The Final Season of “You” Teases Jenna Ortega’s Return

Spoilers ahead for You season 4. 

Jenna Ortega’s character is officially coming back for the fifth and final season of You on Netflix. 

During Netflix’s Tudum: A Global Fan Event LIVE from São Paulo, Brazil event on Saturday, the streaming platform teased a number of its upcoming shows and movies, including the very popular You. In a video featuring the show’s star, Penn Badgley, he speaks to the audience about what’s to come in the final season. 

But fans will be excited to learn that a familiar face appears in the teaser — Ellie Alves, played by Jenna Ortega. 

“I’ve heard you’re on the edge of your seats waiting and theorizing about the epic conclusion of You,”  Badgley says in the video. “More importantly, you’re considering what — or should I say who — Joe will come up against as he finally returns to New York.”

As Badgley is speaking, snippets from the new season with a freshly-shaven Joe are shown on the screen. 

“Though I can’t say who just yet, we all know there are many loose ends from Joe’s past,” he continues. 

The teaser then shows several past characters, including Ortega’s Ellie — a character with whom Joe becomes close in season 2 and protects as a pseudo-big brother.

The last time we see Ellie is at the end of season 2 when Joe seemingly acts as a hero by giving her money to skip town after she is wrongfully connected to her sister Delilah’s disappearance. Of course, Joe’s former stalkee-turned-wife, Love, actually killed Delilah. Joe mentions Ellie in season 3 when he says he still sends her money. 

After Ellie went into hiding, fans had theories that she would eventually come back and seek revenge for the murder of her sister. But Ortega isn’t a fan of that theory and said it “defeats the purpose of Ellie’s storyline.” 

“Right now we see her as somebody who’s incredibly hurt and has been screwed over and kind of got the worst of the worst — to bring her back and make her a murderer like Joe defeats the purpose because that’s not her character and that’s not in her heart,” Ortega said in 2020. “It takes away from her innocence and it takes away from that fear factor that she has of being a teenage girl involved with this psycho serial killer, Joe.”

The last time fans saw Joe, he had just made his grand return to New York City after pretending to be Jonathan Moore — a professor in London. Joe gets sucked into a wealthy social circle, which eventually takes viewers on a whodunnit journey with Joe trying to solve several murders. The two-part season — which aired on February 9 and March 9, respectively — shows viewers just how twisted Joe Goldberg actually is. 

After the whirlwind fourth season, it leaves viewers wondering if Joe will finally have to answer for his countless crimes, and how will Ellie be part of that?