After three seasons and a fentanyl-focused final run, Sam Levinson’s HBO series gets the closure it wanted even if it didn’t earn it.
“I think in the end, I wanted to tell an honest story about addiction,” Euphoria mastermind Sam Levinson said during the featurette that played after “In God We Trust,” the Euphoria series finale. “I also wanted to tell a story about grief and the emotional turmoil that it can create.”
In a way, how else would Levinson’s HBO series, steeped in kids surviving with drug addiction in today’s America, end? After Angus Cloud, someone Levinson has gone on record saying that he “fought” to keep “clean,” died due to a lethal mixture of meth, cocaine and fentanyl, it should be no surprise that this final season of Euphoria was bookended by fentanyl deaths. Tish, the dancer we met at the beginning of the season, took laced drugs and died at the party Rue was attending. (Remember, Rue cleaning that situation up was really the beginning of her work for Alamo Brown.) And now, sadly, Rue was given a bottle of pills from Alamo for her back pain — after being dragged by a horse, more on that later — and overdosed on Ali’s couch. It was, like Thanos, inevitable, and something that Levinson, in an effort to maintain honesty about today’s drug issues, wanted to shine a light on.
“Fentanyl can just take you out in an instant,” Levinson explained to The New York Times. “It wasn’t like when I was growing up; you could literally take pills off the street and you might have a bad trip or something, but you’d be fine. This is something that hits close to home for a lot of people in this country. So it felt like the responsible thing to do.”
Rue’s tragic ending signaled another inevitability: Euphoria officially coming to an end after seven years, three seasons and 26 episodes, confirmed by HBO not long after the finale ended. For many — most? — this is music to their ears; the hate-watch for Season 3 looked real, keeping viewership numbers high. The question is: Was it all worth it?
Probably not. Like anything Sam Levinson does, there were bright spots, particularly in this finale. Levinson may catch hell for how he has constructed this series post-high school, but everyone was on the edge of their seats when Ali (Colman Domingo, who may need some nominations during awards season from this episode) woke up to start his day. Present company figured he’d walk in to see her dead on the couch originally, but we got treated to what some are calling Rue’s “seven minutes,” a theory surrounding your brain activity during and after death. During that time, Rue envisions Fezco — the character Cloud played — escaping prison, utilizing some very familiar parkour. Making a dash out of Ali’s spot, Rue barrels home, running into her mother, who is ready to embrace her. It’s at that moment that we cut to Rue, heavy in breath, reaching out to her mother from Ali’s couch. Rue was one of the few characters you actually wanted to see make it out of this alive, but that addiction is real — and attached to a larger world full of Alamo Browns and Lauries and Nazis and cartels and strip clubs.
Truthfully, it’s that aspect of this season that’s frustrated viewers. Then and now, Euphoria has held a mirror to society’s ills; the problem is that when the show starts paying homage to Westerns and Quentin Tarantino and making movie-length finales, it feels like Levinson has lost the plot. Hell, we lost track of where Wayne and Faye even went after seemingly carjacking an unsuspecting family on the highway. Last episode, Jules slapped Rue after Rue attempted to open up to her; this week, all we got was a shot of Jules painting her sorrow away in the spot the rich guy set up for her. And likely due to his stock rising between the end of Season 2 and the start of Season 3, Elordi’s Nate spent the better part of this final season alone, ordering takeout on his wife’s dime while hiding out in a gaudy mansion from some mean Armenians. Killing him off via rattlesnake bite in the series’ penultimate episode may have been mercy for Nate, who appeared to be on the brink of returning to the madness that made him one of the series’ most villainous characters. Now, either Levinson wasn’t able to get enough time with Elordi to flesh out a full arc — or he just forgot to write more into the season.
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Think about it. During the behind-the-scenes featurette for this episode, Euphoria stunt coordinator Jeff Barnett said, “It was like Sam wrote, like, an action feature.” The episode included a scary foot chase through a spooky corridor from a limping, shotgun-wielding Nazi; Rue getting lassoed by another Nazi who dragged her — on horseback — down the long road back to Laurie’s before getting shot by Marshawn Lynch’s character, G. And while, yes, all of this was the very reason Alamo gave Rue the bottle of pills to begin with, she also had a big cut in her hand being held together by Jesus and some duct tape. Couldn’t he have just given her the pills for that? Likely not, because again, Levinson basically “wrote, like, an action feature.”
Ultimately, the creator should end the series the way he sees fit, and for the most part, we do get closure. Cassie’s got the big house without the man she wanted in it; Maddy seemingly has nothing, unless Bishop steps up. Lexi is — checks notes — reading the Bible and finding herself. Ali went from exacting Punisher-like revenge for Rue to playing father figure with the family Rue met at the beginning of the season, and that’s about it.
If anything, these three seasons of Euphoria do mirror the stages of drug use. In the beginning, it’s very — um — euphoric, with amazing colors and unforgettable experiences. As the high starts to come down, reality starts to kick in, although your cloudy vision could have you believing that taking tens of thousands of dollars of drugs to sell from Laurie and then not selling them may sound genius, and getting away with it almost makes it like it didn’t happen. Then, stone sober, real life slaps you in the face in the final stage. All of those problems you ducked and dodged are now at your door, and they would all like a word with the manager. That’s Rue’s journey, and in today’s society, those on that journey unfortunately don’t always make it out.
Packaging his honest message in an exorbitant tale like Season 3 of Euphoria may not have been necessary, but then again, it would not have been Sam Levinson. And let’s be real — would the “Season 3 was all a script Lexi wrote” ending have been any better?
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