‘Euphoria’ Season 3’s Devastating Loss and Dissatisfying Finale

How Rue Died in ‘Euphoria’

A hallmark of Euphoria is Rue’s ability to escape any situation she’s landed herself in no matter how dire. But that came to an abrupt end in the finale.

At the top of “In God We Trust,” she manages to escape Wayne’s (Toby Wallace) bunker by the skin of her teeth. Though Faye (Chloe Cherry) screamed for him, Rue was able to hit Wayne hard in the leg with a heavy tool before he could get up.

The injury slowed him down long enough that she had just enough time to get a horse to move off of the bunker door, so she could make it out with her life intact despite Wayne shooting at her.

Rue was barreling down the long, dirt drive of the property when Harley (James Landry Hébert) came chasing after her on horseback. He lassoed her feet and started dragging her back to the house. However, he didn’t get far because G (Marshawn Lynch) was Rue’s cover.

G shot Harley from his sniper’s nest, giving Rue the opening she needed to grab the bag full of evidence that would incriminate Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) in human trafficking and make a run for it. The pair drove away yelling in excitement over what they’d just survived.

Alamo expressed his gratitude to Rue with a glass of Coca-Cola and a bottle of Percocet. He told her the drugs were for the pain she was experiencing from her injuries and that he didn’t want her coming back to him asking for more. Alamo also gave Rue a week off, told her she’s his employee of the year, and encouraged her to send him the bill for any medical care she might need.

Considering Alamo doesn’t believe in off days, only seems to be nice when he’s about to do something heinous, and doesn’t come out of his own pocket unless he’s getting something in return, the scene was ominous. But Alamo wasn’t trying to lure Rue into using again. He had something much more insidious planned.

Rue had gone back to Ali’s place and asked to crash on his couch for a bit. Feeling pain in her hand, she decided to take a pill. What Ali would learn when he found her dead on the couch in the morning was that the drugs had been laced with fentanyl. Rue died the same way Tish (Emma Kotos) did in the season 3 premiere, taking a pill not knowing it would be the very thing that kills her.

Why Alamo Killed Rue

Rue was a loose end and a traitor to Alamo. She’d served her purpose by getting back the bag Laurie’s (Martha Kelly) crew stole. But he couldn’t abide being played by his young protégé.

Last episode, he’d learned from Maddy (Alexa Demie) that Rue was working with the DEA. She’d thought the ramblings Lexi (Maude Apatow) told her about were nothing but nonsense Rue was saying in the moment. Maddy had no idea they’d be the basis for her friend’s murder.

Upon realizing he was being set-up, Alamo made sure to have Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson) down in Mexico to switch out the vans when Big Eddy (Kadeem Hardison) and Mitch (Daeg Faerch) were picking up Kitty (Anna Van Patten) and a fellow Silver Slipper dancer from a plastic surgery clinic.

Bishop ferried the product across the border while Laurie’s van had nothing but a singular rat in the hidden compartment. She didn’t know this, so when the DEA swarmed the property, she hung herself from the roof.

Wayne and Faye had beat a quick retreat before the cops could find them. They’d discovered it was a set-up when Wayne learned that Faye had been right about the “drugs” they’d stolen from Alamo’s safe. They were laxatives, which could only mean the feds were involved. The couple hitch-hiked to safety, leaving Harley and Bruce (Melvin Bonez Estes) behind to deal with the fallout along with Mitch and Big Eddy.

The Creative Decision Behind Rue’s Death in ‘Euphoria’

Rue died in the first 30 minutes of the Euphoria season 3 finale. In a poignant and heartbreaking sequence, she dreamed that Fez (the late Angus Cloud) escaped from prison using parkour just like he said he would. She rushed off to go find him.

As she drove around the city, Rue saw her younger self. But she pushed past those memories in her search for Fez. She thought he was hiding out in her house, but she couldn’t get to it because cops were blocking the way. Determined, Rue bypassed them on foot and found her way home.

It was empty as she explored her room and the hallway until she came upon her mom Leslie (Nika King) at the dining room table. They embraced, and Rue’s mind flitted back to her father (Bruce Wexler) and the hug she’s so desperately wanted from him, too. But all of it was an hallucinatory dream brought on by the fentanyl that was killing her.

In the final behind-the-scenes look at Euphoria season 3, Levinson said, “I think in the end I wanted to tell an honest story about addiction. I also wanted to tell a story about grief and the emotional turmoil that it can create.” Later, he added, “The honest ending is that people like Rue don’t make it.”

Levinson also spoke to the fentanyl crisis in America and to his own experience with addiction. He shared, “People relapse. They f—k up. They’re not ready to get clean. And they weren’t dying like they are now with the influx of fentanyl into this country. I can say with absolute certainty that if I was going through what I went through when I was young now I wouldn’t be here either, so there’s no reason to sugarcoat it.”

Choosing to have Rue die from an overdose was an emotional decision for Levinson, one based on his desire to write a story for Cloud, who’d lost his life in a similar manner. He said her death was for the people “who weren’t granted a second chance.”

As a creator, Levinson doesn’t believe in a utopian ending. He said as much in the bts and it’s abundantly clear in the writing for the finale. But it’s not Rue’s death that’s jarring or his stated reason for why he wanted to show that not everyone makes it through when they’re recovering from addiction. It’s what happens afterwards that takes Euphoria in a direction that neither serves Rue nor the series as a whole.

Ali Avenges Rue and Kills Alamo

Part of the remaining hour in the finale covers Ali’s grief over Rue’s loss. How he’s the one who found her, checked the Percocet for fentanyl, called Leslie to tell her that her daughter had overdosed, relapsed while grieving, lost faith in a higher power, and decided he needed to go after Alamo. That it wasn’t enough that he was there for the kids he lost to addiction and the poison that’s being allowed to come into America; he needed to expunge one of the sources of this evil.

The storytelling around Ali’s mission to avenge Rue is beautiful in its intent and gorgeously portrayed by Colman Domingo. It’s also conventional. Rue not only becomes a tragic figure, she’s fridged in her own show to make room for a high-noon style shootout between the devastated father figure in her life and the man who took her from the world.

Euphoria, a show about a young woman trying to do right and failing to do so over and over again despite her big heart and good intentions, suddenly becomes a grief-driven action-tinged flick that revels in all the tropes that Westerns have been critiqued for and with no nuance or subversion to balance it out.

The story becomes about the men entirely. Ali kills Alamo after they’ve agreed to a duel and the latter doesn’t hold up to his side of the deal. They were supposed to wait until a bottle of champagne drops on the floor, but Alamo shot first only to learn that Bishop had emptied his gun. Ali killed him honorably, doing so only when the bottle had smashed.

It was done in the Silver Slipper like it was a saloon, and Bishop betrayed his boss to save Maddy from the fate of becoming the bought and paid for mother of Alamo’s children.

None of the women spoke of their grief over Rue with exception to an awkward conversation between Lexi and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) that reveals Lexi’s been reading the Bible and finding solace in it. Jules (Hunter Schafer) paints a portrait of Rue, but she’s still with Ellis (Sam Trammell) and made no progress in her story.

Leslie has no dialogue. She’s a figment in a dream and the unheard voice on a phone. It’s Ali who avenges Rue. It’s Ali who assumes the role of her father, introducing himself as Martin McQueen to the family who briefly took her in, and it’s Ali who sees Rue last, smiling at the table of this family whose lives barely intersect with the rest of the world.

They’re untouched and innocent, the American Dream in its most basic rendering— a white, Christian, farming family who live on the edges of civilization where the hedonistic elements of greater society cannot and do not interact with them, which is how it’s even possible for them to achieve this unattainable dream.

That’s what’s most tragic about Euphoria. Not that Rue didn’t make it, but that her life was cut short to abide by the traditional narrative structure of a genre that her series didn’t start in and that would have never prioritized her if it did.

Rue wasn’t a hero but reducing her to somebody else’s tragedy and then hijacking her story to depict a testosterone-laden revenge fantasy that uses her death to further the dramatic, climatic action of the men in her life while sidelining the women who loved her is so disappointingly and unfailing Western that it is the most shocking decision that’s been made on this show.

Euphoria ends not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the last gasped breath of a girl who just wanted to go home. The rest is a different story entirely.