Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the series finale of “You” on Netflix.

There was only one way for Joe Goldberg’s story to end.

After five seasons, countless murders, half a dozen stalking victims and way too many lucky breaks, Penn Badgley’s killer protagonist of Netflix’s hit “You” has finally been given his just desserts, sentenced to a lonely life behind bars. And while the road there could have been slightly less bumpy, narratively speaking, it’s a huge relief that justice is, ( for once) being served.

“You” was an addictive, thrilling and terrifying crime drama because it told its seedy story from Joe’s point of view, even though he was a serial stalker, killer and misogynist who justified his many acts of cruelty as “protecting” innocent women and “punishing” the guilty. Of course, he was always the guiltiest one of all.

But a disturbing trend cropped up around the series, in part because Badgley, of “Gossip Girl” fame, is just so darn charming and handsome: Fans seemed to actually kind of like Joe. In spite of all the blood on his hands, there was an innate magnetism to the character, with his floppy hair and shy smiles.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

So it’s apt and pointed that in Joe’s final outing on “You,” the story revolves around a woman who knows just how awful he is, but falls for him anyway, just like all of you watching at home. Season 5 saw Joe blow up his perfect life with billionaire wife Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) and son Henry (Frankie DeMaio). He jumps into the arms of Bronte (Madeline Brewer, “The Handmaid’s Tale”), real name Louise Fletcher. She seems like a starving artist with a bookish mind who is catnip for the erudite Joe, attracted to both a woman in need of rescue and talking about literary theory. As Kate starts to recoil from Joe’s true murderous tendencies (which she conveniently ignored for three years of marriage) Joe falls harder for Bronte, yet another woman he believes is the “one.”

But Bronte isn’t the flimsy waif she appears to be. It turns out she’s part of a group of true-crime aficionados bent on proving that Joe killed Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), who you might remember Joe did, in fact, kill back in Season 1. But as Bronte’s trying to play the part of a woman falling in love with Joe, she starts to actually fall in love with him. In spite of the murders she believes he’s committed, and witnessing Joe kill her friend Clayton (Tom Francis), Bronte takes Joe’s side and jumps in his bed.

But Kate is on the warpath, and, with the help of two women Joe has cruelly hurt in the past − Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) and Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) − she traps Joe in his own glass cage in the basement of his bookstore and attempts to get him to confess to his crimes. When he refuses, she decides to kill him, but Joe escapes (he sewed a key inside his own arm, which … ew) and attacks her. Meanwhile, Kate’s sister Maddie (Anna Camp), yet another woman tortured by Joe, locks both of them in the basement (she doesn’t realize Kate is there) and sets the store on fire. Bronte thankfully gets her brainwashing undone after talking with Marienne, then shows up at the inferno and saves Joe, because she believes she can bring him to justice.

In the final episode, Bronte takes over half of the series’ classic narration, turning the tables on Joe as he becomes the “you” of the story. She absconds with him to a remote vacation home, letting him believe they’re going to flee to Canada. When the pair are on the verge of sexual intimacy, Bronte pulls a gun on Joe. They get into a dirty, bloody fight, which ends with Maddie shooting Joe in his genitals before he’s dragged away by police in the rain.

Finally, Joe can’t talk his way out of punishment. He’s convicted of his many murders and sentenced to life in prison, while all of the people he hates, from Kate to Maddie, get a happily ever after. In the final scene, we see Joe, head shaved of his signature alluring locks, desperately lonely in prison. All he has to keep him company are lurid letters from women turned on by his criminal record, which he abhors. In the end, we see him for the woman-hating, manipulative horror he’s always been on the inside.

It’s a bit of letdown that Bronte, a character fans have just met this year, is the one who finally brings Joe to justice, and the finale is messy and somewhat anticlimactic. But after a meandering and nonsensical fourth season that lost the thoughtful bite of the first three, “You” remembered to try for meaningful storytelling in its last hurrah.

In one of the last episodes, Bronte is attacked by an “incel” radicalized by the online “manosphere.” He’s petty and little and stupid and cruel, blaming “females” for his problems. By the end of the series Bronte (and viewers) realize that while Joe may wear clean-cut shirts and read Henrik Ibsen, he’s just the same as the incel. His penchant for “protecting” women is just one more way to demean, violate and control them. He even admits to having sprained Bronte’s ankle purposefully, so she would be immobile and forced to stay with him.

Somehow, even with all the murder and torture Joe has committed this season, that little twist of an ankle is the scariest moment of all. Because the best parts of “You” were never the soapy melodrama or absurd violent shocks, they were the moments when you were reminded that evil can be contained in even the prettiest of packages. That we never know who the people we meet really are on the inside.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll be thinking about that long after I stop thinking about Joe’s mussed hair.