‘Euphoria’: 50 Thoughts I Had About the Season 3 Finale

Reported by Vogue.

The Euphoria Season 3 finale arrived the way the whole season did — loudly, messily, and with a lot to answer for. At one hour and forty-five minutes, the closing episode of Sam Levinson's chaotic final chapter swings for catharsis and lands somewhere between genuinely affecting and borderline exhausting, according to Vogue's episode breakdown. Which, honestly? Feels about right for a show that has been simultaneously impossible to look away from and deeply frustrating to defend.

The episode moves through violence, grief, and a surprising amount of snake symbolism with the pacing of someone who knows they won't get another season to clean things up. Nate is dead. Fez is alive and free. Cassie watches her husband die in a manner the internet has already dubbed "Cleopatra-style." Faye doesn't make it. Nearly every female character on the canvas takes a hit — emotionally, physically, or both — and the cumulative weight of that is not nothing, even when the writing around it leaves something to be desired.

Where It Actually Lands

What the finale does earn: the Rue and Jules scenes, which land with a rawness the season rarely achieved week-to-week. A tribute to the late Angus Cloud is woven in with enough care to gut you. Ali claiming Rue as a daughter — quietly, without fanfare — is the kind of moment that reminds you what this show could be when it wasn't busy being unhinged. The Silver Slipper strip club sequence, complete with body glitter and a shootout, is Euphoria at its most maximalist; whether that's a feature or a bug depends entirely on your patience for Tarantino-level gore deployed with significantly less precision.

Lexi's brown tie and matching lipstick are, against all odds, a look. The little white dog survives. The 2024 election exists in Euphoria-world, which raises more questions than it answers. And somewhere in the wreckage of this season, there is a genuinely moving show about addiction, identity, and what it costs to grow up — it just kept getting buried under its own ambition.

Euphoria ended not with a bang or a whimper but with something messier and more honest: the feeling that it almost got there, and that almost is sometimes enough to make you cry anyway.

Read the original at Vogue.