The awful possibility I feared last week (and, honestly, since Season 1) has come to pass: Rue dies in the Season 3 finale of “Euphoria.”
Find out how it happens — and what happens in the aftermath — as we review the major action in “In God We Trust.”
We pick up with Faye’s screaming for Wayne, and it doesn’t take Rue long to figure out that she’s gotta GO. She grabs a nearby wrench and slams it into Wayne’s knee, punches Faye right in the face, then runs through the tunnels with Wayne firing a gun at her the whole way.
She makes it through the passage to the barn, and she’s speeding away from the house on foot, but Harley catches up to her on horseback and ropes her like she’s a rogue steer. He’s dragging her back to the house when a sniper shot takes him down; Harley falls from the horse and loses his grip on the lasso, leaving a dazed Rue laid out in the middle of the dirt road. Only G’s yelling for her to run (he fired at Harley) gets her moving again, and she makes it to the truck so they can both take off, whooping in joy over their getaway.
Rue brings the contents of Laurie’s safe to Alamo, which earns her an attagirl and a kiss on the head from the druglord. He pours her a Coke and passes her a Percocet to help with the physical aches she’s incurred. He declares her employee of the year, gives her a week off, and pays her in several fat stacks of bills and a full bottle of painkillers.
Who did (and didn’t) survive the DEA raid?
In Mexico, Big Eddy and Mitch load up the ambulance with fentanyl and grab Kitty and the other woman who had work done. They all make it through the border checkpoint without incident. Back at Laurie’s, everyone survived Rue’s escape, but they’re real salty about it. Things get worse when Wayne takes some of the dummy painkillers, has to rush to the bathroom soon after, and finally listens to Faye that the pills they got a while back are dummies. “It’s a set-up?” he realizes… moments before he and Faye decide to save their skins and slip out of the ranch on horses before anyone can catch them.
Big Eddy and Mitch drive the ambulance to Laurie’s, where all of her animals are unsettled. Could it be because there’s a full-on Drug Enforcement Agency invasion barreling down on the property at high speed? “I can’t go to prison,” Laurie whispers as flashing lights fill the driveway and the helicopters circle her home. Eventually the officers get inside, where Harley mutters to his dog that he can’t go back to prison… but he ultimately puts down his gun and surrenders to the agents. While all this is happening, Laurie goes to the roof, slips a noose around her neck, and hops off the ledge, killing herself before she can be caught.
But when the DEA opens the secret panel in the ambulance, all they find is a dead rat… because Bishop, with whom Big Eddy communicated while they were both south of the border, moved all of the fentanyl to a different ambulance while Mitch was in the clinic, retrieving the dancers who’d had surgery. And that fentanyl makes its ways safely to Alamo’s coffers.
We later see that Faye and Wayne ditched the horses as soon as the DEA were on the move, and they hitch a ride to put distance between them and Laurie’s place. Those crazy kids!
Rue’s luck runs out
Rue gets her hand stitched up, then crashes on the couch at Ali’s house. He wakes the next morning to find her eating cereal and watching a news report that an inmate escaped from a correctional facility using unconventional means. It was Fez (!), and his parkour plan apparently worked! Rue immediately hops in the car to make good on her promise to pick him up; Ali tells her she’s crazy, but she doesn’t care, because Fez is her friend. “You said it yourself,” she reminds him, “‘Rain or shine.'” As she speeds to the now-abandoned drive-through mart where Fez used to work — and where she expects him to be waiting for her — Ali finds the bottle of Percocet Rue left on his coffee table. Understandably, he looks worried.
After the mart, Rue drives like a maniac as she tries to figure out where her friend went; along the way, she has visions of her, Jules, Gia, and Fez when they were younger. Eventually, she finds that police have blocked off the alley near her house. She ducks under the yellow tape and makes a run for it, managing to elude the cops by hopping up and running along the roofs. (Side note: And yes, it is around this point that I start questioning whether what we’re seeing is reality.)
She enters her childhood home via an open window in her bedroom, then finds her mother at the dining room table, reading the Bible and crying with a smile on her face. Leslie reaches her hand out to her older daughter, and that’s when we realize that none of this has actually happened: Rue is still on Ali’s couch, listening to her Bible app and crying as she gasps for air and dreams that she’s embracing her mother and father at their house.
So the next time Ali wakes and comes out into his living room, it’s real life… and he cries as he realizes Rue died in her sleep, likely because her hand was hurting and she took one of the “Percocet” in the bottle Ali gave her. When Ali tests the meds with a home kit, he sees that the tablets were actually Fentanyl. He calls Leslie with the awful news.
Months later, he attends a 12-step meeting and talks about how angry he is at everyone complicit in bringing Fenatnyl into the country, and how he reacted to Rue’s death by having a drink and losing his faith. “I’m tired,” he says. “I’m done.” Then he announces that the meeting will be his last: “I’m gonna find a better way to be of service.” Next time we see him, he’s sawing off the barrel of a shotgun.
The high school crew in the aftermath
Some time after Rue’s death, Jules paints Rue on a canvas and cries while Ellis makes French press coffee.
Elsewhere, Cassie can’t afford to sell her house, because she owes more than it’s worth. So, she tells Lexi, she puts on her “entrepreneurial hat” and decides to convert it into a creator house where she’ll charge room and board and take a cut of the creators’ earnings. She wants Lexi to script story for them. “Do you think Nate’s ever going to come back?” Lex wonders, which is how we learn that Cassie and Maddy’s cover story is that Nate just left one night and never came back.
They move on to talking about how Rue left her Bible at Lexi’s the last time she was there, and Lexi wound up reading it. “You’d think it would be boring,” she tells her sister, “but there’s a lot of violence and sex.” They talk about Rue, and how Lexi feels guilty over how she left things between them. Cassie is mildly comforting — as comforting as one can be while waving around a sex toy for emphasis — then Lexi gently says she’s not sure that she wants to be the showrunner of Cassie’s OnlyFans boarding house. After she leaves, Cassie sits on her bed and, lit by a ring light, cries as she looks at a photo of her and Nate.
Ali takes justice into his own hands
While all of this is happening, Bishop (and his new poodle, Snowflake) ferry Maddy to the Silver Slipper. It’s clear she doesn’t want to be there. She’s led into a back room with Alamo, where she hands him an envelope full of money from Cassie and he shares with her a recent epiphany: His life is ruled by female genitalia (he uses a different word), and he’s afraid. “I think you just need to lay off the merchandise,” Maddy tells him. But he maintains that he wants “the American dream” of a home and family, and the way he’s fondling her as she talks, he seems to want it with her.
Soon after she arrives, a man in full military dress uniform shows up at the club and places a bicycle-style lock around the door handles. When Kitty approaches the guy, we see it’s Ali — and he asks to talk to her manager. That’s G now, and when he comes out of the back office to see what’s up, Ali introduces himself as “a friend of Rue’s.” G tries to intimidate Ali with a handgun, and that’s when Ali cocks his shotgun under the table and jams it into G’s lap.
Under duress, G confesses that Alamo Brown owns the club and that Rue OD’d on fentanyl. When he claims not to know who gave her the pills, Ali makes good on his promise and shoots G in the crotch. Everyone screams and scrambles for safety. Some of the other security staff take shots at Ali but they miss, and when Alamo makes his presence known by busting through a mirror, it surprises Ali and he drops the gun. Alamo uses Maddy as a shield, then tosses her at Ali so he can secure his own weapon.
Alamo’s last stand
Eventually, Ali and Alamo are staring at each other across the room. “Tell me who sent you,” Alamo asks. “Rue,” Ali replies. Alamo has a terrified Kitty bring him an open Champagne bottle, which he empties in a few long gulps. Then he has her roll it along the bar, with the understanding that both he and Ali will draw their guns when the bottle drops off the end.
Alamo draws early, but his gun — which Bishop handed him — has no bullets in it. He turns to the henchman and promises to see him in hell before Ali lands two blasts in his chest. Then he stands directly over the dying kingpin and fires again, “just in case.” When he walks back in the main room, Bishop lets the bullets he’d been holding in his hand fall to the blood-soaked carpet. Then he turns to Maddy, asking, “May I give you a ride home?” Kitty and her new butt come with them.
Some time later, Ali drives to the homestead near the border where Rue stayed in the season premiere. He refers to Rue as his “daughter,” and tells them “she’s in a better place.” They invite him in for coffee, and he winds up staying for a meal. Ali cries as he says grace before they eat, then he pictures her smiling at him from the end of the table and saying, “Amen.”
The final shot of the season is of a tattered American flag flapping in the breeze outside the house as the sun sets. “May God bless us all,” Rue says via voiceover.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the finale? Grade it, as well as the season as a whole, via the polls below. Then make sure to hit the comments with your thoughts!