The Ending of 'Euphoria' Was a Complete Disaster

There were two requests I had in my mind for the Euphoria finale that wouldn’t make an entertaining (but dreadful) three-season viewing experience not a complete and total disaster: 1) Rue survived, and 2) Ali survives. Everything else, frankly, was entirely optional. A shoot-out in which every other character is killed off would have been fine.

We got the shootout, anyway.

Spoilers

I knew they’d kill off Rue. I just knew it, because Sam Levinson’s idea of “tragedy” is as subtle as a sledgehammer to an elbow, and it could not possibly be complete without sacrificing his protagonist on the altar of his own ego. Killing off Rue is Levinson’s shortcut to “deep” and “profound.” Everything else can be absolute s*** (and it was, spectacularly), but in his mind, Rue’s death would redeem the whole bloated series. Euphoria would be remembered as a dark and grim reflection of reality. Legacy secured. Roll credits.

But man, reality sucks. And what happened after Rue’s death has no basis in reality anyway, so why not give us the ending we didn’t see coming from three seasons away? Oh, right. Because Sam Levinson was in charge.

Here’s what happened: When we last left off, Rue — working with the DEA — had set up a vague drug bust that would take down both Alamo and Laurie. It would require sneaking drugs through the Mexican border in an ambulance carrying a couple of strippers who had undergone various forms of plastic surgery. Sigh.

Meanwhile, last week’s episode left off with Faye essentially waking up her boyfriend Wayne before Rue could break into his safe. Long story short: Rue is shot at multiple times, chased, and dragged along the ground by a horse before Marshawn Lynch’s character sharp-shoots the guy riding it. What a waste of Marshawn Lynch.

Rue miraculously escapes, turns over the MacGuffin in Laurie’s safe to Alamo, who gives her a stack of cash, and she finds safety on Ali’s couch while the DEA bust goes down, but not before taking a Percocet for the pain. You already know where this is going.

Alamo pulled a switcharoo on the drug bust. Laurie finds out too late, ties a rope around her neck, and leaps from the roof — killing herself before the cops can take her alive. Because there are no drugs, poor Big Eddy and his colostomy bag escape arrest (and quits the life), Alamo keeps the drugs, and eludes the law entirely.

The Percocet he gave Rue? Laced with fentanyl, naturally. She dies on Ali’s couch, but not before a long dream sequence in which she tries to help Fez after he parkours out of prison and finally sees her mother — which is the precise moment we knew she was dead, because Levinson had finally run out of ways to punish her while she was still breathing.

Ali discovers her on the couch in the morning. The death breaks something in him. He relapses, attends his last meeting, surrenders his sponsorship of young addicts. He’s seen too much death, and Rue’s was the final straw. This could have been the ending. Instead, grief transforms into knock-off Tarantino. Quiet, peaceful, loving Ali — seeking revenge for Rue’s death — brings a sawed-off shotgun into Alamo’s strip club; they agree to a … duel. Alamo cheats. Ali lives anyway, because Bishop — done playing the quiet-but-menacing henchman, possibly nursing feelings for Maddy — had emptied the bullets from Alamo’s gun in advance. Ali guns down Alamo in front of dozens of witnesses and faces, as best as we can tell, exactly zero consequences for it.

In the end, he returns to the deeply Christian household that Rue visited in the season premiere, prays with the family for her, and sits down to a peaceful dinner. Ali finds religion … again. “In God We Trust” is the episode title, which should tell you everything you need to know about the level of nuance on display.

Lexi may have found religion, too — she picked up the Bible Rue left behind, apparently the show’s way of signaling depth without doing any of the work. Meanwhile, she’s now writing scripts for Cassie, who has decided to run her own OnlyFans empire out of her house in the wake of Nate’s death. I guess this is Cassie’s happy ending.

And that’s that. Cassie is an aspiring OnlyFans mogul. Maddy has escaped her debts and may have found an unlikely kinship with Bishop. Alamo is dead. Laurie is dead. Nate is dead. Rue is dead. Fez is still in prison. Jules is grieving by painting portraits of Rue from the safety of her sugar daddy’s apartment, because Jules has always been Levinson’s least-considered character and why stop now.

I won’t say Levinson’s third season of Euphoria was a complete waste of time. It was better than The Idol, though that’s a distinction roughly as meaningful as being the one frostbitten toe you didn’t have to cut off. At least The Idol had the decency to be catastrophically bad in ways that were occasionally fun to witness. Euphoria, meanwhile, dutifully marched through the predictable paces of a violent prestige drama that thinks it’s a generation-defining work of art, when in reality it’s just a very expensive reason to be grateful the show is finally over.