On the night between Sunday 31 May and Monday 1 June 2026, In God We Trust was released on Sky and HBO, 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, namely Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi.

Euphoria 3, the review: the sex and drugs formula no longer works

Sam Levinson declared to Popcast, the New York Times podcast, that as far as he is concerned the story of Euphoria ends with the third season, effectively closing the doors to a season 4 which therefore, barring sensational second thoughts, there will not be. And probably also weighing on the choice to close this series with the third season, released four years after the second, were the important commitments of the three previously mentioned actors, launched towards top-level cinematographic careers.

Personally, in fact, it almost seemed to us that Levinson wanted to indulge in humiliating storylines and epilogues for the three characters of Rue, Cassie and Nate, as if he wanted to take revenge on their respective interpreters. Obviously (hopefully) it didn’t go that way, but it’s undeniable that the sigh of relief we breathed when we discovered that Euphoria 3 will remain the last and final season of the series is the best thing about these eight final episodes. Before explaining why, a brief summary of how Euphoria 3 ends. Naturally with all the relevant spoilers.

How Euphoria 3 ends

The suspicion that this would be the last season had already arisen at the end of the seventh episode, when Alamo killed Naz on Maddy’s (very salty) behalf and thus freed Cassie, but soon after they discovered that Nate had died from the bites of a snake (a cobra?) that had entered the underground pit in which he had been buried alive.

Indeed perhaps even before, when Maddy had spoken to Alamo about Rue’s troubles and LIKE A STUPID she had mentioned the DEA, the police agency dedicated to combating drug trafficking, for which Rue is secretly acting as an informant to frame both Alamo and Laurie and her family, factions in turn engaged in a joint action of drug trafficking from Mexico through an ambulance transporting two girls who have gone across the border for plastic surgery.

In this triple cross, Rue pretends to seek refuge with Laurie to escape the Alamo, but is taken prisoner by Laurie’s son.

Faye seemed ready to help her and escape with her from her Nazi boyfriend who tattooed a swastika on her back, but at the last minute she changed her mind and woke up Wayne.

Rue cripples her tormentor and gives her cheating friend a well-deserved punch in the face and somehow manages to escape. Chasing her is Wayne’s cousin, Harley, who reaches her on horseback and captures her with the 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 the Alamo.

The boss seems to reassure the battered Rue and sends her to seek treatment at his expense, also offering her a bottle of Percocelt, a painkiller.

Rue goes to Alì, she finally seems calm even if the temptation to overdo it with the pills is strong.
In the morning Alì wakes up, lights a cigarette and goes into the living room where he finds Rue having breakfast while watching a news report on the escape (with parkour stunts) of Fez, his old drug dealer friend played by Angus Clous, who committed suicide in 2023.

Against Ali’s advice, Rue decides to go and look for him to keep her promise to help him if he managed to escape. In her crazy search she also comes across police checkpoints surrounding a neighborhood, she manages to force one and reaches her own home, she sneaks in through a small window and in the house she finds her mother, who offers her a hand to welcome her, but Rue is unable to reach her…

And here we return to Alì’s awakening, the cigarette and his proceeding towards the living room, where however Rue lies sprawled on the sofa. Dead.

Alì tests the pills on the table, discovers that they were cut with fentanyl, some time later he goes to the last meeting with the Drug Addicts Anonymous and announces that from the next day he would stop trying with words, hospitality and love for everyone in the name of God. And from how shortly after he cuts the barrel of a rifle we understand that the moment of revenge against the Alamo has arrived.

Who, in the meantime, is doing very well because the anti-drug operation went rather badly: from a phone call from Big Eddy and a missing bottle of Coke it was clear that the Alamo men were deceiving Laurie’s men. And in fact when the DEA arrives en masse to surround Laurie’s estate upon the arrival of the ambulance, the agents only find a derisory dead mouse in the false bottoms of the vehicle. If he had known, perhaps Laurie would have avoided throwing himself from the roof of the house with a rope around his neck to crush his head, rather than hanging himself, so as not to get arrested (and risk finding some former students from when he was a teacher in prison, perhaps).

This is because Alamo, alerted by Maddy’s INCREDIBLY WICKED words, had the ambulance switched while Laurie’s man accompanied the girls into the clinic. And so Bishop had calmly brought all the cargo from the Alamo, emerging completely clean from the affair. As well as, apparently, Faye and Wayne, who understood from a painkiller pill with a laxative effect that the DEA had framed them and escaped just in time: the last time they see each other, Faye gets a ride hitchhiking and Wayne appears from behind a bush with a loaded gun in his hand.

But at least for the Alamo, as mentioned, Ali’s revenge arrives. Who puts on his old military uniform and goes to the Alamo club, who in the meantime is there with Maddy, still forced to pay her debt while helping Cassie in the new business of hosting Only Fans colleagues in her and Nate’s house, who is officially only missing (evidently she and Maddy have not confided anything to anyone).

Ali first talks to G, who he shoots in the stomach when he denies knowing the truth about Rue’s death. And so Alamo faces him, first shielding himself with Maddy by taking advantage of his opponent’s morals, then challenging him to a wild west duel.

Obviously Alamo tries to cheat, again counting on Ali’s honesty, but when he is about to shoot in advance he discovers that Bishop has given him an unloaded gun. Alì scores and unloads the last three buckshots into Alamo, who dies while his men and girls smile at their newfound freedom, starting with Maddy and Bishop.

Once revenge has been taken, Alì takes the van back and goes to visit the Amish family who had welcomed Rue at the beginning of the season, the last place where she said she felt at peace with herself. Ali reports the death of Rue, whose father he pretends to be, and joins them for lunch. Before eating he says a prayer, which sounds like a final farewell to dear Rue, whose spirit appears around the table before the shot widens out of the isolated house, outside which a United States flag is flying. End.

Euphoria 3 was a continuous humiliation of the protagonists: luckily it’s over

Euphoria had become a phenomenon for how it distorted the classic teen drama by removing any veneer of bourgeois respectability. The characters were problematic, they had emotional dependence problems as well as drugs, they betrayed mothers, sisters, best friends for a bit of attention or for a dose.

Already from the second season, which for a long time focused on Lexi’s meta-acting, however, it seemed to have started to exaggerate, to find excuses to show nudity and drug use.

In this third season, Levinson almost seemed to want to settle scores with the performers who had become “too old” for this series, finding needlessly and excessively provocative ways to humiliate their characters.

Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie was naive but also determined and intelligent in exploiting her body; this season she started playing the dead cat on TikTok, she continued by opening Only Fans to afford 40,000 dollars of flowers for the wedding, she had a flash of clarity by getting help from Maddy to become an actress but when they killed her she went back on her knees to be bossed around by Maddy, while in the meantime she took blows and blows from Naz because of Nate but she didn’t think for a moment about going to the police. And she doesn’t even do it when she finds her husband dead. In fact, for her the happy ending is to pretend the serenity she has found again but when her sister leaves we understand that it’s all a fake, like the story of the missing Nate.

And let’s talk about Jacob Elordi’s Nate, then: he was the cool bad guy, the one who always got what he wanted but was smart enough to never pay the consequences. He has become a moron who, at the first difficulties with the construction company he inherited from his father, has the idea of borrowing money from a loan shark at interest rates of 100% weekly, then he thinks of cheating his friends into borrowing more money (and asking them for it immediately, right?), he ends up cutting off his fingers, they massacre him repeatedly, he is reduced to a complete mess while his wife sends him money, he screws up at the meeting with the Municipality which blocks his residential project for a rare plant found on the land, he goes to uproot the plant and is captured by Naz who has him buried alive, his brother goes to look for him but does not hear his screams, on the other hand a poisonous snake enters the hole through which the air passes, the protagonist of an interminable and very slow scene which culminates with the bites of 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 Zendaya’s Rue. That she had cleaned up but after four years Laurie comes back to look for her. Indeed, to force her to work for her forever to repay a debt of a few thousand dollars. Then she is forced to ask the Alamo to hire her instead of killing her. And still forced to lie about the disappearance of her friend who asked too many questions, forced to work for the DEA, to play the triple game with Laurie and the Alamo, and gradually worse between senseless and forced choices. Until the saddest death, made even more tragic by Sam Levinson’s comment that “the meaning is that in the end people like Rue don’t make it”.

Euphoria told of the desperation, the torments of a generation, but in this season it ended up showing the lack of any form of intelligence of its protagonists, who face real tortures written for them with ruthless cruelty. So it may not have been a great ending, but at least Rue and the others put an end to their suffering. And also to our defenseless spectators.