'Euphoria' Finale 'In God We Trust' Gets Mixed Reviews
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- HBO's 'Euphoria' aired its series finale 'In God We Trust' on Sunday, with Season 3 confirmed as the show's last installment after two prior seasons and a six-month shoot.
- Rue Bennett (Zendaya) dies of a fentanyl overdose about halfway through the finale, poisoned by Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) in retaliation for her work as a DEA informant, with her death depicted quietly on Ali's couch.
- Ali (Colman Domingo), going by his birth name Martin McQueen, abandons 12-step principles to storm Alamo's Silver Slipper club with a shotgun in a Tarantino-inflected revenge sequence that the critic called tonally incompatible with the episode's anti-opioid message.
- The finale's closing image — Rue smiling beatifically at a Texas homestead while right-wing border rhetoric is voiced over an American flag flying over farmland — clashes with the show's prior irreverent stance, per the review.
- Breakout supporting stars Sydney Sweeney (Cassie), Jacob Elordi (Nate), and Hunter Schafer (Jules) received rushed or half-hearted arcs, with the critic noting Elordi and Schaefer were particularly underserved by the platform that launched them.
- Creator Sam Levinson's signature bombast, which once amplified the show's emotional intensity, ended the series working against its own thesis, producing a finale the reviewer called 'a jumbled mishmash that did a lot and said little.'
Why it matters: The finale marks the definitive end of HBO's most controversial prestige teen drama, and Zendaya and Domingo's performances are singled out as the only elements that cohere in an otherwise fractured capstone. By collapsing the ensemble into Rue's singular addiction arc and grafting a revenge-thriller climax onto an opioid-realism death scene, the show spent the goodwill built by its first two seasons on a coda that sidelined Sweeney, Elordi, and Schafer — exactly the stars HBO rode to cultural relevance.
