On the night of Sunday, May 31, to Monday, June 1, 2026, Sky and HBO aired “In God We Trust,” the eighth and final episode of Euphoria 3, the third season of the series created and produced by Sam Levinson and starring a cast that, since the first season, has launched at least three stars into the Hollywood firmament: Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Jacob Elordi.
Sam Levinson told Popcast, a New York Times podcast, that as far as he is concerned, the story of Euphoria ends with Season 3, effectively closing the door on a Season 4, which—barring any dramatic change of heart—will not happen. And the decision to end the series with the third season—released four years after the second—was likely also influenced by the major commitments of the three aforementioned actors, who have launched into top-tier film careers.
Personally, in fact, it almost seemed to us that Levinson wanted to indulge in storylines and humiliating endings for the three characters—Rue, Cassie, and Nate—as if he were seeking revenge on their respective actors. Obviously (hopefully) that wasn’t the case, but it’s undeniable that the sigh of relief we breathed when we found out that Euphoria 3 will be the series’ final season is the best thing about these eight concluding episodes. Before explaining why, here’s a brief summary of how Euphoria 3 ends. Naturally, it’s full of spoilers.
How Euphoria 3 Ends
The suspicion that this would be the final season had already arisen at the end of the seventh episode, when Alamo killed Naz on Maddy’s (extremely lucrative) behalf and thus freed Cassie, but immediately afterward they discovered that Nate had died from the bites of a snake (a cobra?) that had entered the underground pit where he had been buried alive.
Or perhaps even earlier, when Maddy had spoken with Alamo about Rue’s troubles and, LIKE AN IDIOT, had mentioned the DEA—the law enforcement agency dedicated to combating drug trafficking—for which Rue is secretly working as an informant to frame both Alamo and Laurie and her family, factions who are themselves engaged in a joint operation to smuggle drugs from Mexico via an ambulance transporting two girls who crossed the border for plastic surgery.
In this game of deception, Rue pretends to seek refuge with Laurie to escape from Alamo, but is taken prisoner by Laurie’s son. Faye seemed ready to help her and run away with her from her Nazi boyfriend, who had tattooed a swastika on her back, but at the last moment she changed her mind and woke Wayne. Rue cripples her tormentor and delivers a well-deserved punch to the face of her traitorous friend, and somehow manages to escape. In pursuit is Wayne’s cousin, Harley, who catches up to her on horseback and captures her with a lasso, but luckily G intervenes and shoots Harley, who was dragging poor Rue on his back. She recovers and returns to G, who takes her back to Alamo.
The boss seems to calm the battered Rue and sends her to get medical treatment at his expense, even offering her a bottle of Percocet, a painkiller.
Rue goes to Ali; she seems finally calm, even though the temptation to overdo it with the pills is strong.
In the morning, Ali wakes up, lights a cigarette, and goes to the living room where he finds Rue having breakfast while watching a news report on the escape (complete with parkour stunts) of Fez, his old dealer friend played by Angus Clous, who committed suicide in 2023. Against Ali’s advice, Rue decides to go look for him to keep the promise she made to help him if he managed to escape. In her frantic search, she also stumbles upon police roadblocks surrounding a neighborhood; she manages to break through one and reaches her own home, sneaks in through a small window, and finds her mother inside, who reaches out a hand to welcome her, but Rue can’t reach her…
And here we return to Ali’s awakening, the cigarette, and his walk toward the living room, where Rue lies sprawled on the sofa. Dead.
Ali tests the pills on the coffee table and discovers they were laced with fentanyl. Some time later, he goes to his final meeting with Narcotics Anonymous and announces that starting tomorrow, he would stop trying to reach out with words, acceptance, and love for everyone in the name of God. And from the way he cuts the barrel off a rifle shortly after, it’s clear that the time for revenge against Alamo has come.
Meanwhile, he’s having a great time because the drug bust went rather badly: a phone call from Big Eddy and a missing bottle of Coke had given him a clue that Alamo’s men were outsmarting Laurie’s. And in fact, when the DEA arrives en masse to surround Laurie’s estate as the ambulance pulls up, the agents find only a pathetic dead mouse in the vehicle’s false bottom. Had she known, perhaps Laurie would have avoided throwing herself off the roof of the house with a rope around her neck to smash her head in—rather than hang herself—just to avoid getting arrested (and perhaps risking running into some former students from her teaching days in prison).
This is because Alamo, alerted by Maddy’s INCREDIBLY SCANDALOUS words, had the ambulance swapped while Laurie’s man escorted the girls into the clinic. And so Bishop had quietly taken the entire load to Alamo, who emerged from the whole affair completely unscathed. Just as, apparently, Faye and Wayne, who had realized from a painkiller pill with a laxative effect that the DEA had set them up and had fled just in time: the last time we see them, Faye catches a ride by hitchhiking and Wayne pops out from behind a bush with a loaded gun in his hand.
But at least for Alamo, as mentioned, Ali’s revenge is coming. He puts on his old military uniform and heads to Alamo’s club, where Alamo is there with Maddy, who is still forced to pay off her debt while helping Cassie with her new business of hosting fellow OnlyFans models at her and Nate’s house—Nate, who is officially listed as missing (clearly, she and Maddy haven’t told anyone anything). Ali speaks first with G, whom he shoots in the stomach when G denies knowing the truth about Rue’s death. Alamo then confronts him, first using Maddy as a shield by exploiting his opponent’s sense of morality, then challenging him to a Wild West-style duel.
Of course, Alamo tries to cheat, once again counting on Alì’s honesty, but when he goes to shoot early, he discovers that Bishop has given him an unloaded gun. Alì realizes this and fires the last three buckshot rounds at Alamo, who dies while his men and women smile at their newfound freedom, starting with Maddy and Bishop. Having exacted his revenge, Ali gets back in the van and goes to visit the Amish family who had taken Rue in at the beginning of the season—the last place where she had said she felt at peace with herself. Ali tells them of Rue’s death, pretending to be her father, and joins them for lunch. Before eating, he recites a prayer that sounds like a final farewell to dear Rue, whose spirit appears around the table before the shot pulls back from the isolated house, outside of which a U.S. flag is flying. The end.
Euphoria 3 was a constant humiliation of the protagonists: thankfully, it’s over
Euphoria had become a phenomenon for how it subverted the classic teen drama by stripping away every veneer of bourgeois respectability. The characters were troubled; they struggled with emotional dependency as well as drug addiction, betraying mothers, sisters, and best friends for a shred of attention or a fix. As early as the second season, which long focused on Lexi’s meta-performance, it seemed to have started to go overboard, finding excuses to show nudity and drug use. In this third season, Levinson seemed almost intent on settling scores with the cast members who had become “too big” for this series, finding unnecessarily and excessively provocative ways to humiliate their characters.
Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie was naive but also determined and savvy when it came to using her body; this season, she started off playing the coy girl on TikTok, she went on to start an OnlyFans account to afford $40,000 worth of flowers for her wedding, she had a moment of clarity when she got Maddy to help her become an actress, but when they cut her out, she went back on her knees to be bossed around by Maddy, all while taking beatings from Naz because of Nate but never once thinking to go to the police. And she doesn’t do it even when she finds her husband dead. In fact, for her, the happy ending is to feign newfound serenity, but when her sister leaves, it becomes clear it’s all a sham, just like the story of Nate’s disappearance.
So let’s talk about Jacob Elordi’s Nate: he was the cool bad boy, the one who always got what he wanted but was smart enough to never face the consequences. He’s become a moron who, at the first sign of trouble with the construction company he inherited from his father, gets the idea to borrow money from a loan shark at 100% weekly interest rates, then thinks of scamming his friends to borrow more money (why not just ask them right away?), he ends up having his fingers cut off, getting beaten up repeatedly, reduced to a pitiful state while his wife sends him money, he loses it at the meeting with the city council that blocks his residential project because of a rare plant found on the site, he goes to uproot the plant and is captured by Naz, who has him buried alive, his brother goes to look for him but can’t hear his screams, on the other hand, a poisonous snake slithers into the air vent, the protagonist of an interminable, agonizingly slow scene that culminates in the snake biting the defenseless Nate. And when they find him, he’s not just dead—his face is disfigured; it’s something revolting. “Do you like handsome Jacob now?” Levinson seems to say.
And finally, there’s Zendaya’s Rue. She’d turned her life around, but after four years, Laurie comes looking for her again. Or rather, to force her to work for her forever to pay off a debt of a few thousand dollars. Then she’s forced to ask Alamo to hire her instead of killing her. And she’s forced again to lie about the disappearance of her friend who asked too many questions, forced to work for the DEA, to play a triple game with Laurie and Alamo, and things just keep getting worse amid senseless choices and others she’s forced to make. Until the saddest death, made even more tragic by Sam Levinson’s comment that “the point is that in the end, people like Rue don’t make it.”
Euphoria used to depict the despair and torments of a generation, but this season it ended up exposing the utter lack of intelligence in its protagonists, who face real-life tortures written for them with ruthless cruelty. So it may not have been a grand finale, but at least Rue and the others put an end to their own suffering. And to ours as helpless viewers, too.
