Hollywood’s Most Sinful Show Ends With A Moral

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Since it premiered in 2019, HBO’s gritty teen drama “Euphoria” has angered both sides of the aisle for being either exploitative and anti-feminist or debauched and hedonistic. The show “appears to be overtly, intentionally, marketing extremely graphic adult content — sex, violence, profanity and drug use — to teens and preteens,” the Parents Television Council warned years ago. The anti-drug campaign DARE later weighed in with a similar message.

In one episode alone, “Euphoria” infamously featured nearly 30 penises. I’ve criticized the show for its gratuitous content over the years. But after inundating its viewers with bloodied faces and dick pics and heroin needles, the show’s third and final season takes the only unexpected turn left: It’s all about the Bible.

This season, everybody is talking about the Old Testament. Nate, the jock with violent anger issues-turned real estate developer, quotes it in a courtroom: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Pimp and drug kingpin Alamo references the good book, saying he wants a Norman Rockwell, barefoot-and-pregnant-wife kind of lifestyle. “It’s biblical,” he says. Even our drug-addicted heroine, Rue, has a religious awakening while staring at a Joshua tree engulfed in flames like the burning bush.

There’s no doubt about it: An ancient religious text is driving the plot. But driving it where, exactly?

(Proceed with caution; spoilers abound).

Season 3 picks up five years after its predecessor, meaning the high school students are all in their early twenties. Indebted to her dealer, Rue is now a drug mule funneling balloons of fentanyl across the southern border inside her own body. One leaking balloon could kill her, and we watch as she checks, lubes up, gags on, and gulps down whole balloons to pay off her debts. Don’t do drugs, kids.

Meanwhile, she’s still meeting with her sponsor, Ali. She may be working as a drug mule, but she herself is getting clean. And thanks to his encouragement, she decides to get religious.

On her way back from a run in Mexico, Rue stays with a Christian homesteading family in Texas, and she can’t stop thinking about how happy they seemed.

“Religious people are happier,” Ali agrees. “That’s a fact.” (It is)

Rue raises the objection that she’s attracted to women; Ali, hoping to keep her curious about religion, says, “You could spend all day picking apart these books …. You either have faith, or you don’t have faith. Otherwise, you can argue about this sh*t forever.”

So Rue decides, then and there, to believe. Whether it works out for her is up to interpretation.

The show’s finale, which aired on Sunday, may have left viewers with more questions than answers. And some are infuriated with what they see as the show’s right-wing, MAGA turn.

“euphoria finale was good for the most part but i’m kind of floored by how wildly republican that last scene was,” one person wrote.

“simply have to laugh at one of EUPHORIA’s big closing beats being an abandonment and rejection of Islam,” said another.

“So did Euphoria just end on the point that Christianity, specifically the fundamentalist conservative kind, is the answer lol,” another wondered.

Even before the finale, this season was overflowing with religious and conservative themes.

Nate ultimately dies from a rattlesnake bite, but more fundamentally, his death is caused by bureaucracy. He gets on the wrong side of some Armenian mobsters when he can’t pay back their loans after his construction project stalls. The reason? An endangered white fritillary flower was found on the site.

All he can do is hope the environmental impact study comes swiftly. He tries to propose working around the flowers, but Nate’s fate is sealed in a Los Angeles County courtroom with two words: “Motion denied.”

This season also angered OnlyFans models who thought it made them look degenerate. One creator on the website suggested that scenes of Nate’s fiancée, Cassie, dressed up as a sexy dog are simply reflective of Hollywood drama — and beneath the dignity of a real OnlyFans star.

But they weren’t the only ones upset. Commentator Megyn Kelly latched onto a clip in which Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, dresses up as a sexy baby, calling it “sick.” But the characters in the show find it sick too, which is why Cassie stops creating that kind of “content” — at least temporarily.

It’s hard to watch this season and not take away that bureaucracy is actively evil, OnlyFans is depraved, and the Bible is worth reading. After cracking open Rue’s copy, one character gushes, “It’s kind of incredible actually, like you think it’d be boring, but there’s a lot of violence and sex.” Cassie stares in disbelief. “So there’s a new Bible?”

On top of all this, the show’s final moments are a searing indictment of everyone involved in the fentanyl crisis. After Alamo discovers that Rue has been working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, he gives her Percocet laced with fentanyl. She dies, as was heavily foreshadowed in the penultimate episode, before she has the chance to reunite with her family and friends and make a new life for herself. When Ali finds her lifeless body on his couch, Rue’s name becomes just the latest entry in the leather-bound book where he remembers all the young people he has tried, and failed, to help get clean.

“I used to believe that the world would be a better place if people could empathize with addiction,” he tells a support group. But empathy can also extend to a dealer selling drugs to feed his children. “Maybe the real disease,” Ali suggests, “is that people no longer know the difference between right and wrong. I don’t care what your struggles may be. You poison kids for money, you’re evil. It’s plain and simple.”

Show creator Sam Levinson reportedly originally had a different ending planned. But after the death of Angus Cloud, who played the lovable drug dealer Fez in the first two seasons, Levinson changed his mind. He, a former drug addict himself, helped get Cloud to rehab twice before his overdose in 2023 at the age of 25. “Once he passed away, I had to reconceive of the script,” Levinson told the New York Times, “and I thought, you can’t tell a story about addiction today without the very real consequences. Most people don’t get a second chance.”

But that doesn’t mean Rue doesn’t find redemption; in her final moments, she imagines embracing her father, her mother, and Fez. Her death may be sudden and anticlimactic, which is why it’s riling up some fans, but it’s not unlike what happens to thousands of others who die of fentanyl every year.

“Fentanyl can just take you out in an instant,” Levinson said. “It wasn’t like when I was growing up; you could literally take pills off the street and you might have a bad trip or something, but you’d be fine. This is something that hits close to home for a lot of people in this country. So it felt like the responsible thing to do.”

Though Ali admits that Rue’s death has shaken his faith and he doesn’t know what to believe, what follows is an immensely entertaining cowboy Western-style shoot-out between Ali and Alamo, who gets what he deserves. It is Ali, not Rue, who visits the El Paso homestead on Jerusalem Road — wearing a Zion National Park hat. The show ends with a single word — “Amen” — and a shot of an American flag billowing in the prairie breeze.

You can read the ending as a stirring call to faith or as a nihilistic shrug; Rue never made it back, and Cassie is doubling down on her OnlyFans career. But as Cassie’s sister Lexi notes, the Bible is kind of the story of a lot of people dying while the living choose to keep moving forward. Levinson has also rejected the latter interpretation, telling Tablet, “There’s plenty of nihilism in the world. I see ‘Euphoria’ largely as a rejection of it.”

After seven years, “Euphoria” is finally done flummoxing its fans and haters. We may continue to debate the finale for years to come, but it’s clear that the show isn’t glamorizing a lifestyle of limitless sex and drugs. And despite its many tragedies, it ends with a moment of hope.

“You know what I would find surprising?” the character Maddy says. “A little grace in this world.”

And surprise us, “Euphoria” has.