‘Euphoria’: Sam Levinson Ends His Gen Z Opus With a Finale Where Characters Die, Scatter, or Fade Away

Alci Rengifo

Like a debauched deity eager to wash away his creations, Sam Levinson ends “Euphoria” with a finale that feels like a hybrid off the rails. The conclusion to the third, and presumably final, season has but a few faint glimmers of what made Levinson’s Gen Z opus compelling when it premiered in 2019. Back then, it was a dark portrait of American suburbia through adolescent eyes. Some called it too debasing for its own good, yet there was no denying the visceral power of the production. In particular, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney became pop cultural fixations thanks to the series. After a long absence following a rather clunky though memorable second season, Levinson premiered season three as a show that felt like something altogether different. Out of high school and into the terrain of a bizarre neo-Western, this season was pure mayhem, scattering key characters around, not knowing what to do with half of them, and now ending in a shower of disappointing deaths and cliché shootouts.

Titled “In God We Trust,” the finale opens right where the previous episode left off and clocks in at one hour and thirty-three minutes. Rue (Zendaya) is panicking when Faye (Chloe Cherry) screams to awaken her neo-Nazi drug dealer boyfriend, Wayne (Toby Wallace), after opening his safe only to find no piles of cash. They are still underground beneath the house run by drug boss Laurie (Martha Kelly). A quick fight and escape follows during which Rue is nearly trapped again by a horse-riding Harley (James Landry Hébert). Luckily, one of the goons belonging to Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is there to shoot down Harley and get Rue back to Alamo’s strip club, where the big boss congratulates her for proving her loyalty. Laurie doesn’t escape, however, when the DEA storms her compound and she prefers to hang herself in operatic fashion before the SWAT team instead of going to prison. When Rue makes her way to the home of sponsor and friend Ali (Colman Domingo), it seems she might have a chance at personal renewal, but the painkillers Alamo gave her are laced with fentanyl. 

Surely, one of the most controversial and disappointing aspects of this finale will be the demise of Rue. From the first episode of the series, it has been this character and Zendaya’s consistently strong acting that has defined “Euphoria.” A tragic drug addict struggling to find her footing, Rue was always compelling. Levinson, who wrote and directed all eight episodes of the season, could have chosen a smarter, richer option than a cliché overdose. To his credit, Rue’s death scene is the one moment this entire season that felt like a return to the emotional heart of the series. It’s a well-edited rug pull where Rue awakens in Ali’s living room and sees a news report that her old friend and dealer Fez (the late Angus Cloud, only shown in flashback) has escaped prison. She had promised to pick him up if he ever did get out and so she drives out to her old neighborhood, reflecting on past memories, including the first time she ever saw Jules (Hunter Schafer). All she finds are the police sealing off the streets. She evades them and makes it into her childhood home, where her mother is reading the Bible and Rue slips into that final sleep. The series could have just ended there, but Levinson is then left to figure out what to do with everyone else. 

The episode becomes a scattered set of moments, some thrown in as if the contract demands this actor have their final scene. The cops who turned Rue into a narc vanish along with Alamo’s right hand (Kadeem Hardison), conveniently suckered into driving into the DEA raid. Wayne and Faye later appear to prepare to hijack a car on a lone highway. These side characters can at least understand their abrupt departures. They never formed part of the narrative backbone. The rest of the cast seems to inspire boredom or a strange kind of wrath from Levinson. Prior to its premiere, season three was riddled with reports of tensions between the cast and showrunner. Even music artist Labrinth left with some pretty strong words against Levinson, depriving the series of its trademark sound (famous film composer Hans Zimmer stepped in). Is this why Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie was reduced to a bubble-brained caricature of Sweeney’s own public image? Whether posing nude with absurd toys or auditioning for a soap opera, Cassie became nothing more than a near-sexist poster girl for either what the showrunner hates in contemporary women or what he feels the culture has done to them. Sweeney at least had more things to do than Jacob Elordi, a current talk of the town after several major features, reduced this season to stumbling around while an Armenian punched him and cut off fingers and toes. Hunter Schafer was equally underused, thrown into a sluggish storyline about Jules having a middle-aged sugar daddy who speaks in one scene. In this episode, we see her once, in mourning and silence while painting a portrait of Rue. The sugar daddy appears, kissing her head and walks out of frame. Just like that, the defining love story of the series withers away into irrelevance. 

The second half of the finale quickly wraps up with Cassie, now living with Maddy (Alexa Demie), at the mansion she used to share with Nate, who died in the previous episode from a snake bite while trapped in a coffin thanks to the Armenian gangsters he owed money to. Cassie proposes to her sister Lexi (Maude Apatow) that she help set up a room and board system at the house for the girls they plan to turn into internet fodder. Lexi turns it down. She is haunted by reading the Bible Rue left behind at her apartment, inspiring deep contemplations about life. Guilt as felt through a Biblical prism will become a running theme in this finale. Maddy takes an envelope full of cash to Alamo, who has demanded a cut of Cassie’s internet earnings after helping find Nate, and even the older strip club boss starts talking about epiphanies and wanting to trade this life for the suburban American dream. Maddy, he believes, should have his babies. Ali then arrives in a soldier’s uniform. Earlier he admitted to his AA group that he would not return and had taken a drink for the first time in years after Rue’s death. Now he is an avenging angel plucked out of “Taxi Driver” or “Unforgiven.”

Levinson used to climax this show with moments of stunning pop poetics, like Rue seeming to overdose at the end of season one to a gospel choir lifting her high and a marching band in the distance, while singing Labrinth’s “All for Us.” A great irony of the third season is that stylistically it has been relentless with its pacing, widescreen cinematography and thriller attitude. When Ali walks into Alamo’s club it’s a riddle of clichés involving shotguns, demands to see the big boss and a final standoff modeled after Western duels at sundown (though they stay indoors). Like the Armenian gangster killed in the previous episode, luck is on Ali’s side when serene Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson) betrays Alamo in a way that lets Ali blow him away. Biblical vengeance is served. Levinson’s apparent evangelical spirit resurfaces when Ali drives out to meet the secluded Christian Rue met in the season premiere, letting them know she found peace here. In the final scene, Ali says grace before dinner, a vision of Rue smiles from the head of the table. Does Levinson believe in Biblical judgement and redemption? The final shot of an American flag blowing in the breeze, outside the home of secluded Christians who surely have puritanical social views, leaves many questions in the air. 

This is not the ending fans of the show seven years ago would have anticipated. Maybe Levinson wanted to make a statement about the unpredictability of life, especially in a center of culture and excess like Los Angeles. Maybe he just didn’t know what to do with these characters. There could have been another ending to “Euphoria,” a climax where maybe the surreal, bizarre nature of the season could have turned out to be a vision running through Rue’s mind during that overdose in season one, as if a dying mind were melding what and who she knows with flickers of the future. Ali could have easily then been a figment of her imagination, like a figure the subconscious wishes would exist. Maybe Cassie and Nate could have become a boring suburban couple with debauched habits at night. His toxic inner rages, such a theme in the first seasons, could have manifested into one of those masochistic relationships where enduring his terrors is worth it as long as they are making money. Maybe Maddy could have gone to college and studied finance while scooping up influencer clients on the side. It is curious how Levinson didn’t imagine any of these characters going to college with the exception of Lexi. So many maybes in the world of “Euphoria.” The world has changed since the show premiered. Since then we have endured a pandemic, shifts in the industry itself and Gen Z are now joining the general workforce, no longer just children. Yet, season three feels not so much about  a generation as about its creator, grappling with rebukes at those he once worked with and losing a sense of focus. Where he goes next becomes the real question at the end of this series that was born with such potential and now rides into the sunset as a strange footnote. 

The “Euphoria” series finale airs May 31 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.