You makers reveal they ‘cried’ while writing Joe Goldberg’s end: ‘We wanted him not to know the feeling of a lover’s touch’

Was Joe always supposed to go to prison?

When asked if Joe’s fate was sealed from the very start, Michael Foley said that despite then knowing that the audience shares a love-hate relationship with the show’s anti-hero, they knew Joe couldn’t just walk free and had to face the consequences of all his dark deeds. But whether he would die or be detained was a very last-minute decision. The writers kept asking themselves, “What does Joe deserve?” They agreed he deserved to suffer for all the lives he ruined, but most importantly, he needed to face himself and everything he had done. “Sera, Greg and all of us writers, our plan was to have Joe so horrific that we wake everyone up to what we’ve been co-signing and rooting for all this time. There was no way he was going to get away with it. He was not going to ride off into the sunset, ever,” he said. 

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Justin Lo shared that one of their writers, Neil Reynolds, had an idea. Everyone was asked to take a weekend to think about what Joe deserved. Then they came back, and each person spoke without interruption. It was very emotional,  people cried while sharing their thoughts. Lo said, “That was the most important part of our process,” because it helped them collect a lot of deep ideas they could build the ending from. “There were tears. People have such strong feelings about it. People were talking about their personal experiences, and it did go down to the wire.”

On why prison was better than death, Foley said, killing Joe would have been too easy. “We wanted him not to know the feeling of a lover’s touch. Beyond not having his freedom, it would be more punishing for him to end the series alone.” But, the real standout moment was neither him sitting in the jail, nor him getting shot, but the ending montage, when we see Joe read letters from fans and seems disgusted by them. The letter where a person obsessed with him wished to become his next victim. Foley explained this was part of Joe’s self-delusion. Even when he’s exposed as a killer, people still support him, but Joe thinks he’s better than them. Foley said, “The problem is always somebody else and not him.”