SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “In God We Trust,” the Season 3 finale of “Euphoria,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Rue Bennett is gone. But to those whose lives she touched, she’s vividly present.
That’s among the takeaways from the Season 3 finale of “Euphoria,” an episode that brought its primary characters to some version or another of closure. Rue (Zendaya) dies before the episode’s midpoint, after which Ali (Colman Domingo) must avenge her. Meanwhile, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) seems set up for her future as an OnlyFans mogul, but still has ways to go in terms of healing the wounds left by her brief, turbulent marriage to the late Nate (Jacob Elordi). And there’s a sweet tribute to Fezco (played in the first two seasons by Angus Cloud), in some ways the soul of “Euphoria.”
Here’s everything that happened in the season finale.
Rue’s Escape, and What Came After
Rue manages to break free from Laurie’s (Martha Kelly) compound after Faye (Chloe Cherry) betrayed her in the final moments of Episode 7. Rue’s agility and speed come in handy as she’s almost out, up until one of Laurie’s henchmen lassoes her; G (Marshawn Lynch) kills Rue’s assailant and drives her away. The DEA’s raid on Laurie’s ranch — Laurie chooses to hang herself, rather than be arrested — ends up with Alamo’s (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) crew escaping unscathed. The DEA agents open up the floor in an ambulance his lackeys have driven over the border from Mexico, and instead of finding drugs, they find a dead rat. Alamo knows what’s happening.
Later, he praises Rue (telling her that she’s “employee of the year”) and assesses her injuries, including the nasty cut on her palm. Then he offers her a percocet, but reminds her not to abuse it: “That’s for the physical pain. Not that shit up in your head.” He also hands her a bottle of them.
His words seem in retrospect meant insincerely, but Rue might have done well to listen: Sitting with Ali, she enters a manic state after seeing a TV news report that Fezco has managed to break out of prison using parkour. Rue races to find him, breaking through a police barricade to enter her house. Once there, she envisions her mother, Leslie (Nika King), from whom she’s been estranged, outstretching her hand to greet her. Tragically, this has been the fantasy of a dying woman. Some time later, Ali finds Rue’s dead body on his couch, discovers the pills, and tests them for fentanyl; when he sees the positive result, he pounds the counter with his fist, then calls Leslie to tell her the bad news.
Ali’s Reckoning
In a bravura scene of acting, we see Ali at a group meeting, in which he tells the group he picked up a drink while grieving a friend. He refers to this as having been months prior; time has passed since Rue’s death, but the wound still feels fresh. Ali no longer wants to be a part of the program, which he says isn’t serving him as he deals with only the latest loss in his life. (In last week’s episode, we saw him, in flashback, dealing with the loss of friends he could not save when COVID made in-person meetings obsolete for a time.) “I’m going to find another way to be of better service,” he says. We next see him sawing off a shotgun.
At Alamo’s club, Ali manages to get a meeting with the top dog, who evades being shot by placing Maddy (Alexa Demie) between himself and the gun — as he seems to suspect, Ali won’t kill an innocent bystander. Alamo sets the terms of a duel: one of the dancers, Kitty (Anna Van Patten), will roll a Champagne bottle down the bar, and when it hits the floor and shatters, the men may draw. Alamo, as one might expect, violates the terms of his own deal and draws on Ali well before the bottle falls, pulling the trigger: The gun, however, isn’t loaded. Ali looks at his associate Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), whom he realizes took the bullets, and begins to say “I’ll see you in Hell, motherf—” before Ali’s bullet blasts him. With Alamo’s strange spell broken, the girls at the club file out slowly.
Other Characters’ Endings
Maddy found herself at Alamo’s club in an attempt to pay off the debt she incurred trying to free Nate last episode; leaving Cassie at home, she tells her not to wait up, as she’ll be out late. Where she’ll end up after Alamo’s death is unknown, but it certainly seems as if Ali’s bullet got her her freedom back.
Cassie, meanwhile, seems to have made a certain sort of peace with her husband’s death, even as she hasn’t shared the details. In a conversation at her house with her sister Lexi (Maude Apatow), Cassie is noncommittal in answering a question about the unsolved mystery of Nate’s “disappearance.” “I don’t like to think about it,” she says. She’s planning on converting her and Nate’s mansion into a hype house of sorts for OnlyFans models, and offers her sister the job of writing them all storylines; to her credit, Lexi seems to understand the role would be a poor fit. Once Lexi leaves, we leave Cassie sitting on what had once been the bed she shares with Nate; backlit by the ring light she uses for her videos, she stops herself from weeping, but we hear her gulp as a “Euphoria”-sized tear comes down her cheek and as she contemplates a picture of herself and her late husband. The camera pans far out, into the world beyond Cassie’s misery, to reveal her living in a sort of dollhouse, one in which she’s still performing — if only for herself.
Lexi is better off elsewhere — she has bigger things on her mind. She’s been reading the Bible Rue left at her place, as Rue was forging a connection with her faith. Back then, Lexi had told Rue she was being annoying; now, she regrets it. “I could have left things better,” she tells her sister. “It doesn’t matter how you leave things,” says Cassie, citing their father’s abandonment of the family. “It still sucks.” There’s a comfort, though, in going through the suck together. Art provides solace, too; in a single, brief sequence, we see Jules (Hunter Schafer) painting a portrait of Rue.
A Final Tribute
In the episode’s closing sequence, we see Ali visiting the farmhouse Rue encountered back in the season premiere, when she was crossing the Mexico-U.S. border as a drug mule and seeking help. Then, the family she saw and their aura of benevolence and peace made her consider turning to faith. Now, the family remembers her fondly when Ali tells them “My daughter stayed here a while back.” They ask after her, and are taken aback when Ali says “She’s in a better place.”
The family prays with Ali before a meal, with a seat at the table left empty. Ali sits directly opposite the chair for Rue and, for a fleeting moment, sees her, with the picture window behind her showing a vast expanse of land and sky — a vista of the strange nation that gave her life, and took it from her. For now, though, Rue looks truly happy, smiling an unencumbered, guileless smile. “May God bless us all,” Rue says in voiceover, to close out the episode, and the story of her too-short life.
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