Who Dies In The Euphoria Season 3 Finale?

The casualty list is here, and after years of close calls, we have finally bid farewell to Euphoria’s main character/narrator, Zendaya’s Emmy winning avatar, Rue Bennett.

Laurie and Alamo are also gone for good, and G might not make it after taking a hit to the crotch with a shotgun. We’re breaking down the most gruesome and heartbreaking moments of the episode below:

Laurie

Euphoria’s monotone drug dealer chooses suicide over incarceration. Surrounded by birds in cages, she refuses to end up behind bars herself. Her animals warn her before she realizes it’s the DEA closing in. Members of her gang talk a big talk about a shootout, before surrendering to the agents, but she climbs to the roof, ties a rope around herself and jumps.

Rue

In the series’ biggest fake-out yet, we see a whole dream-sequence of Rue waking up at Ali’s to discover that Fezco has indeed escaped from prison by using parkour to scale the walls. Having promised to pick him up if he ever succeeded, she goes speeding around town in her van trying to find him.

Flashbacks of their friendship and her relationship with Jules clue us in that Rue’s life is flashing before her eyes. She climbs into her bedroom window, spies her mother reading the Bible in their kitchen, and reaches out to her before we realize she’s high on the pills Alamo gave her, which we learn are laced with fentanyl, as she gasps her last breaths.

Ali finds her the next morning, on his couch, and has to deliver the news to Leslie himself. He’s so shaken by the death that he has decided to stop attending addiction meetings, in preparation for a suicide revenge mission.

Alamo

We finally discover Ali’s full name. Martin McQueen shows up to the Silver Slipper in his Marine’s uniform and carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Colman Domingo revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he told Sam Levinson he didn’t want to spend Season 3 in a diner booth, and what we got is a full 180 twist into a Tarantino-style revenge montage.

Ali gets Kitty to bring out her manager, and he ends up shooting G in the crotch after he lies about where Rue got the fentanyl from, before challenging Alamo to come out and face him.

Alamo uses Maddy as a human shield, and then challenges Ali to a Western-style shootout. He draws before the designated time, only to find that Bishop has removed all of the bullets from his revolver.

Ali gets his revenge, thinking he’d die at the club, but Bishop lets him walk out alive, so he goes on to visit Rue’s Texas homestead for the show’s closing scenes.

So much feels unfinished after the credits roll, but how do you tie up everything Euphoria built in 93 minutes? The spirit of the series, the addiction, the chaos, the zeitgeist of a generation trying to make ends meet is all there. And it gets summarized best by Lexi in her conversation with Cassie:

In the Bible, everyone’s dying of all different things, and they just keep going. And that’s the heart of it, I think. Bad things happened. So why have anxiety about it? Like, what good does it do? No matter what, you have to just keep going and that’s the point of it.

Sam Levinson killed off two drug dealers and his main character and told us to keep going, but we didn’t really get to see what that looks like for most its characters. Will Bishop free Maddy and Cassie from their debt? Will Jules continue settling for life as a sugar baby? Will Lexi ever break through emotionally with her sister? Does Magick ever win that insurance fraud case? Some fans might cross their fingers for a fourth season, but how do you continue Euphoria without its backbone and narrator?