The Series Finale of ‘Euphoria’ Let the Characters Down: TV Review
SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains plot details from “In God We Trust,” the series finale of “Euphoria,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Throughout its third — and now confirmed to be final — season, “Euphoria” already felt like it had fractured into several different shows under the nominal banner of what was once the HBO version of a teen drama. Sunday’s finale, “In God We Trust,” functioned only as a capstone to one of these clashing narrative threads: the story of Rue Bennett (Zendaya) and her ultimately losing battle with drug addiction. Not only did this final focus on Rue render other characters an afterthought whose trajectories trailed off with a shrug; even Rue herself felt poorly served by a protracted, feature-length episode that tried to square a somber warning about the real-life opioid epidemic with an operatic revenge thriller and underbaked religious themes.
For its first two seasons, the form and function of “Euphoria” were in sync. However controversial or, at times, eyeroll-inducing, creator Sam Levinson’s sense of showmanship effectively channeled the intensity of hormone-fueled emotion. Whether it was the room revolving around Rue “Inception”-style as she sunk into her latest high or Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie professing her love for a terrible boyfriend with warbling, tear-streaked dedication, “Euphoria” got its point across loud and clear.
But without a simple rubric like trying to survive high school, “Euphoria” lost its center of gravity and spun out in wild new directions. Rue became a drug mule across the Mexican border for one criminal ringleader, Laurie (Martha Kelly) and a strip club manager for another, Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Cassie took to OnlyFans, mostly for her own validation but partly to bail her now-husband Nate (Jacob Elordi) out of ruinous debt — reuniting her with her estranged best friend Maddy (Alexa Demie), now a talent manager. Cassie’s sister Lexi (Maude Apatow) toiled as an assistant on a nighttime soap opera. Jules (Hunter Schafer) was quite literally stuck in a tower, kept by a sugar daddy and isolated from the rest of the cast apart from the occasional conversation with Rue.
The latter half of the season started stitching some of these subplots together, at least in a literal sense. Maddy began managing some of Alamo’s strippers, bringing her into the same underworld that had already swallowed Rue; Cassie moved into Lexi’s apartment complex, auditioned for a role on her show and slept with its heartthrob star. (Jules remained siloed, perhaps a consequence of the scheduling tango that came with an increasingly famous cast and a six-month shoot.) Even as “Euphoria” became more focused on the surface level, however, it swerved into a new tonal register: earnest Christianity.
After taking a back seat to sex work as explored through Jules, Cassie and Alamo’s club the Silver Slipper, Rue’s addiction came back into the forefront for “Euphoria”’s home stretch. Recruited as — or more accurately, strong-armed into being — an informant for the DEA, Rue developed an intense interest in good, evil and redemption. She monologued to God in a church; she saw a burning bush, or rather a Joshua tree, and heard the voice of the divine; she reconnected with her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) and asked him if she could make up for the harm she’d done, both to loved ones like her mother Leslie (Nika King) and to strangers by smuggling lethal drugs into the country.
This turn was frankly difficult to digest in a show that’s otherwise adopted a stance of irreverent insouciance toward other hot topics. Cassie’s OnlyFans adventures, for interest, were depicted with a kind of sneering derision toward the character’s poor judgement and lack of savvy. (“What an idiot” is the barely hidden subtext of many of her scenes, from complaining her husband losing a toe on their wedding night is “not fair” to being easily manipulated by Maddy to melting down when she realizes she can’t un-delete her account.) When Lexi sums up the message of the Bible as “bad things happen” so “why get anxiety about it,” I was prepared to laugh at the gross oversimplification, only to find myself wondering if “Euphoria” actually wanted me to take the young writer at her word.
When Rue dies of a fentanyl overdose about halfway through “In God We Trust,” the mismatch between medium and message gets even more extreme. The actual depiction of her death — she passes quietly on Ali’s couch; when he finds her, it’s with stoic resignation — is deliberately understated, a realism doubled down on by Ali’s speech at his final AA meeting about the nationwide scourge of fentanyl-related fatalities. Yet the surrounding circumstances aren’t exactly those of the average substance abuser. Rue was effectively poisoned by Alamo, who tempted her with tainted Percocet, in retaliation for her collaboration with the feds; she’s as much a casualty of the larger-than-life clash between outlaws and enforcers in Levinson’s sweeping vision of the contemporary West as she is the everyday plight shared by millions.
This dissonance carries over into Ali’s subsequent revenge mission. Abandoning the 12 steps and empathy as a guiding principle, Ali resolves to enforce “the difference between right and wrong” by storming Alamo’s club with a shotgun. The Tarantino-inflected gore that ensues has its thrills, like so much of Levinson’s genuinely entertaining output. It also relies on out-of-nowhere twists, like Alamo’s betrayal by his taciturn henchman Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and clashes with the humble mundanity of Rue’s tragic fate. Is a bloody shootout that defies basic credulity — how’d Ali get the shotgun into a club with armed security?! — really the best way to illustrate the suffering of addicts and the loved ones they leave behind?
In other words, where the bombast and showmanship of “Euphoria” once amplified its core thesis, the two elements ended the series at odds. Zendaya and Domingo do great, resonant work, but even their empathetic portraits of suffering people can’t make this strange coda cohere. (Season 3 is much more of an epilogue to “Euphoria” than a continuation.) Breakout stars like Sweeney, Elordi and Schaefer are even less well served by their arcs’ rushed or half-hearted conclusions. Whatever pleasure could be had in Nate’s comeuppance was undone by his humiliation dragging out for hours before being put out of his misery; Cassie’s next act as a hype-house doyenne is only handwaved at, and any responsibility for Nate’s unpaid debts handwaved entirely. “In God We Trust” isn’t the send-off any of these stars deserve from the platform that launched them.
Finally, Ali — going by his birth name, Martin McQueen — arrives at the Texas homestead Rue identified as her “promised land” before her overdose. Saying grace with the family that sheltered her in the season premiere while spouting right-wing talking points about “pure evil that’s pouring across our border,” Martin sees Rue smiling beatifically at the head of the table. “May God bless us all,” she intones over an idyllic image of an American flag flying over farmland.
Again, “Euphoria” has previously trained us to receive such signaling as tongue-in-cheek, with prior references to Cassie and Nate’s “right-wing suburban bubble” and Cassie spewing manosphere talking points on podcasts while being the breadwinner in her own marriage. An earlier episode was titled “America My Dream,” after Cassie’s housekeeper’s naive faith in the same value system that’s leading one of her bosses to scam his neighbors out of their kids’ college funds. Putting Rue’s apolitical faith in nationalist terms for the show’s closing image reads like one last thumbing of the nose that butts up against the season’s occasional naked sincerity. Once a clear expression of teenage angst, “Euphoria” ended a jumbled mishmash that did a lot and said little.
Throughout its third — and now confirmed to be final — season, “Euphoria” already felt like it had fractured into several different shows under the nominal banner of what was once the HBO version of a teen drama. Sunday’s finale, “In God We Trust,” functioned only as a capstone to one of these clashing narrative threads: the story of Rue Bennett (Zendaya) and her ultimately losing battle with drug addiction. Not only did this final focus on Rue render other characters an afterthought whose trajectories trailed off with a shrug; even Rue herself felt poorly served by a protracted, feature-length episode that tried to square a somber warning about the real-life opioid epidemic with an operatic revenge thriller and underbaked religious themes.
For its first two seasons, the form and function of “Euphoria” were in sync. However controversial or, at times, eyeroll-inducing, creator Sam Levinson’s sense of showmanship effectively channeled the intensity of hormone-fueled emotion. Whether it was the room revolving around Rue “Inception”-style as she sunk into her latest high or Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie professing her love for a terrible boyfriend with warbling, tear-streaked dedication, “Euphoria” got its point across loud and clear.
But without a simple rubric like trying to survive high school, “Euphoria” lost its center of gravity and spun out in wild new directions. Rue became a drug mule across the Mexican border for one criminal ringleader, Laurie (Martha Kelly) and a strip club manager for another, Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Cassie took to OnlyFans, mostly for her own validation but partly to bail her now-husband Nate (Jacob Elordi) out of ruinous debt — reuniting her with her estranged best friend Maddy (Alexa Demie), now a talent manager. Cassie’s sister Lexi (Maude Apatow) toiled as an assistant on a nighttime soap opera. Jules (Hunter Schafer) was quite literally stuck in a tower, kept by a sugar daddy and isolated from the rest of the cast apart from the occasional conversation with Rue.
The latter half of the season started stitching some of these subplots together, at least in a literal sense. Maddy began managing some of Alamo’s strippers, bringing her into the same underworld that had already swallowed Rue; Cassie moved into Lexi’s apartment complex, auditioned for a role on her show and slept with its heartthrob star. (Jules remained siloed, perhaps a consequence of the scheduling tango that came with an increasingly famous cast and a six-month shoot.) Even as “Euphoria” became more focused on the surface level, however, it swerved into a new tonal register: earnest Christianity.
After taking a back seat to sex work as explored through Jules, Cassie and Alamo’s club the Silver Slipper, Rue’s addiction came back into the forefront for “Euphoria”’s home stretch. Recruited as — or more accurately, strong-armed into being — an informant for the DEA, Rue developed an intense interest in good, evil and redemption. She monologued to God in a church; she saw a burning bush, or rather a Joshua tree, and heard the voice of the divine; she reconnected with her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) and asked him if she could make up for the harm she’d done, both to loved ones like her mother Leslie (Nika King) and to strangers by smuggling lethal drugs into the country.
This turn was frankly difficult to digest in a show that’s otherwise adopted a stance of irreverent insouciance toward other hot topics. Cassie’s OnlyFans adventures, for interest, were depicted with a kind of sneering derision toward the character’s poor judgement and lack of savvy. (“What an idiot” is the barely hidden subtext of many of her scenes, from complaining her husband losing a toe on their wedding night is “not fair” to being easily manipulated by Maddy to melting down when she realizes she can’t un-delete her account.) When Lexi sums up the message of the Bible as “bad things happen” so “why get anxiety about it,” I was prepared to laugh at the gross oversimplification, only to find myself wondering if “Euphoria” actually wanted me to take the young writer at her word.
When Rue dies of a fentanyl overdose about halfway through “In God We Trust,” the mismatch between medium and message gets even more extreme. The actual depiction of her death — she passes quietly on Ali’s couch; when he finds her, it’s with stoic resignation — is deliberately understated, a realism doubled down on by Ali’s speech at his final AA meeting about the nationwide scourge of fentanyl-related fatalities. Yet the surrounding circumstances aren’t exactly those of the average substance abuser. Rue was effectively poisoned by Alamo, who tempted her with tainted Percocet, in retaliation for her collaboration with the feds; she’s as much a casualty of the larger-than-life clash between outlaws and enforcers in Levinson’s sweeping vision of the contemporary West as she is the everyday plight shared by millions.
This dissonance carries over into Ali’s subsequent revenge mission. Abandoning the 12 steps and empathy as a guiding principle, Ali resolves to enforce “the difference between right and wrong” by storming Alamo’s club with a shotgun. The Tarantino-inflected gore that ensues has its thrills, like so much of Levinson’s genuinely entertaining output. It also relies on out-of-nowhere twists, like Alamo’s betrayal by his taciturn henchman Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and clashes with the humble mundanity of Rue’s tragic fate. Is a bloody shootout that defies basic credulity — how’d Ali get the shotgun into a club with armed security?! — really the best way to illustrate the suffering of addicts and the loved ones they leave behind?
In other words, where the bombast and showmanship of “Euphoria” once amplified its core thesis, the two elements ended the series at odds. Zendaya and Domingo do great, resonant work, but even their empathetic portraits of suffering people can’t make this strange coda cohere. (Season 3 is much more of an epilogue to “Euphoria” than a continuation.) Breakout stars like Sweeney, Elordi and Schaefer are even less well served by their arcs’ rushed or half-hearted conclusions. Whatever pleasure could be had in Nate’s comeuppance was undone by his humiliation dragging out for hours before being put out of his misery; Cassie’s next act as a hype-house doyenne is only handwaved at, and any responsibility for Nate’s unpaid debts handwaved entirely. “In God We Trust” isn’t the send-off any of these stars deserve from the platform that launched them.
Finally, Ali — going by his birth name, Martin McQueen — arrives at the Texas homestead Rue identified as her “promised land” before her overdose. Saying grace with the family that sheltered her in the season premiere while spouting right-wing talking points about “pure evil that’s pouring across our border,” Martin sees Rue smiling beatifically at the head of the table. “May God bless us all,” she intones over an idyllic image of an American flag flying over farmland.
Again, “Euphoria” has previously trained us to receive such signaling as tongue-in-cheek, with prior references to Cassie and Nate’s “right-wing suburban bubble” and Cassie spewing manosphere talking points on podcasts while being the breadwinner in her own marriage. An earlier episode was titled “America My Dream,” after Cassie’s housekeeper’s naive faith in the same value system that’s leading one of her bosses to scam his neighbors out of their kids’ college funds. Putting Rue’s apolitical faith in nationalist terms for the show’s closing image reads like one last thumbing of the nose that butts up against the season’s occasional naked sincerity. Once a clear expression of teenage angst, “Euphoria” ended a jumbled mishmash that did a lot and said little.