‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Finale Recap: In Rue We Trust
It's the bittersweet end of an era.
With the Euphoria finale episode “In God We Trust,” we’ve finally made it to the end of the season—and, given most reports and rumors, the series itself. Clocking in at an hour and thirty-three minutes, it’s the longest episode in HBO history, with Sam Levinson having a lot of loose ends to tie up. We open where we left off, with Faye screaming bloody murder to wake Wayne. Rue knocks Faye out and hurts Wayne’s knee, and he runs after her, shooting. Our hero escapes, though, and Rue runs off the farm in the early hours of the morning, carrying the bag from the safe. Unfortunately, she’s no match for Harley’s lasso skills, and she goes down like Wile E. Coyote as he drags her behind his horse. Just when it seems Rue is down for the count, G appears out of nowhere and shoots him, freeing Rue and driving off with her and the bag from the safe in his pickup truck.
Cassie and Maddy are sharing the worst diner breakfast ever. Tears in their eyes, makeup running down their faces, the two friends are in a daze after the awful events of the night before. Maddy asks Cassie, “What do I do?” The two friends simply clasp hands, and Cassie reassures her, “We’ll figure it out together.”
Rue delivers the licenses to Alamo, who tells her he’s proud of her and gives her a fatherly kiss on the forehead. He says that she was right all along and that the two of them were meant to be after all. He pulls out two Percocets—one for him, one for her. He reveals that he proposed a different deal to Laurie: to split the fentanyl sale 50/50 and a lifetime truce. He tells Rue to take the week off and says he’ll pay for her medical expenses if she needs anything, which she takes him up on, getting her hand stitched up at the doctor. He also gives her a bag of cash, a “token of appreciation,” and a bottle of pills—not a great look for a raging addict.
“How do so many people get to be so evil?” Rue asks Ali. He tells her it’s human nature to be selfish. They’re watching an old noir film together, and she asks Ali if she can stay on his couch for a bit. She puts her Bible audiobook back on and starts, once again, with Genesis. “Let there be light,” the narrator says, as Rue contemplates her bottle of pills.
In Mexico, we see the deal going down, fentanyl traded for cash placed in the back of the van. Mitch goes to pick up the girls from the plastic surgeon’s office while Big Eddy waits in the car. Kitty got a BBL, so she has to lie on her stomach. The other one got some kind of facial surgery and looks barely conscious. They get to the US border, where they’re searched by a skeptical agent but let through without incident.
As Mitch and Big Eddy approach Laurie’s farm, girls and money in tow, Wayne finds out the hard way that Faye wasn’t lying when she said the pills were laxatives. He realizes the whole thing is a setup, and he and Faye take off into the night on horseback, though they seem to fall off the back when they pass the ambulance. They were just in time, because enough DEA agents to conquer a small country appear on the dirt road to Laurie’s farm, accompanied by a helicopter escort and everything.
Both Bruce and Bruce Sr. surrender despite some big talk. Laurie says she can’t go to prison and runs up to her roof with a rope around her neck, hanging herself. The big drug bust is all for naught, though, because when the DEA opens up the bed of the truck, they find nothing but a dead rat.
Bishop was down in Mexico, too, it turns out, and while Mitch was in the plastic surgery office, Bishop swapped out the vans. He brings the correct van with all the money to Alamo. Big Eddy tells the DEA he quits, and Faye and Wayne hitchhike into the sunset.
Rue is watching the news at Ali’s and sees that Fezco broke out of prison using parkour, just like he said he would. She tells Ali that she promised Fez she would pick him up when he escaped, even though at the time she thought that was a joke. She drives like a madman to go save her friend, flashing back on her memories of Fezco and seeing a younger version of herself and of Jules in the process.
Rue breaks through a police line to get to her childhood home. She wanders through the empty house and finds her mother sitting at the table in shadow, reading her Bible. Her mom silently reaches out to her, and as they embrace, we realize Rue is hallucinating, or dreaming. She’s in her father’s arms now, who died when she was 14 from cancer and whose terminal illness and painkiller prescription first kicked off Rue’s addiction. The music swells as they hold each other, and we see Rue on Ali’s couch with headphones in, crying.
Ali comes into the room in the morning and appears to find Rue dead on the couch. It’s a stark, quiet, anticlimactic moment, for all the times Rue has narrowly escaped the most violent, horrible, epic deaths—she ends up curled up alone on the couch. “Give her peace,” Ali says as he rests his hand on her head, tears in his eyes. He uses a test kit on Rue’s pills and discovers they aren’t Percocet but fentanyl. Alamo killed her, the easiest and least traceable way possible. Ali calls Leslie, Rue’s mom, and tells her what happened, though we can’t hear the words. In complete silence—rare for this show—he writes down Rue’s name in his book of the dead.
Next, Ali is speaking at a 12-step meeting, and delivers the following message: “I used to believe the world would be a better place if people could empathize with addiction. To understand that addicts were suffering from an incurable disease, no different than cancer. The addict may be in remission, but the disease ain’t gone. I thought that empathy was the key. But if you can empathize with an addict, you can also empathize with a dealer. They’re selling drugs to feed their children. Who can’t understand that? So maybe empathy ain’t that helpful after all. Maybe the real disease is people no longer know the difference between right and wrong. I don’t care what your struggles may be. You poison kids for money, you’re evil. It’s plain and simple.”
The number one cause of death for people under the age of 50 is fentanyl, he tells the rapt group. He says the government is complicit, the shipping companies, the dockworkers, the cartels, the cookers, the corrupt cops, the bureaucrats, the nonprofits, lawyers, politicians. Everyone gets his ire. Ali says that a few months ago, after Rue died, he relapsed. He had lost his faith. He says he’s tired of pouring his life, his heart, and his soul into lost kids only for them to not get a second chance. “You’re either making the world a better place, or you’re making it worse,” there’s a right and a wrong, and that’s all he knows for certain. The meeting will be his last, Ali says. He’ll find a better way to be of service. Next, we see him sawing off the end of a shotgun at his house.
At Jules’s apartment, Ellis pours a cup of coffee while she paints a portrait of Rue.
Back at Cassie’s McMansion, she’s dealing with her grief over losing Nate in her own way. She plans to fix up the house and make it into a content studio for OnlyFans girls, her very own TikTok house. She asks Lexi to stay on as a “storyteller” before handing an envelope of money to Maddy. “It’ll be easier if you pretend to like him,” Cassie tells Maddy, who is presumably off to see Alamo. Bishop picks her up, and Maddy manages to make him crack the first smile we’ve seen the whole season, as she teases him about his little dog, Snowflake. He says he likes to surprise people. Maddy says the thing that would surprise her most is “a little grace in this world.”
Lexi is under the impression that Nate has simply run off. She doesn’t understand why Cassie wouldn’t want to know where he is. She also asks Cassie if she ever reads the Bible, and admits she’s been reading the copy Rue left on her couch. “It’s kind of incredible,” Lexi tells Cassie, filled with “violence and sex.” Reading it made her think about Rue, and how she wishes she had left things better with her before she died. But Cassie compares Rue to their dad. “The last thing he said to me was ‘I love you,’” Cassie tells Lexi. “It didn’t make it any better. So it doesn’t matter how you leave things. It still sucks.”
