The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria.
Euphoria’s troubled protagonist, Rue (played by Zendaya), spends much of the drama’s final season dodging one potentially violent death after another. As a drug mule turned strip-club employee turned arms dealer turned informant, she barely survives being buried up to her neck, getting dragged by a horse down a dirt path, and becoming target practice in multiple shoot-outs.
Yet when she does die, midway through the series finale, which aired last night, the scene unfolds quietly: Rue, recovering from a long day of double-crossing her employers and suffering a wound on her palm, overdoses on the fentanyl with which her painkillers have secretly been laced. The sequence stands out for its contemplative beauty. Rue, asleep, dreams of walking through her childhood home and seeing her mother, reaching for her before being embraced in return. Reality and fantasy blur. She smiles even as she gasps for air, then drifts off into endless slumber.
If only Euphoria had maintained that restraint across the rest of its bloated ending. Rue’s fate underlined how addiction can be a frustratingly misunderstood disease, but the show around her undercut that message again and again through its over-the-top storytelling. In its conclusion, Euphoria tried to provide both a serious look at the fentanyl epidemic and an extended homage to action-Western tropes about good and evil. The result was scattershot and murkily rendered, undermining the significance of its heroine’s tragic journey.
The episode’s frequent detours into lazy platitudes about faith didn’t help. Across Season 3, Rue, in turmoil, shows interest in the Bible. But after her death, the show’s characters allude to religion in ham-fisted ways. Lexi (Maude Apatow), Rue’s childhood friend, was largely indifferent toward Rue all season; in her last scene, however, Lexi delivers a monologue about how enlightening she has found the Bible in the months since Rue died, concluding that the holy book is about how, “no matter what, you have to just keep going.” Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Rue’s merciless, drug-dealing, sex-trafficking former employer, who gave her the fentanyl-laced pills, insists out of nowhere that he wants to start a family, because it’s “biblical” to do so. When the white-supremacist drug dealers he has butted heads with have their property raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, one of them raises his arms in a Christ-like pose as he surrenders—an image that’s both grossly misguided and thematically confusing, especially given Rue’s final voice-over praying for God to “bless us all.” These moments say little about the power of faith or why Rue was so drawn to Christianity. Instead, they come off as unconvincing attempts to rewrite the season’s crude indulgences as profound.
[Read: Euphoria is my favorite depression]
But that’s been the overarching problem with Euphoria this season: The show has touched on plenty of provocative topics—the unoriginality of modern Hollywood, the suffocating nature of capitalism, the online and offline trials of sex work—without saying anything substantive. That emptiness was more apparent than ever in the series finale. Ali (Colman Domingo), Rue’s levelheaded sponsor, becomes a last-minute superhero, avenging her by blowing Alamo to pieces using a sawed-off shotgun; though the always-excellent Domingo sells the character’s heel-turn, the scene overshadows the emotional devastation of Rue’s death. Absurdities such as a storyline about a minor character’s Brazilian butt lift received more screen time than Jules (Hunter Schafer), Rue’s ex-girlfriend and once the second-most-important character on Euphoria. She appears only in a brief, dialogue-less scene in which she paints a portrait of Rue. Schafer does her best to convey Jules’s grief, but the moment feels like too little, too late—and too haphazard, considering the episode’s relentless tonal whiplash.
In addition to the poetry of Rue’s death, the show did manage a handful of poignant, gorgeously shot moments that harkened back to the thoughtful elegance of its earlier seasons, including Ali’s speech about how tired he has become after losing so many loved ones to addiction. A sequence in which Lexi’s older sister, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), haloed by the ring light she uses for her OnlyFans work and weeping alone in her mansion, looks like a figurine in a dollhouse is similarly meditative; she’s no longer the 50-foot woman towering over Los Angeles. But how are the characters reflecting on—not just responding to—the loss of a friend they watched struggle with addiction for years? What is the legacy of a young woman who escaped so much brutality only to be felled by a synthetic drug that she had no idea she was taking?
Euphoria doesn’t supply any answers—and, worse, it seems uninterested in searching for them. In its final moments, the show relied instead on the same moves it’s delivered all season: providing shock value over meaningful observation, turning previously nuanced characters into caricatures, and gesturing vaguely at the idea that everyone is addicted to something, be it opiates, sex, or success. “I’ve always been against utopian storytelling,” Euphoria’s creator, writer, and director, Sam Levinson, said in a behind-the-scenes featurette after the episode. This ending certainly wasn’t utopian. But in its misery, it did a disservice to any well-intentioned messages it attempted to convey, letting Rue down along the way.
The post Euphoria Searched for an Epiphany. What It Found Was Nonsense. appeared first on The Atlantic.
