Last week, Lexi’s friend Gillie observed what a TV show needs for viewers to stick around for the next episode: “If someone doesn’t die periodically, people get bored.” What read as foreshadowing then comes to pass now for Nate, in a sequence that delivers a memorable (and terrifying) end to a character who wound up being little more than a symbol of peaking in high school. What’s worse than being buried alive? Euphoria has the answer. Nate Jacobs experiences a particularly harrowing double-whammy in the series’ penultimate episode, further illustrating why borrowing beyond your means to live a lavish lifestyle is a road to ruin. Losing a pinky toe and his ring finger was just the beginning of the torment. Spending time in a coffin six feet under as he waits for his wife to pay the $1 million he owes is bad enough. For maximum horror, throw in a rattlesnake crawling into the coffin via the pipe that’s keeping Nate from suffocating. Running out of air would have been far less terrifying.
Every action has a consequence. More broadly, when Nate’s predicament puts Cassie in danger, Maddy turns to the only person she knows who has that kind of cash. Getting into debt with Alamo is as equally perilous as Nate’s entanglement with Naz. The connection between the two overarching crime plots is far from seamless, but by the end of “Rain Or Shine,” there’s one fewer crime boss to deal with. Alamo kills Naz, leaving fewer loose ends to tie up as the season barrels toward its conclusion.
Rue has gotten out of so many scrapes throughout Euphoria that it is a given she will somehow find a safe exit, no matter how slim the odds. Hell, even this season opened with her finding a way over the border wall that was straight out of a Looney Tunes short. But going into the finale, I am no longer certain of her ability to dodge the Grim Reaper, and the introduction of Ali’s “Book of the Dead” adds to the fear she won’t make it out alive.
There is also the matter of whether this is the final season of Euphoria. Creator Sam Levinson has played coy about the possibility of more, saying he approaches each season as if it were the last. “If there is a beginning, there must be an end,” Rue’s voiceover begins (and Ali says the same later). But that is not necessarily true for a TV show, which can exist in a liminal space without an official conclusion. Even if there were more, it’s hard to imagine Zendaya’s participation for scheduling reasons alone (not to mention the rumors of a falling out between the creator and star). Whereas I didn’t buy for a second that Rue was going to die when she was buried up to her neck, all bets are off now that she has been caught with her fingers in the safe at Laurie’s compound. Telling Ali that this is the “last run” is ticking the “last day on the job” trope that ends with that character dying dramatically. Ali also points out that Moses didn’t make it to the Promised Land, so he might not be the best Biblical figure for Rue to draw inspiration from.
Giving Ali additional screentime and deepening his backstory beyond NA meetings and the diner conversations is long overdue. One of the best episodes of Euphoria to date is the Colman Domingo and Zendaya two-hander that bridged the first two seasons (along with the excellent Jules episode), and both actors mine the history of Ali and Rue’s relationship and their individual experiences with addiction. Earlier in “Rain or Shine,” Rue tries to share her spiritual awakening with Lexi, but it quickly turns into an argument. Lexi’s preoccupation with work, coupled with Rue’s inability to fully articulate what she’s caught up in (Nazis, a Black cowboy, and the DEA), makes it sound like she is high again. With Ali, Rue discusses the specifics and her motivation to undo the evil she has done by bringing fentanyl into the country. Describing the plot of season three to someone who hasn’t caught up would make you sound like you’re under the influence, and these two conversations illustrate how the outlandish aspects of Euphoria don’t always mesh with the grounded material.
In addition, Rue’s scenes with Lexi and Ali bookend Cassie’s ongoing woes, delivering the tonal whiplash that continues to plague this season. The dark comedy crime caper Cassie finds herself in does have some genuine moments of hilarity, namely, Cassie’s reaction to Nate’s finger being left out on the counter all night instead of on ice—Sydney Sweeney is nailing the wild swings. However, in an episode that runs 75 minutes, the scenes with L.A. Nights star Dylan Reid slow the momentum of the parallel storylines involving Rue and Cassie. The nighttime soap’s contribution to this season has been little more than a device to get Cassie to pledge her allegiance to Maddy and then delete her OnlyFans account. Lexi’s role is to pout about her sister, and I expect Lexi’s script will take a lot of pieces from Cassie’s life, much like she did with the school play in the second season. I am preemptively rolling my eyes if Lexi pitches a story (or even a spinoff show) involving Nazis, Black cowboys, and the DEA.
Of course, Lexi also mentions the law-enforcement detail to Maddy, who, in turn, tells Alamo, furthering how contrived this plotting has become. Maddy always came across as more worldly than her classmates, but this season is proving her naivete. Even if Maddy thought the DEA comment was from Rue’s drug-addled brain, it would be best not to bring this up. Part of me thought that Maddy might keep this nugget of information as a bargaining chip, but instead, she plays it off like this is Rue being Rue. Maddy’s other mistake is seeing herself as someone whom Alamo considers an equal, but the slinky bathing suit she is given to wear proves otherwise. There is no dipping your toe in this business. If only she had listened to Rue’s multiple warnings to steer clear. Far from being a hard point to gather, Levinson can’t help but hammer home Maddy’s predicament as she stands underneath a trio of stag heads mounted on the wall.
The majority of the bad choices this season are driven by money and the desire for wealth. Nate’s fate is directly tied to borrowing large sums of cash he couldn’t pay back; Alamo didn’t even put the $1 million in the bag for the exchange, yet Maddy is still in debt to him. Now, Rue’s about to get caught in the middle of a theft because she couldn’t give Faye the fortune she promised. There are always catches and loopholes when striving for riches, and very few people get the wealth they think is coming their way.
While the messaging is as subtle as a sledgehammer, the set pieces in the penultimate episode deliver edge-of-the-seat suspense. I am not particularly scared of snakes, but watching the snake slither toward the pipe and then into the coffin with Nate was hard to watch. Jacob Elordi has spent much of this season screaming and shouting; often, he feels like he is in a different show. However, those final moments of Nate’s life hit a different register than the cartoonish violence of losing his pinky toe and ring finger. It is a terrifying sequence that will linger in my mind for a long time.
The handoff of the “money” to Naz repeats the Western motif, and the standoff score is tense, but that aspect of the season is heading into overdone territory. Another repeat visual is Rue getting locked in a bedroom at Laurie’s place, nodding to last season. The more nail-biting moment comes during the attempted robbery of the safe while Wayne sleeps. Because of the SS officer story Wayne told earlier, followed by the camera focusing on Faye’s fresh swastika tramp stamp, there is a suggestion that Faye is luring Rue into a trap. Instead, she wants to steal the cash and get out of there. Unfortunately, there is no money, and what Alamo is desperate to retrieve is the IDs of all the women who are part of his sex trafficking operation. Rue finds Angel’s license in the collection, implying she is dead, and another reason to bring down Alamo gets added to the growing list. I keep coming back to the story of the snake from last week and to the idea that you cannot predict a person’s true intentions until it is too late. Rue’s issue is that she is surrounded by snakes whose intentions she does know, which is just as perilous in the world of Euphoria.
Stray observations
• There is no Jules this week, and it is hard to see how she will fit into the finale even with its 93-minute runtime.
•During Ali’s backstory, we see the impact the pandemic had on recovery without a peer-to-peer support structure. There was no longer a space to gather for meetings, and isolation led to relapses. This is the second episode this season to effectively and explicitly mention COVID-19.
• On the guest star list this week, Natasha Lyonne appears in Ali’s flashback as a sex worker that he smoked crack cocaine with, and Hollywood big shot Brian Grazer plays Burt, a Hollywood big shot uncomfortable with an OnlyFans user playing an OnlyFans user on TV.
• A lot of people (and especially actors) might add a couple of inches to their height, but it appears that Nate (and Elordi) don’t fit that bracket because why lie about being 6’5”? This scene continues the ongoing silliness of Nate’s storyline before it takes a swerve into horrifying with the snake in the coffin.
• No illustration of season three’s scheduling difficulties is clearer than Elordi not being present when Sweeney and Alexa Demie shot their coverage of finding Nate’s body.
• The Steely Dan needle drop isn’t the most innovative or unexpected choice of song, yet “Do It Again” is a great choice as the DEA operation gets going and Rue heads to Laurie’s place.
• One more symbolic visual: Rue looking like she is wearing a crown of thorns with the bonfire raging behind her.
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