You Has A Massive Plot Hole In Its Final Season

Spoiler alert: This post discusses events from You Season 5, Episode 9.

For five seasons, You gave viewers a perfect storm of twisted romantic obsession mixed with bloody chaos. Of course, the show was also going to do something really big and flashy in its final season, but unfortunately, the climactic moment in its penultimate episode got bogged down by plot holes. There are simply too many aspects involved in the Mooney’s fire that don’t add up, turning what should have been You’s explosive send-off into a hodgepodge of unexplained questions.

In the ninth episode of the final season, Joe’s wife Kate traps him in his own infamous cage, where she, Marienne, and Nadia reveal their plan to expose his crimes and kill him. However, things go haywire when a drunken Maddie locks the Mooney’s basement door and set the bookstore on fire.

In the commotion, Joe breaks free of his cell using a key he had stitched into his arm. He shoots Kate, but it doesn’t stop her from sending Joe’s recorded confession to Nadia, ensuring he’d now have to pay for his crimes. Once Joe’s girlfriend Bronte notices the fire at Mooney’s, she rushes to the basement to save Joe, leaving Kate there to die.

Except... she doesn’t. One of the many unbelievable plot holes about this fire is the revelation in the finale that Kate somehow survived being shot and left for dead in the burning building. A small flash-forward at the end of the season confirms Kate has burns covering one arm, but other than that, no real wounds at all.

Sure, maybe Kate made some sort of miraculous exit that wasn’t shown, but there are even more plot holes that don’t add up about the fire scene. Namely, Kate texting Joe’s confession to Nadia is a huge crux of her plan, but it’s been established several times that there’s no reception in the Mooney’s basement. So, she shouldn’t be able to send or receive texts down there.

This bizarre plot hole is even more glaring a few episodes earlier, when a TikTok interviewer has no issues going live in the Mooney’s basement, even seamlessly filming a livestream from inside Joe’s cage.

And finally, the most concrete plot hole of all has to do with Mooney’s as a building. Fans on TikTok pointed out that in Season 1, it was established the bookstore had a back door from the basement to the outside. This exit would be an easy way for Joe to escape the fire, but apparently it just disappeared from existence?

For how meticulously Joe plans out his devious strategies, it’s pretty alarming just how messy and inexplicable so many elements of this important fire scene wound up being.