Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the Euphoria season 3 finale, “In God We Trust,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Lou Bennett is gone. But to the people whose lives she touched, she is very much alive.
That’s one of the takeaways from the season 3 finale of “Euphoria,” an episode that brought some form of closure to the major characters. Rue (Zendaya) dies before the middle of the episode, and then Ali (Coleman Domingo) has to avenge her. Meanwhile, Cassie (Sidney Sweeney) seems set for a future as an OnlyFans mogul, but she still has a long way to go when it comes to healing the wounds left by her short and tumultuous marriage to the late Nate (Jacob Elordi). And there’s also a sweet tribute to Fezco (played by Angus Cloud in the first two seasons), who is in some ways the soul of Euphoria.
Here’s everything that happened in the season finale.
Lou’s escape and afterward
Lou manages to escape from Laurie’s (Martha Kelly) mansion after Faye (Chloe Cherry) betrays her in the final moments of episode seven. Lou’s agility and speed come in handy when she almost goes out, until one of Laurie’s henchmen lassoes her. G (Marshawn Lynch) kills Lou’s attacker and chases her away. A DEA raid on Laurie’s ranch – Laurie chooses to hang herself rather than be arrested – results in the crew of the Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) escaping unharmed. When a DEA agent opened the floor of an ambulance his men drove across the Mexican border, he found not drugs but dead rats. Alamo knows what’s going on.
He then praises Lou (telling her “Employee of the Year”) and assesses her injuries, including a severe cut on her palm. He then offers her Percocet, but reminds her not to abuse it: “It’s for physical pain. It’s not like you’re doing that in your head.” He also hands her a bottle of them.
In retrospect, his words may have been insincere, but Lou may have been listening. Sitting with Ali, she becomes manic as she watches the TV news about Fezco’s successful escape from prison using parkour. Lou rushes to find him and breaks through the police barricade to break into the house. Once there, she imagines her estranged mother Leslie (Nica King) reaching out to greet her. Sadly, this was a dying woman’s fantasy. Moments later, Ali finds Lou’s body on the couch, discovers pills, and tests for fentanyl. When he saw the positive result, he slammed the counter with his fist, then called Leslie to tell her the bad news.
ant calculation
In a brave scene of acting, Ali is seen telling the group that he grabbed a drink while grieving a friend at a group meeting. He states that this was several months ago. Although time has passed since Lou’s death, the wound is still fresh. Ali no longer wants to participate in the program, but he says the program is useless because it only deals with recent losses in his life. (Last week’s episode saw him in flashbacks dealing with the loss of a friend he couldn’t save when the coronavirus temporarily eliminated the need for in-person meetings.) “I’m going to find other ways to serve you better,” he says. We then see him sawing off a shotgun.
At the Alamo club, Ali manages to meet with the top dog, but he avoids being shot by putting Maddie (Alexa Demme) between him and the gun – Ali seems suspicious that he doesn’t intend to kill innocent bystanders. The Alamo sets the conditions for the duel. If one of the dancers, Kitty (Anna Van Patten), rolls a champagne bottle onto the bar and it falls to the floor, shattering, the men are entitled to a draw. As you might have guessed, Alamo violated the terms of his deal, closing in on Ali and pulling the trigger long before the bottle dropped. However, there is no bullet in the gun. Ali sees his colleague Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), realizes he’s been shot, and begins saying, “I’ll see you in hell, mom-” before Ali’s bullet hits him. The Alamo’s strange spell was broken, and the girls in the club slowly filed out.
Other characters’ endings
Maddie finds herself at the Alamo club, trying to pay off the debt she incurred to free Nate in the last episode. After leaving Kathy at home, she told me not to wait as she would be out late at night. It’s unclear where she ends up after Alamo’s death, but it certainly looks like Ali’s bullets have restored her freedom.
Meanwhile, Kathy seems to have made some kind of peace with her husband’s death, although she hasn’t revealed any details. In a conversation at home with her sister Lexi (Maud Apatow), Cassie does not actively answer questions about the unsolved mystery of Nate’s “disappearance.” “I don’t like thinking about it,” she says. She plans to convert her and Nate’s mansion into a kind of hype house for OnlyFans models, and offers her sister the job of writing all the storylines. To her credit, Lexi seems to understand that this role is not for her. After Lexi leaves, we leave Cassie sitting on the bed she once shared with Nate. Backlit by the ring light she uses to shoot the video, she stops crying, but you can hear her gulp as tears of “euphoria” roll down her cheeks and she thinks of a photo of herself and her late husband. The camera pans beyond Cassie’s misery to reveal that she lives in a dollhouse in which she continues to perform, if only for herself.
Lexi is better off living elsewhere. She has bigger things in mind. As Lou was developing a connection to his faith, she read the Bible he had left at home. At the time, Lexi told Lou that she was a nuisance. Now she regrets it. “I could have done better,” she tells her sister. Cathy points to her father’s abandonment of his family and says, “It doesn’t matter how you leave him.” “It’s still awful.” But there’s comfort in going through hardships together. Art also provides solace. In a single short sequence, Jules (Hunter Schaefer) is seen painting Lou’s portrait.
final tribute
In the final sequence of the episode, Ali is seen visiting the farmhouse Lou encountered in the season premiere when he was seeking help across the Mexico-U.S. border as a drug mule. Then the family she saw and their aura of compassion and peace made her consider turning to faith. Today, Ali’s family remembers her fondly, saying, “My daughter stayed here a while ago.” They ask after her and are surprised when Ali says, “She’s in a better place.”
Before the meal, the family clears the table and prays with Ali. Ali sat directly across Lou’s chair, and for a fleeting moment, out the window behind her, she could see a vast expanse of land and sky, a vision of the strange country that had given her life and taken it from her. But for now, Lou seems genuinely happy, unhindered, and smiling without malice. “God bless you,” Lou says in voiceover, concluding the episode and the story of her all-too-short life.
