[unsettling music plays]

[eerie sting]

[Bronte] How could I love you, knowing what I knew? And the biggest question of all, how do I give you the ending you deserve? The finale brought about the question of, "What does Joe Goldberg deserve?" We knew years ago that he wasn't gonna get away with what he's done, and he wouldn't be redeemed. It was really just a question of how we were gonna get to the end. Careful. Gonna get me addicted to this Bonnie and Clyde shit.

[Madeline] As they're running away, Bronte's biggest anxieties are really that Joe is gonna find her out. One little thing that tips him off, and she's done. And so she's trying to play it carefully because the stakes are very high. Point of no return. Drive, bitch.

[Penn] They're both trying to make this work in their own way. Joe can only try to make it work one way, which is, "We've gotta be together, or…" Well, there's no "or" to him, but the "or" is "or I'll kill her." [chuckles]

[Bronte] A kiss almost gave me away, which means this ends tonight. And then for her, it's like she's gotta figure out how to bring him to justice. "Do I end up killing him? Do I end up calling the cops?" She's wrestling with all the same problems that the viewers, and the writers, and all of us making it have had. Usually, there's some kind of reckoning, right? You think that me losing my son, and my home, Mooney's, isn't enough? Even though we've been talking about it for years, we said, "Let's take two days and have every writer in the room speak to what we think Joe deserves and what we want the show to have said." Can I… give you a taste of our future tonight?

[Michael] There was a bit of a question of whether Joe should die or not. If he did die, would it be by the police? Would it be by the hand of somebody getting revenge?

[Penn] I've always thought anybody killing him would mean they're essentially brought down to his level. It'd be vengeance, but it wouldn't quite be justice.

[gun cocks]

[Joe] What the fuck?

[Bronte breathes heavily] Tell me how you killed Guinevere Beck. Once she backs Joe into a corner, she confronts him with that question, that driving force for all these years, which is, "What really happened to Beck?" Giving the ghost of Guinevere Beck justice is a significant theme in this season. It wasn't enough that you took her life, you had to take her fucking voice too? The way that Bronte wants to make it right is have him redact all the words he wrote in The Dark Face of Love, leaving only Beck's voice, because he bastardized it with his, and Bronte wants to take it back. The least that I can do is erase you. I am over the moon that they're honoring Beck this way, that they're showing that she mattered, that her life mattered, that her artistic voice mattered. Beck was given a really hard time by fans 'cause she wasn't a perfect person. It's nice that, this season, they're reminding people, "Hey, she didn't deserve to die." You get to be the one who kills me, Bronte. This is how our story ends. My name is Louise. Bronte's not a murderer. She's not a killer. And I don't think it's good enough for her that he just die.

[Charlotte] I don't really know about what people deserve, if we're gonna go there. I don't know about there being an ultimate sort of moral right or wrong of how you're supposed to punish, or not, people who do bad things.

[gunshot echoes]

[Joe yelps]

[thunder crashes]

[Joe grunts] Ultimately, we decided that death would be too easy for Joe Goldberg. His delusion is a big part of his character, and we wanted to burst that delusion. We wanted Joe to have to sit on trial. And as Bronte says, he needed to face the victims, face the loved ones of the sons and the daughters, the parents of the sons and daughters who he killed.

[Bronte] In the end, Joe Goldberg was made to see all of himself.

[Michael] We wanted to punish him, wanted to incarcerate him, have him live without freedom, power, knowing someone else's touch.

[Charlotte] It could've gone a number of ways. It's interesting that he's isolated and that he's not allowed to interact anymore with this world.

[Madeline] I think Joe really thrives on other people. It's just where he gets his power. And he doesn't have access to that anymore. He has to sit there and think about what he's done.

[Joe] My punishment is even worse than I imagined.

[Penn] It is an interesting question. "What would justice for him look like?" I think we get as close as we can. Put him in jail, take away his genitalia.

[laughs] It's really important that we dethrone him as a romantic or sexual icon. And, um, they did that.

[man] That is a series wrap on Mr. Penn Badgley. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. I mean, yeah. Words… words really fail. When Penn was filming the final scene with Bronte, his voice gave out. He said, "This is the end." "I don't think I could have done another season, another episode." He had put so much into the show and inhabited this really dark character for so long that it was like he gave it his all.

[all] You! It's bittersweet. There's things with this role I'll never get to do again. That's the bitterness of it. As an actor, there's so many things I get to do. But also thank God that I won't have to do some of it again. A lot of fake blood. I think I've had my quotient of fake blood for a while.

[Joe] It's unfair, putting all of this on me. In the end, we put a lot of thought into waking ourselves up from the fact that we've been rooting for a terrible, terrible guy this entire time. We didn't want to shame the audience or preach, but we did want to finally say, "This is what you've been rooting for." "This is what you've been looking past about this character." And it was our opportunity to have him turn to camera and say …

[Joe] Maybe the problem isn't me. Maybe…

[suspenseful music swells, then fades] …it's you.

[dramatic sting]