Contains spoilers for the series finale of “Euphoria.”
The smartest thing Sam Levinson did when he created “Euphoria” for HBO was to make his narrator and heroine an unregenerate addict who was also an idealistic innocent.
Rue Bennett (Zendaya) was our guide through his overheated vision of suburban high school life circa 2019-22; her slapstick ineffectuality endeared her to us, and her nonchalant reactions to her friends’ behavior — a shrug, a whacked-out laugh, an embarrassed grimace — took down the temperature of Levinson’s adolescent fever dream. With her fuzzy but consistent moral clarity, she was the show’s relief valve.
“Euphoria” was never good, exactly, but it had the mesmerizing effect of a bonfire. It was a hyped-up and lushly styled package of familiar ideas about teenage angst and addiction that understood, crucially, that teenagers rarely have a sense of humor about themselves. It romanticized sex and drugs and violence at the same time that it luridly exploited them. But the distinctive thing about it was Rue. The culture recognized this by awarding Zendaya’s serviceable performance in the role with a pair of Emmy Awards.
So you could argue that the dumbest thing Levinson did when he ended “Euphoria” was to kill off Rue halfway through the 90-plus-minute series finale on Sunday night. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But her death — from a homicidal fentanyl overdose, after she had been more or less clean through the third and final season — made sense, in a deflating way. It lined up with the censorious, negative current that ran beneath the show’s dark flamboyance.
If Rue had survived, Levinson, a former addict, would not have had the same opportunity to lecture us about addiction and about the poisonous state of our society. Almost the first thing that happened after she died was that her friend and Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, Ali — a monotonous role played with great skill by Colman Domingo — gave an anodyne speech about addiction to his N.A. group.
The episode’s final 45 minutes proceeded in alternately violent and lugubrious fashion; the style was still there, but the life had gone out of it along with Rue’s good-humored slacker playfulness. Ali took revenge on Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the sex-and-drugs-and-guns merchant who had spiked Rue’s painkillers, in an elaborate western-style shootout. Maddy and Cassie (Alexa Demie and Sydney Sweeney), the Lucy-and-Ethel frenemies, stared down a future in the prostitution-and-pornography-adjacent sector of the influencer industry.
And the series ended on the season’s oddest and least convincing note: the religious awakening Rue experienced after an accidental encounter with a Christian family in rural Texas. Her dazed encounters this season with the Bible, and with a burning tree that she took as a biblical sign, had some humor to them. But the final image of an angelic Rue appearing in the empty seat left for her at the family’s table felt wholly out of tune with her character and with the show. An anarchic, three-season ride to hell did a sudden U-turn onto an irony-free highway to heaven.
To be fair, Levinson, who wrote and directed nearly all the show’s episodes, faced a number of challenges in preparing the final season. Entertainment industry strikes pushed production back; there was a four-year gap between Seasons 2 and 3. The death in 2023 of Angus Cloud, who played the drug dealer Fezco, complicated the writing process and took away one of the show’s more engaging characters. Zendaya and Sweeney became major stars, and the season focused more heavily on them. Hunter Schafer, who played Rue’s love interest, Jules, was marginalized, and Rue and Jules’s relationship became a footnote.
But the biggest problem was that the characters couldn’t go to high school anymore. Forced out of the hothouse comfort zone he had established, Levinson tried to work the same tricks in the real world, but it was a curiously synthetic peak-TV world: strip clubs, Armenian gangsters, backlot melodrama, the perils of Los Angeles real estate development, the moral tawdriness of the influencer economy. Cross “Breaking Bad” with a spaghetti western, dollop on sex and religion, and see what happens.
What appeared to happen was that Levinson lost some of his edge, or his interest, or both. The treatment of the characters, particularly the punching bags Cassie and Nate (Jacob Elordi), became even more shallowly debasing than it had been in the high school seasons. The flashbacks of childhood trauma and outbursts of sentiment that had felt potent on a teenage emotional spectrum now felt melodramatic. The picture of the sick society responsible for the characters’ quandaries took on a Trumpian dimension of American carnage. After all the hullabaloo the show’s excesses had stirred up, Levinson seemed to be straining for a redemption that he didn’t need.
This wasn’t a world that we needed Rue to guide us through; we’ve seen it plenty of times before. The final sanctimonious scene, with Ali telling the homesteading family that Rue was “in a better place,” broke faith with everything that had mattered about the show. But there was a truth to it: Rue had done a good job, and she deserved to go somewhere better.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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