Spoilers below.
HBO has, at last, officially confirmed that the season 3 finale of Euphoria marks the conclusion of the Emmy Award-winning drama about coming of age in a morally gray, frequently depraved contemporary America. And that conclusion arrives with the ultimate ending for its central character:
Rue Bennett—who was portrayed with such consistent nuance by Zendaya—dies midway through the 93-minute runtime of the episode, titled “In God We Trust.”
This development is in no way a surprise. Especially in the latter episodes of this season, creator Sam Levinson, who wrote and directed every installment, has been heavily hinting that this would likely be the outcome. As Lexi’s friend Gillie told her just two episodes ago when Lexi was working on her L.A. Nights script, “If someone doesn’t die periodically, people get bored. Otherwise, it’s just walking and talking.” By killing off Nate last week, Levinson abided by what I will refer to as the Gillie Rule. But watching Rue die of an overdose of fentanyl, provided to her slyly and deliberately by Alamo Brown, was more than just an attempt to shock or keep things interesting. It was an acknowledgment of reality—a thing that Euphoria only occasionally likes to acknowledge.
“The number one cause of death for people under 50 is fentanyl,” Ali, Rue’s recovery sponsor and the closest thing she had to a dad after losing her actual one, says at a group meeting. This is just the truth, something that Levinson, a former addict who filtered his own experiences through Rue, knows quite well. A young person like Rue, who couldn’t get off drugs and gravitated toward environments that kept them in her orbit, was likely to succumb to her disease. And she did. Her death was deeply sad to witness, especially following a sequence that seemed genuine: In an imagined version of events, Fez (the late Angus Cloud) really escapes from prison by executing the parkour-related elaborate getaway he described to Rue on the phone in episode 3—until we realize it was just Rue experiencing her dreamy final moments of consciousness before her death. During many of the sequences in this finale, including Ali’s monologue at a group meeting, Euphoria sobers up to an extent it rarely has throughout this uneven, often batshit season. Which is welcome. But in its closing moments, Levinson can’t stop himself from bombarding our screens with naked bodies, a ton of bloody violence, and a dollop of very confusing moralizing.
“You are either making the world a better place or making it worse,” Ali concludes in that aforementioned monologue, before going on the vengeance quest at the Silver Slipper that dominates the latter half of the finale. “In the end, it’s that fucking simple.” And at the end of Euphoria, Levinson seems hellbent on imposing some system of ethics—albeit in an uneven, inconsistent, and traditionally conservative manner—on the morally askew universe he built.
Given how obsessed this season was with traditional Westerns, which generally subscribe to the good ol’ binary American concept of heroism vs. evil, it’s not surprising that Levinson ultimately sorts things out with a shootout in a saloon, the saloon being the Silver Slipper. Ali, a veteran, shows up there one night dressed in his soldier’s uniform. His intent: to take down Alamo, a cowboy, as punishment for murdering Rue by giving her the drugs that killed her.
Ali absolutely would have died were it not for Bishop, who makes sure that Alamo’s gun is not loaded (as Alamo believes it to be), enabling Ali to blow him fully away, and for Bishop to get both Maddy—who he clearly has a thing for—and Kitty (Anna Van Patten) out of there, along with his adorable dog, Snowflake. “I like to surprise people,” he tells Maddy when she notes how weird it is that he owns a poodle. Bishop does indeed surprise us by turning out to be the moral compass in this series, silently and imperceptibly judging his boss until he realizes he must stop him from committing more horrible acts.
It’s notable that many of the heroes in this finale are Black men. Ali is obviously a hero. In a way, so are Big Eddy (Kadeem Hardison) and Bishop, who conspire against Laurie’s white supremacist crew to make sure that Eddy’s van only brings back a dead rat after that last Mexico run, while Bishop retrieves the IDs that Rue recovered from Laurie’s compound and gives them back to Alamo. Levinson also eliminates several of the racists in Laurie’s crew, including Laurie herself, who seems to decide she’d rather jump off a roof than be outdone by a Black man. G (Marshawn Lynch) shoots Harley (James Landry Hébert) after he captures Rue, ties her up by the ankles, and drags her body behind his truck for a while, an act that has to have been scripted with the memory of James Byrd Jr.’s murder in mind. Harley ultimately is apprehended by the police, offering himself up with a beatific grin that suggests he sees himself as a martyr on the level of Jesus Christ, even though he is anything but. In many ways, this Euphoria episode functions as a cathartic exercise in punishing some of the worst people in our society—racists, drug pushers, misogynists—at a time when no one seems to experience punishment for even the most basic and blatantly obvious crimes.
Yet its closing moments could easily be watched by a conservative Christian Trump voter and perceived as validation of their own beliefs. In the final sequence, Ali ventures back to the homestead that Rue visited back in the first episode of the season and which she described as the most peaceful place she had ever known, even though the owners, the Millers, seemed to hate immigrants (Mr. Miller references “the pure evil that’s pouring across our border and poisoning our great nation, the United States of the America”), “commies,” and the like.
When he arrives, Ali introduces himself by his birth name—Martin McQueen—which might sound more palatable to this deeply conservative rural Texas family than “Ali.” He explains that his daughter spent time with them not too long ago and is no longer with us, which is a lie that feels true. They kindly invite him inside. They share a meal, before which Ali delivers a traditional Christian prayer at a table where there is an empty chair in Rue’s honor. As Ali says, “Amen,” the image of Rue fills that chair. The series finale ends on a wide shot of the exterior of the Millers’ house and the American flag flapping in the breeze outside of it. “May God bless us all,” Ali says, in what sounds almost like a pledge of allegiance.
This lands as an ironically optimistic button on a season of television that has announced pretty loudly that the future for Gen Z does not look bright at all. That’s backed up by the way other characters’ storylines resolve:
Jules, one of the most important figures in Euphoria, gets a single, brief scene where we see her painting a vibrant portrait of Rue, through tears in her eyes. She’s clearly been impacted by that loss; the piece of art she creates is suggestive of her last memory of Rue, an image of her crashing to the floor after Jules slaps her. As a character, Jules was wildly shortchanged this season, particularly in terms of the amount of time we spent with her. In our last encounter, it’s clear she has committed fully to her sugar-baby relationship with Ellis, which means she has succumbed to a status quo situation Rue warned her to avoid. As Euphoria ends, Jules seems trapped.
So does Cassie, whose final appearance in a frame of Euphoria makes her look like a plastic figurine of femininity inside a dollhouse, backlit by a ring light to optimize her appearance on social media. With Nate gone, Cassie seems even more lost than she was when the season first began.
Maddy, on the other hand, looks incredibly relieved when Ali puts a few fatal bullets into Alamo. That’s partly because she will no longer have to potentially marry that man to repay her and Cassie’s debts, but also because she seems genuinely moved by the idea of avenging Rue’s death. This episode deprives us of knowing exactly what happens next on Maddy’s journey, though it strongly implies that journey will put her on a path alongside Bishop.
Ultimately, Lexi—who spent much of the season convinced of her superior decision-making—doesn’t seem any more certain about her place in the world than Cassie or Maddy. She politely declines Cassie’s invitation to be the “storyteller” in the influencer house her sister plans to start in the wallpapered atrocity that is her suburban L.A. mansion. Lexi tells Cassie about her experience reading the Bible that Rue left behind at her apartment. “You’d think it’d be boring. But there’s a lot of violence and sex,” she says, which feels as if Levinson is describing Euphoria by proxy.
Lexi goes on to describe to her sister what she thinks she learned from reading that holy text: “Bad things happen. So why have anxiety about it? What good does it do? No matter what, you just have to keep going, and that’s the point of it, I think.” This is a somewhat Buddhist reading of a Christian text, and that feels intentional, too. Levinson seems eager to overlay multiple religions on top of his basic reading of morality, so that many people can relate to what he’s preaching, as muddled as that might be.
It also feels like he’s selling us multiple iterations of the American Dream, while also deconstructing those iterations at the same time. Before Ali bursts into the Silver Slipper, Alamo explains how much he wants to realize the ultimate form of happiness, which, in his mind, involves picket fences and a pregnant wife in the kitchen. “The American Dream: I want it,” he tells Maddy. “For our four beautiful cocoa-colored babies, too.” Alamo has been conditioned to believe that any person can earn their way into America’s good graces by amassing enough wealth and keeping women in their place. In a way, so has Maddy. Those are the core values that, maybe, could have made them a twisted power couple if Ali hadn’t blown him to shreds and she hadn’t looked less relieved about the fact that she wouldn’t have to marry him to maintain money, safety, and status.
“Maybe empathy ain’t that helpful after all,” Ali says as he sorts through his approach toward helping those with addictions. “Maybe the real disease is that people no longer know the difference between right and wrong.” Perhaps he has a point. I am just not sure that Euphoria ultimately makes that point in a clear and cogent way.
In the final sequence of the episode, Levinson shows us a former addict, Ali, who seemingly can’t afford to identify himself by a Muslim name but still sits comfortably with a white, conservative Christian family that shares his sadness over Rue’s passing. At that same table is one of the members of the Miller family, Daisy (Jessica Treska), whose name is shared with the main character in a James Joyce novella whose exuberance clashes with the chaste morals of her time. Euphoria’s Daisy Miller seems shaken by the death of Rue, who perhaps represented freedom to Daisy. Levinson seems to want us to think that the world Daisy grew up in represents an ideal that America is incapable of achieving anymore.
It’s notable that the date of Rue’s death is Oct. 13, 2024, the same date, as a newscast on Ali’s television reminds us, that SpaceX successfully executed its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket, theoretically getting humans one step closer to venturing to the moon or Mars. This implies that the billionaires—who get to operate seemingly outside the boundaries of right and wrong—even reach the most peaceful, rural parts of Texas that Rue viewed as sanctified. (Starship takes off from a launch pad in Boca Chica.) One could also interpret this SpaceX connection as Levinson’s way of signaling that there is not much hope left for human beings on this Earth, and our optimism has the best chance of continuing if we look up, to the stars.
“Why do the nations say,/‘Where is their God?’/Our God is in heaven,” reads a passage from Psalm 115, which Rue reads, at least in her mind, in the final moments before she dies. She reaches out her hand as she leaves this mortal coil, and in those moments it feels like someone—her mother; God; Fez, who appears to her in a moving last appearance by the late Angus Cloud; the universe—is there to hold it. “Give her peace,” Ali says after he finds Rue dead on his sofa, with the words of her audio Bible still ringing in her earbuds. Rue finally gets to find it, the only way she can: by escaping the confines of this earthly plane. As an addict, Rue was always chasing a feeling of euphoria she never fully got to experience. In death, it seems, she finally finds it.
