Ranking Every Euphoria Character's Ending

Warning! This article contains spoilers for Euphoria's series finale.

Euphoria just aired its season 3 finale, and it was every bit as aimless and scattershot and crushingly disappointing as the seven episodes that came before it. Euphoria has felt off this whole season, and that was never more apparent than in the climactic sequence when Ali went all Taxi Driver at the strip club. HBO has confirmed that Euphoria is ending after season 3, and that the season 3 finale was actually the series finale, so that’s the last time we’ll see any of these characters.

The final scenes with characters like Jules and Cassie are the final moments of their entire three-season journey. Some of their endings are perfectly in line with their character, like Rue’s inevitable untimely demise from a drug overdose, while others felt wildly out of character, like Lexi suddenly getting really into the Bible. Some of the characters’ endings were awesome, like Ali’s shotgun-wielding rampage, while others were a huge let-down, like making Maddy the damsel in distress in a wannabe Tarantino movie.

Now that all is said and done, I’m sure Euphoria will go down in television history as a flawed but fascinating experiment; a distinctive vision by a demented auteur. At times, it was one of the best shows on TV; at others (like the last eight Sundays), it was one of the absolute worst. But which Euphoria character got the best ending, and who among them got the worst?

6 Lexi Gets Weirdly Into The Bible

The last time Euphoria ended a season, the finale was dragged down by Elliot’s insufferable song. This time, it’s dragged down by a meandering monologue about the Bible. Season 3’s version of Elliot’s song is Lexi’s soliloquy about the Bible that Rue left in her apartment. The previous episodes dedicated a ton of screen time to Lexi’s Hollywood career, and it seemed to be building toward a TV adaptation of her school play, but the closest thing she gets to an ending is this sudden epiphany.

After spending the whole season bashing Christians and Christianity and judging Rue for her belief in God, Lexi does a complete 180 and becomes obsessed with the Bible. It’s the kind of cartoonish conversion you’d see in a Pureflix original.

5 Jules Stays With Her Sugar Daddy, Keeps Painting

A lot of Euphoria’s main characters have been underserved in season 3, as the show has pivoted its focus to the street war between Laurie and Alamo, but none of the legacy characters have fared quite as badly as Jules. Jules has been relegated to a background role this season, with the absolute bare minimum screen time and character development.

Her intermittent scenes touched on a few interesting ideas. A crucial scene from a couple of weeks ago suggested she was starting to see the dark side of the sugar baby lifestyle, and that there was tension with her sugar daddy’s family. But in her one scene in the finale, Jules paints Rue in Hell, gets greeted by her sugar daddy, and keeps repeating the same cycle.

4 Maddy Narrowly Avoids Becoming Alamo's Concubine

Maddy’s story took a really sinister turn in the penultimate episode of this season. Throughout season 3, Maddy has been every bit the cold-hearted ice queen she was in seasons 1 and 2 — tricking Cassie into signing a draconian contract, threatening Lexi, etc. — but when she got into business with Alamo, I knew she was in way over her head. After using her connections to save Nate (which ultimately turned out to be futile, because he was already dead), Maddy had put herself and Cassie into so much debt with Alamo that they were basically sold into sex trafficking.

Thankfully, in the finale, Maddy manages to escape this horrific existence, but it’s not because of anything she does. Just when Alamo is telling Maddy he’s going to force her to marry him and bear his children, Ali bursts in with a sawn-off shotgun to shoot the place up. Maddy is basically a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued, which is seriously disappointing as the culmination of her story.

3 Cassie Resumes Her OnlyFans Career

Cassie gets the most predictable ending, but at least it gives her some agency to choose her own path (and might even be setting up a spinoff). In the finale, we see that Nate is officially classified as “missing,” and that Cassie seemingly hasn’t even told Lexi what really happened. The guilt and trauma of that whole experience is still weighing on her, but she’s trying to keep her head held high.

In her final scene, Cassie explains that she’s turning her house into a content creation center, where she’ll bring in a bunch of fellow OnlyFans models to shoot content day and night, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s being planned as the setting for a spinoff. Euphoria’s third season has been much more interested in Cassie’s OnlyFans career than anything else, so this was hardly a surprise.

2 Ali Goes Rolling Thunder On Alamo

In its climactic sequence, the Euphoria finale devolves into a reboot of Rolling Thunder. After Ali determines that Alamo poisoned Rue with fentanyl, he saws off the end of his shotgun, dons his full military regalia, and goes to the strip club to settle his score. This armed standoff comes out of nowhere — you’d think Ali and Alamo were the lead characters of this series, not Rue and Jules, from the way the finale plays out — and the bloody payoffs feel forced and unearned.

But hot damn if Colman Domingo doesn’t give an incredible performance in this sequence. He keeps you on tenterhooks from the moment he walks into that club to the moment he puts one last shell in Alamo’s head. It’s a masterclass in mesmerizing screen presence; a perfect encapsulation of simmering rage.

1 Rue Dies Of An Overdose

When we saw Fezco parkouring his way out of the prison yard, I thought Euphoria was taking an even more ridiculous turn than ever before. That prison escape looked like something Jason Statham would do in a Fast & Furious movie. But it was actually the first hint that what follows is a delirious, drug-induced death spiral. That whole montage felt like classic Euphoria: the ethereal cinematography, the hypnotic music, the dreamlike editing, the heartbreaking visual symbolism. For a couple of minutes, as Rue slipped out of this mortal coil reaching out for her estranged mother, I was reminded why I fell in love with this show in the first place.

The timing of Rue’s death is really powerful, too. It’s very sudden and unceremonious, slap-bang in the middle of the episode. As far as TV character deaths go, it’s much more Logan Roy than Hank Schrader — one minute, she’s alive and well; the next, she’s unresponsive — and it was surprisingly realistic for Euphoria. Rue doesn’t go out in some triumphant blaze of glory with a lot of drama and fanfare; she just O.D.s on a couch a third of the way through the episode.

Ultimately, Rue’s death felt a bit like a footnote in her own show. The death itself was handled beautifully, but it’s quickly brushed past to set up Ali’s big revenge. We don’t get to see anyone’s reactions to Rue’s death besides a brief aside from Lexi, and there isn’t even a funeral. Euphoria is Rue’s story, as told by Rue, but in the end, the show couldn’t wait to get rid of her.