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Content warning: this article contains discussions of addiction.
Don’t make any risky moves if you haven’t seen “In God We Trust,” the Season 3 finale of “Euphoria.” Spoilers ahead!
The third season of “Euphoria” has come to a bitter end. So what happened to all of our favorite (living) characters — namely, Rue Bennett (Zendaya), Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) and her sister Lexi (Maude Apatow) — as well as series antagonists Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Laurie (Martha Kelly)? (I say this with all due respect to Jacob Elordi’s fallen soldier Nate Jacobs, who died in the season’s penultimate episode “Rain or Shine.”)
So, what fate does everyone meet in the Season 3 finale “In God We Trust”? If you’re familiar with “Euphoria,” you know that this show rarely lets any of its characters off the hook; in fact, showrunner Sam Levinson seems to take some pleasure from tormenting his performers. From Rue’s fate to the shocking conclusion, here’s what happens at the end of the third season of “Euphoria.”
What you need to remember about the plot of Euphoria
Patrick Wymore/HBO
The third (and ideally final) season of “Euphoria” has been a wild ride, to say the very least. After a five-year time jump, we reconnect with all of the characters and see what they’re up to. It’s an understatement to say that nobody is doing particularly well. Not only is Rue working as a drug mule for Laurie when the season opens, but Maddy is toiling away as a lowly assistant, Nate is drowning in debt, and an oblivious Cassie decides to work as an OnlyFans model to buy flowers for her and Nate’s lavish wedding. (Lexi is, unsurprisingly, doing okay; she’s working as an assistant to Sharon Stone’s television executive Patty Lance.)
Throughout Season 3 of “Euphoria,” everyone suffers. Rue turns on Laurie and starts working for Alamo, a strip-club owner who may or may not be involved in human trafficking. (He is.) Cassie becomes a successful adult content creator with Maddy’s help while Nate drowns in debt, and Jules spends almost all of the season in a high-rise building painting while she waits for a visit from her her wealthy patron Ellis (Sam Trammell). By the time we get to the penultimate episode, “Rain or Shine,” the chess pieces are firmly on the board. Rue, on Alamo’s orders, is set to infiltrate Laurie’s compound. Nate, in deep debt to Naz (Jack Topalian), finds himself literally six feet under and ends up dying when a rattlesnake finds its way into his underground coffin — and he’s discovered by both Cassie and Maddy, the latter of whom is also working for Alamo at this point. So what happens in the finale?
What happens at the end of Euphoria?
Patrick Wymore/HBO
The episode opens just as the previous one ended — with Rue seemingly at the mercy of Faye (Chloe Cherry) and white supremacist Wayne (Toby Wallace) in Laurie’s compound. After she gets what she needs, she manages to stage a daring escape — though she is dragged by a man riding horseback in the process! — and Alamo is incredibly grateful. The problem is that he offers her prescription painkillers, the source of Rue’s long-standing addiction. Thankfully, she still has her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo), and she decamps to his house for a safe haven.
As Alamo’s ambulance full of drugs — and girls who received illicit surgeries in Mexico — heads back, Laurie’s team is intercepted by the DEA, as is Alamo’s team. Laurie dies by suicide when the DEA invades her home, but because Rue’s nowhere near this entire scene, she’s safe … for now.
That’s what we think, anyway. When Ali wakes up, he finds Rue dead on his couch — even though she didn’t take enough of the painkillers. (Ali uses a test to see if the pills were laced with fentanyl, and they were.) Elsewhere, nothing matters much for the other characters. Cassie decides to transform Nate’s empty mansion into a content creation house — with Lexi as an unlikely showrunner — and hands Maddy a stack of cash, at which point she returns to her new boss Alamo.
So what happens next? Ali heads to Alamo’s club with a sawed-off shotgun and a mission as Alamo attempts to seduce Maddy into sharing a life with him. Ali starts the conflict and demands that Alamo face him directly. As it turns out, Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson) took the bullets out of Alamo’s gun, and Ali kills him. Ali then goes to the Texas homestead Rue dreamed of, prays with the family that welcomed her, and sees a final vision of her. “God help us all,” Rue intones before the show fades to black.
What the ending of Euphoria means
Eddy Chen/HBO
It’s a massive understatement to say that the endig of “Euphoria” is unrelentingly bleak. Rue’s death isn’t, honestly, all that surprising that the end of the day; like Jacob Elordi before her, it’s prety easy to imagine that Zendaya wanted to exit the series quickly and painlessly in case it continues for another season. Unfortunately, it all feels … pointless.
Sam Levinson typically prioritizes shock value over actual substance, and that’s certainly true of this season finale — throughout which he stages multiple tense, lengthy stand-offs between characters instead of even attempting to complete the story he started. Ultimately, though … if Season 3 of “Euphoria” has anything worthwhile to say, it’s about the concept of destiny. (The Americana, Western-tinged vibe of this season adds to that, to be sure.) The finale seems to say that Rue was destined to lose her life to the addiction that gripped her after her father’s death, and even though we all probably saw this coming, it was still disappointing to see it play out this way. In any case, congratulations to Zendaya. She’s finally free.
“Euphoria” is streaming on HBO Max now.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).