Euphoria Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Your Future Will Be Bright

Spoilers below.

It was inevitable that one of Euphoria’s principal characters would die before the end of this season. Given all the portents of death in last week’s episode as well as this one, there’s a high probability that at least one more will go in next week’s season—series?—finale.

But let’s not get into that just yet, out of respect for—spoiler alert—Nate Jacobs. It was Nate who failed to make it out of the seventh episode, “Rain or Shine,” alive. Sadly, he died the way we all figured he would: by being buried alive on a construction site, then poisoned by a rattlesnake who crawled into his coffin and attacked him. Yes. We all saw this coming.

I’m going to be brutally honest: The loss of Nate does not feel like a huge loss for Euphoria. In no way is that a commentary on Elordi’s performance. He committed fully to his depiction of a toxically masculine character’s ultimate breakdown. But series creator Sam Levinson wrote Nate into a corner this season, whittling down any interesting curves or texture in the character until Nate contained nothing but the unpleasant edges of a frustrated, entitled capitalist. First he lost a toe, then the same toe again, plus a finger. It was almost like Levinson slowly, physically removed Nate from the picture, then sent in a snake to finish the job.

The fact that a snake killed Nate feels—like so much in this overstretched, hour-plus episode—a bit biblical. (What if it turns out that the most Christian show on television is actually…Euphoria?) It doesn’t take a massive intellectual leap to conclude that Levinson is suggesting that Nate’s sins are what caused his death. That’s undeniably true. If he hadn’t deceived his investors, or lied to Cassie, or bought the ugliest house in the L.A. suburbs, he probably would not have been subjected to such a deeply disturbing death.

Nate’s fate is one answer to the question that runs throughout “Rain or Shine,” which is the same one that Rue poses to Ali: Can anyone be redeemed?

As this episode tells us: Some people can, maybe, but not everyone gets the chance. (Nate certainly didn’t.) The flashback that covers Ali’s past life as a crack cocaine addict who becomes a champion for others in recovery makes this point explicitly while, simultaneously, showing how Ali managed to redeem himself.

We see Ali tell more than one man struggling with addiction that if he hangs in there, “your future will be bright,” including one named Ammanuel (Christopher Ammanuel), whose name literally means “God is with us.” But he dies, and so does another guy, Sean, who passes away during COVID, when it was impossible to have in-person group meetings. I don’t know how much more loudly Levinson can announce that Gen Z is facing an adulthood that feels hopeless, confusing, and devoid of prospects, because he’s pretty much declaring that at maximum volume. (Sidebar: Natasha Lyonne makes a cameo appearance as a sex worker who does drugs with a young Ali. I have no idea why Levinson insists on putting so much racist language in this character’s mouth, but for the record, I will once again note that this season of Euphoria is extremely Tarantino-coded.)

Meanwhile, Maddy is in a hopeless place when this episode ends. She’s been fired from her assistant job because she got Cassie an audition on L.A. Nights without consulting Ms. Penzler, who immediately dismisses her. She also gets played by Alamo, who agrees to help her pay off Cassie’s debt if he gets a 20-percent cut of her future earnings. But then puts a bunch of decks of playing cards in a bag instead of actual cash and blows Naz away so he won’t have to pay him a dime. “It’s about time your ass wised up,” Alamo tells Maddy, underlining the fact that she’s as out of her element in a less, um, corporate environment as she was working at a (supposedly) reputable business. Earlier in the episode, Maddy says, fiercely, to Cassie, “When somebody shows you who they are, believe ‘em.” Yet she’s incapable of seeing who Alamo really is until it’s too late.

Cassie’s life is similarly in absolute disarray by the time this episode is over. Her husband is dead. Her potential in Hollywood ends before it begins after Brian Grazer tells Sharon Stone’s Patricia Lance that it doesn’t make sense to take the risk of employing a sex worker (meaning Cassie) to play a part on L.A. Nights when they could easily cast a regular actor. It’s telling how insincere every Hollywood power player in this episode is. Even though Patricia thinks it would be authentic to cast Cassie, a position she heroically takes with a huge image of Superman behind her, she immediately abandons that stance as soon as she realizes her boss is not on board. “You’re right,” she says. “I don’t give a shit.”

Cassie, who deleted her OnlyFans account so she could take the L.A. Nights gig, has to quickly regain her audience so she can try to pay back Nate’s debts. But that struggle is only real until she manages to clandestinely post an image of her and L.A. Nights star Dylan Reid (Homer Gere, son of Richard, star of American Gigolo) posing provocatively on his socials, boosting the followers to her new OnlyFans instantly. (Don’t feel too bad for Dylan, who tells Cassie he “really fought” for her to be cast, even though it doesn’t seem like he did a damn thing.) With Nate gone and her career trajectory in a downward spiral, it’s hard to imagine what sense of purpose Cassie will have going forward.

The only central character who is “succeeding”—based on traditional metrics, anyway—is Lexi, who wins over the network execs with the storyline she wrote for her sister, even though it will now be recast with someone else. Despite selling her soul in small increments, Lexi sees herself as superior to her high school friends. “I don’t understand what happened to you, like your conscience,” Lexi tells Maddy, after she pulls the stunt with Cassie and Dylan. “It’s like you’ve all lost your fucking minds.” Which, of course, is when Lexi tells Maddy that Rue came over and was acting weird, talking about Bible stuff and Nazis and also working for the DEA, a piece of information that Maddy serves up directly to Alamo and that will undoubtedly bite Rue in the ass in the last episode.

By the way, that entire conversation between Rue and Lexi sounds like me trying to explain Euphoria’s third season to someone who hasn’t seen it:

Rue: “Lexi, I’ve been working with Nazis.”

Lexi: “Nazis? I thought you were working for a Black cowboy.”

Rue: “Well, the Nazis introduced me to the Black cowboy.”

The question left hanging at the end of “Rain or Shine” is whether Rue will survive the episode that follows. Every sign, literal and metaphorical, suggests she will not. There’s the most obvious bad omen, which is the way that Fern (Chloe Cherry) suddenly screams out for Wayne after she realizes there’s no money in the safe that she and Rue opened. White supremacist Wayne (Toby Wallace) clearly wants Rue dead already.

Rue’s effort to get Alamo and his whole crew arrested in a DEA crackdown seems destined to fall apart now that Alamo has been tipped off by Maddy. Other, more subtle clues suggest that Rue might not be long for this world, including the pancake supper she shares with Ali at his apartment, which has heavy “Last Supper” vibes, and an earlier moment in that sequence, when—after hearing about Rue’s burning bush experience—Ali tells her: “I figure it’s worth mentioning that Moses doesn’t make it to the Promised Land.”

Rue chuckles. “That’s where we differ,” she tells him. She seems to think she has a deeper purpose, much like Moses, whether she actually gets to the Promised Land or not. And what she discovers in that safe backs up that idea. Rather than cash, she finds a stack of driver’s licenses that belong to women who have worked for Alamo and disappeared from existence, including Angel. Not only could Rue expose Alamo and his operation for drug-running, she could also prove that they have been trafficking and murdering women. Those women are the Euphoria version of Israelites, who could be saved from their enslavers by Moses, a.k.a. Rue.

“You wanna undo the evil you’ve done?” Ali asks Rue. “Start by changing yourself.” Rue swears that is what she’s trying to do. The problem is she’s still lying. She tells Lexi she’s not using anymore. It’s unclear whether this is true or not, because she still seems kinda strung out.

While she’s being disingenuous, understandably, with Laurie and her crew about her loyalty to them, Rue’s also being a little honest. “I lied so much, people didn’t believe me when I was telling the truth,” she tells them, which is true but would have more credence if we, the audience, didn’t know she’s misrepresenting her position. No one knows whether they can fully trust Rue at this point, including us viewers.

This episode of Euphoria ultimately asks us to question whether Rue deserves redemption. Maybe this is my admiration of Zendaya talking, but I believe she does. I also believe just as strongly that she won’t get it. It’s too easy to imagine Ali adding her name to his so-called “book of the dead,” his “reminder of how the story of addiction often ends.”

Also, I can’t stop fixating on the first words Zendaya utters in this episode, in the opening voiceover narration: “If there’s a beginning, there must be an end.”

The very first episode of Euphoria began with Rue narrating her own birth. How can the (most likely, even though it has not been confirmed) last episode end with anything other than her death?