As we enter the final stretch of the final season of You, there are lots of burning questions on the minds of fans, especially after the ending of episode 5!
After killing Clayton in front of Bronte, Joe was literally caught red-handed as Clayton’s two friends came racing in, one of them live streaming on TikTok and telling Bronte they actually got him to Bronte. Joe’s mind wasn’t the only one racing as the episode left us with a lot of questions.
Surprisingly, You season 5, episode 6, did not begin right where we left off, but rather started off with a flashback which brought about an unexpected return: Elizabeth Lail’s Guinevere Beck. Beck is racing off to meet with a student on campus as she talks to Joe. That student just so happens to be a young Bronte.
Returning to the present day, Joe has been booked and released with help from Kate’s lawyers. As Joe is signing the paperwork for his release, he sees Bronte going in for questioning as he, himself, questions if anything they shared was truly real. As the detective asks if it’s true that she moved to New York to catfish Joe Goldberg and questions why she did what she did, which is when Bronte tells the detective they wanted to get justice for Beck.
Why did Bronte go after Joe in You season 5?
We return to the past to watch as Bronte recalls the events that led her to the present day. We see Beck helping to provide feedback to Bronte about her writing. Bronte thanks Beck for championing her writing like no one ever has before and reveals that she’s going to be leaving school to return to Ohio to take care of her mom, whose health has just begun to take a turn for the worse.
An undisclosed amount of time passes and we find Bronte back in Ohio with her mom. After returning from work and giving her mom her medications, Bronte’s mom points out the news of Beck’s murder on the TV, and Bronte is visibly shaken. She begins to read Beck’s posthumously published autobiography, “The Dark Face of Love,” and quickly notices that some parts of the book don’t sound like Beck, including a reference to a film Beck has previously admitted to not liking.
Bronte couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story and began doing some online sleuthing, which eventually led her to Clayton as well as to Dominique and Phoenix, the women who raced into the beachouse the night Joe killed Clayton. Turns out that Clayton is the son of Dr. Nicky, aka the man Joe pinned Beck’s murder on. After Bronte mentions her suspicions that someone else might have finished Beck’s book, Clayton and the group mention their suspicions that it was Beck’s boyfriend, Joe, who they think was secretly being seen by Dr. Nicky under an alias.
Bronte tells the detective that their goal was to expose Joe for who he really was: a killer.
Over the next few years after, Bronte met the group, they began working to prove their theory. They believed Joe had been killed by his wife in California, and their investigation died with him. Then Joe suddenly resurfaced in New York as Kate’s new man. With Joe back, they decided to not only pick up their investigation but wanted to finally act on their theories. The original plan was to watch him from afar, but then Bronte broke into Mooney’s and came face to face with him. He was no longer an idea anymore, he was real.
Grouping with Dom and Clayton, Dom tells Bronte that she got into the catering circle that caters all of Lockwood Corporation's events. She mentions seeing Joe in person at the gala, but Bronte holds back on telling them about breaking into the bookstore. She later returned, which was when she encountered Joe for the first time when she broke back into the store and was forced to think on her feet.
After this encounter, Clayton and Dom find Bronte shaking after her meeting with Joe. Bronte sees it as an in for them to get closer than expected and she jumped at the opportunity. Bronte mentions hearing from an online user – someone using the handle mintyfresh – who reportedly saw Joe’s cage in person. Bronte mentions sneaking down to the basement to see the cage, only to find books and stories he had written. That’s when she realized Joe is a romantic who likes to see the women he falls for as broken birds who need saving.
Bronte gets the idea to become Joe’s perfect woman, someone who would challenge Joe. Her main strategy was giving Joe someone he would feel the need to save Bronte from, enter Clayton playing her ex. The plan was for Clayton to leak Bronte’s real name, which would lead Joe right to the curated social media accounts, and help him fall further into their trap and to Bronte’s connection to Beck.
Following the conversation Bronte had with Joe about Beck’s death, she begins to question whether they had been wrong about Joe, but Dom encourages her to stick to the mission and see where things go.
As Bronte begins to question things, we learn about the plan coming together for confronting Joe at the beach house. The plan is for Bronte to confront him with evidence, but we know something changes along the way. At the diner where Bronte called Joe to say goodbye, we see her tell Dom she wants to call off their plan and Dom notes Clayton isn’t going to be happy, but she’ll let him know, and they can just enjoy the beachouse for the weekend.
After another officer comes in to pull the detective interviewing Bronte out for a moment, we pivot back to Joe, who has just come home to find Kate working to do damage control in getting the video removed from TikTok. As soon as she gets off the phone, Kate lashes out at Joe for his stupidity in getting catfished. She then confronts Joe about his role in killing Reagan and tells him she wants nothing to do with him. Joe spins things back on Kate, assuring her that if he goes down, so will she.
Joe realizes that Kate is speaking a bit too openly, and realizes Henry is not in the home. As Joe loses his cool and tells her she’ll never take Henry away from him, shouting that she’s not even his mother. Much to Joe’s surprise, Kate has already managed to secure temporary custody after having her lawyers sneak a temporary custody agreement into the paperwork he signed at the police station, assuming he would be too caught up in his bullsh-t to even pay attention. When Joe leaps at Kate to attack her, she quickly defends herself before her security shows him out.
We return to the police station as the detective returns to ask Bronte to walk her through the events of the night.
The recollection begins the moment after Joe first showed up and Bronte tased him. She calls Dom and they notice Clayton has come up with a story to make Joe think he had ghosted him in order to get back with his ex. Clayton wanted to make Joe jealous so that he would show up ready to kill Bronte to prove his theory about Joe killing the women in his life who spurned him was correct. Bronte tells the detective that she knew Joe wouldn’t hurt her like Clayton thought, but she didn’t expect Clayton to get so angry or for Joe to react so violently.
Cut to Clayton arriving at the beach house, where he and Bronte began exchanging words as she confronts him about his plan and how he thought Joe would try to kill her. Clayton tells her he didn’t know for sure, and they can just go back to the original plan. Clayton points out that this isn’t her story; he wanted to get revenge for his dad, and Bronte latched on like a tourist. Bronte reminds him that Beck is the one who died, but Clayton calls her out for being so dumb that she’s been duped by a serial killer.
Bronte makes a comment about the apple not falling far from the tree, a pointed comment clearly designed to hit Clayton where it hurts most. Angered, he shoves Bronte to the floor, and she knocks over a lamp as she falls to the ground. That’s when Joe raced into the room and ended up killing Clayton. Bronte tells the cops that Clayton put her in a situation where he thought she might die, whereas Joe thought Clayton was dangerous, as that’s what they set him up to be.
The detective points out that Bronte’s friends claim Joe killed Clayton in a fit of rage, but Bronte’s comments prompt the detective to ask whether she’s claiming it was self-defense. To our surprise, Bronte says that Clayton started the fight and what Joe did wasn’t murder: it was self-defense.
As the episode comes to a close, Joe returns to his apartment above Mooney’s as he makes it clear via his inner monologue that he is going to stop at nothing to make sure Kate does not take his son. As for Bronte?
The episode closes out with Joe discovering a hidden camera Bronte placed in one of the books on her apartment bookshelf. Knowing Bronte is listening on the other side, Joe looks directly into the camera and utters a chilling “Hi, Bronte,” as his inner monologue makes it clear they’re not done with each other just yet.