Sunday night’s Season 3 finale of HBO’s Euphoria shocked viewers with a fan favorite death scene.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Euphoria’s Season 3 finale.
The popular teen drama ended on Sunday with a shocking main character death.
Rue (Zendaya) died from an overdose after her strip club owner and drug trafficker boss Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) gave her a fentanyl-laced Percocet upon suspecting (correctly) that she was acting as a DEA informant.
Zendaya’s Euphoria character, Rue — a longtime illicit drug user on the show who had been clean for months — took what she believed was a legitimate Percocet only after suffering an injury during a chaotic escape from Laurie’s (Martha Kelly) compound at the start of the finale.
Rue’s death scene on Euphoria plays out with the character experiencing a beautiful dream sequence that involves her reuniting with Fezco (late actor Angus Cloud) on a field, as well as an emotional meetup with her mother Leslie (Nika King), who she finds reading the Bible at her kitchen table.
But as the dream fades, viewers realize that Rue has actually been dying the whole time on the couch at her mentor Ali’s (Colman Domingo) home. The next morning, Ali wakes up to find her dead. Heartbroken, he tests the Percocet pills left on the coffee table and confirms they are laced with fentanyl.
Fans promptly took to social media to express their dismay over the young character’s fate.
“Regardless of how beautifully it was done, the fact remains that rue died over being laced, she was sober and was free to have a good life! her dying is such a terrible ending, for a show that is meant to give hope for addicts!” one X user reacted.
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“RUE WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME,” another exclaimed.
“And in her final moments rue dreamed of Jules, hugging her dad, that Fezco escaped, and that she got to go home and reunite her mom,” a third pointed out.
“WAIT… so Rue was already dead from the overdose this whole time? And her reuniting with her mom was just her imagining one final goodbye before dying???” another asked, adding, “This ending completely shattered me.”
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“What gets me is that Rue died while trying to do better, she was sober, but people thought she had an OD [because] she was an addict, so no one had any reason to think otherwise, but in reality she was murdered,” another declared.
“The Fez and Rue flashback made me sob,” another X user disclosed.
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Another X user summed up Rue’s tragic life as the following:
11 [year-old], panic attack, hospital gives you liquid Valium
Your first high, you never forget it
Start stealing your dying dad’s painkillers to get high with him
Dad dies when you’re 14, you go full addict
Drift from everyone except Lexi
OD in high school, your sister Gia finds your body
Meet Jules, fall in love, fall apart
Take a $10K suitcase of drugs from Laurie
Get clean on paper, owe a debt you can’t pay
5 years later the debt hits $43.8 million
Become a mule, then run drugs for a kingpin
Rat him out, he leaves you laced pills as a goodbye
Die on Ali’s couch dreaming of your mom’s arms
“7 years of fighting to survive, ended by the one man she finally trusted,” the X user added.
Another simply wrote, “Rue has officially died in #euphoria.”
After Rue’s death, the season finale shifts to her high school friends as they begin processing the news and try to move forward with their lives.
In one scene, Lexi (Maude Apatow) reflects on the last time she saw Zendaya’s character alive — the moment she brushed her off while Rue was excitedly trying to talk to her about the Bible — and admits that she has been reading it ever since, finding it surprisingly beautiful.”
During this conversation, Lexi’s sister Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) casually polishes her collection of sex toys while asking questions about the Bible.
Notably, Cassie’s husband Nate (Jacob Elordi) is unable to react to Rue’s death alongside the other characters, as he was already dead himself — fatally bitten by a rattlesnake while buried alive in a coffin in the previous episode.
Meanwhile, Ali reacts to Rue’s death by taking revenge against Alamo. Domingo’s character shows up at the drug trafficker’s strip club and guns him down in a duel before a room filled with terrified exotic dancers.
The finale ends with Ali arriving at a quiet, Christian family ranch — the same one Rue found refuge in at the beginning of the season — where he introduces himself as Rue’s father and gets invited in for dinner.
Ali, who is seated at the head of the table, then leads the Christian family in grace before dinner. As he finishes the prayer and opens his eyes, he looks up to see a vision of Rue sitting at the opposite end of the table, smiling at him — a rare moment of peace in an otherwise chaotic series.
The episode closes on a serene wide shot of the Christian family ranch, with an American flag waving proudly in the breeze in front of the house.
And that’s a wrap for Euphoria, as the show will not be returning for a Season 4, creator Sam Levinson said, according to a report by TheWrap.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.