on the pipeline and his findings in Maddie’s text, and Kate quickly tells him to let up and she’ll look into things from there.
There’s just one problem: this is Joe Goldberg we’re talking about. Cut to Joe sneaking up behind Bob and injecting him with something to knock him out. Kate awakens from her sleep, and we at first question whether the Joe scene was a nightmare sequence for Kate, but it turns out it was real as we see Kate checking her Find My Friends and noticing that Joe is at Mooney’s, where he’s holding Bob at knifepoint. Bob begs for his life and tells Joe he can stop the hit piece, but Joe isn’t having it and plunges the knife into Bob’s neck just as we see Kate turning the doorknob and walks in to find Joe… writing?!
That’s right, it seems Joe was writing about killing Uncle Bob. Kate reads the pages, disturbed by how grotesque Joe’s writing is, and begins to question what else he might be hiding about the murders he’s committed. As Kate walks away, Joe returns to Mooney’s, where he realizes someone is in the building with him. He chases off the figure and catches a woman with a book in hand. She confesses that she broke in as she couldn’t stand the thought of the books rotting away in the abandoned bookstore, and spirals about all that is wrong with the world in how bookstores are spirals about everything wrong with a world that lets bookstores vanish. He begins to fall back into his old ways, but fights the temptation. She recognizes him and knows his name, but we never catch her name before Joe lets her slip away with the book.
You season 5 episode 1 ending explained: Joe claims his first victim of season 5!
After the fight, Kate goes to see Uncle Bob to ask for the truth, and he comes clean about being the source of the leak. He goes on a tangent about how Kate used to value his opinion and let him help keep her in line and stop her from making bad decisions, but she doesn’t have the killer instinct her dad thought she had to lead the company. When Kate tells him she’ll survive the piece as she’s done so much good since the pipeline. That’s when Uncle Bob name-drops Rhys and her involvement in covering up his murder. Bob threatens to release the information on Rhys if she fights the pipeline story and makes it clear he’s been a wolf in sheep's clothing this whole time.
The next day, Kate catches Joe up on everything, including how Uncle Bob knows about Rhys. Joe asks what they should do next, and to his surprise, Kate’s plan is for him to put their survival over Bob’s. In other words, it’s time for Joe to clean this up.
Joe sneaks over to Uncle Bob’s place and slips into the home to find him asleep in his chair, a drink in hand. Using a lasso from the room, Joe strangles Uncle Bob with the lasso. He then uses Bob’s computer to send one final email claiming guilt for false accusations about Kate. Before leaving, Joe stages the scene to make it look like Uncle Bob committed suicide by hanging himself.
As Joe changes and prepares to head home, he notices a light left on in Mooney’s and finds the mystery woman in the bookstore. Turns out she’s been crashing there. The two get to talking, and we finally learn the woman’s name is Bronte. Joe comes to the realization that Mooney’s is part of who he is, and their conversation ends with Joe offering her a job working at Mooney’s.
The next day, he meets her to hand over the keys to the front door and office. After she leaves, Joe returns to the original scene of the crime as he makes his way to the basement of Mooney’s and comes to the self-revelation that he can be the old and new Joe as he turns on the lights and sees the glass cage where many have met their demises at his hand.