Chapter One. The Origin of Ali Muhammed

Ali wasn’t always a nice guy. We knew this much already. Rue Bennett’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor has always been open about being a real piece of shit prior to finding God and getting sober, estranged from a family he terrorized during his addiction. Hearing about it, however, is one thing. Seeing it in front of our eyes is something else. 

In keeping with this season’s theme redemption, we see just how low Ali sank back then. As an addict, there are worse ways to spend one’s time than getting high and shadowboxing in front of your prostitute friend (played by an unrecognizable Natasha Lyonne) while you brag about surviving on a diet of “crack cocaine and pussy.” Worse ways, for example, like making an ass out of yourself over the family dinner table, then beating the shit out your wife within hearing range of your two little daughters. Ali spent some of his addiction time that way, too.

A heart attack is what cleans him up in the end. Since no one comes to visit him it’s clear he’s lost his family by this point; he’ll lose his life if he doesn’t change his habits, and so he change his habits in hopes of atoning for his terrible past. While he loses many friends and mentees, especially when the pandemic shuts down regular NA meetings and makes it harder for the lonely souls to whom he ministers to stay in touch, he stays on the path. 

Rue, seemingly his most beloved protégé and sponsee, does not.

Chapter Two. The Lonesome Death of Nate Jacobs

In this season of Euphoria, Nate Jacobs attempts to launch a nursing home/hospice/funeral home combo chain called SunSettlers, for cashing in on the massive numbers of dying boomers headed to their eternal reward over the next decade. In the process Nate runs up a huge debt to Naz, an Armenian gangster in the coffin business. 

Nate gets married to Cassie, the…let’s say ‘love of his life,’ since for reasons that will soon become apparent she’s not likely to have any competition anytime soon. At the wedding, Nate’s massive debt is exposed by a party-crashing Naz. Nate is then badly beaten by Naz’s thug Artur after carrying Cassie across the threshold of their hideous house.

Nate gets his toe chopped off. Nate gets his toe reattached. Nate gets his toe pulled off again, then gets his finger chopped off too. Nate gets buried alive, with a long PVC pipe to the surface for air, into which he can scream in vain. He spends an unknown number of hours down there, screaming and panicking. He just misses rescue by his brother, whose visit to the site he sleeps through. He does however attract the attention of a nearby rattlesnake, which crawls down the pipe after him, slithers all over him, sits on his chest, then strikes.

Nate eventually gets rescued by his friends — well, by Cassie and Maddy — who discover him dead, his swollen tongue distended from between his lips, his skin purple with poison, the snake still resting on his corpse. (That’s right: With live burial and the snake bite, they’re pulling the double Kill Bill.)

Nate was not a good person. Nate was in fact a terrible person, the closest the first two seasons came to the kind of genuine psychopaths littering Season 3. He only seems relatively harmless because all his schemes keep going up in smoke, and because (despite his towering size) there are always bigger men making a fool of him. But none of this makes him likeable, and depending on your own feelings about the issue of redemption, you may feel that his actions towards Jules and others during Seasons 1 & 2 put him beyond it.

That’s different than wanting him to die after hours of physical and emotional agony, culminating in a minute of raw screaming terror as he prepares to be bitten to death by a snake while completely immobilized. That is “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy” material. (Though this is not true: I, at least, would wish this on my worst enemy.)

Did Nate deserve any of this? What difference does that make, one way or the other? This is what happened to him. As Clint Eastwood put it in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Chapter Three. The Education of Maddy Perez, or The Cruel Tutelage of Alamo Brown

You can’t say she wasn’t warned. Maddy Perez knew that Alamo Brown, her swaggering new business partner with a strip-club empire, was bad news. Rue, his own employee and her own close friend, straight up said he’s a monster. Maddy feels like she can handle monsters, though. From Nate and Cassie — whose OnlyFans career she saves by engineering an extremely vigorous one-night stand between Cassie and TV star Dylan Reid — to her boss and clients, she’s spent years navigating the needs of narcissists and surviving. How bad could this guy be?

That’s the kind of thing you find out when your friend — and meal ticket — is in the clutches of an Armenian gangster who’s now threatening her, too, as well as her shiftless husband. Artur pics her up and slams her through a glass table, which seems real stupid to do to a woman you’re depending on to raise the money you’re owed by looking sexy online, but hey, I’m not in the gangster business, what do I know. Anyway, she, and Maddy, have 72 hours to raise over one million dollars before Nate dies of dehydration. (The snake, like Naz at the wedding, crashed the party.)

Alamo is the only man Maddy knows who can come up with that kind of cash in that kind of time frame. To get it out of him, though, she’ll have to dress up in a fancy swimsuit and fuck him in his hot tub, a task she approaches with the same look of completely resigned disgust she wore when she was cleaning dog diarrhea from her boss’s office floor. Magick, one of Alamo’s girls, coaches her: “Don’t overthink it. Trade a thousand bad days for a good life.” A thousand bad days sure add up, though.

Maddy has been fired from her job by now for getting her sex-worker pal Cassie an audition in the first place — an audition that’s all for naught when network exec Burt (Brian Grazer) puts the kibosh on her controversial casting with producer Patti’s consent. In the process of firing her, her boss calls her a digital madam or something to that effect. But a madam’s supposed to be the one doing the pimping, not pimping out herself. You can see why she hates this, even if she feels she must to through with it to save Cassie.

Alamo’s a man of his word, to an extent. He kills Naz with his golden gun. Artur wisely surrenders and helps them dig Nate up. They discover he’s dead. They also discover that Alamo gave Maddy a ringer, filled with playing cards rather than dollar bills, and was never at any risk of losing that million-plus at all. But don’t worry, he plans on working Maddy and Cassie as if they owe that money anyway.

Now Maddy has witnessed a murder. She’s seen the dead body of her high-school boyfriend, swollen and grotesque after a slow and miserable death. She’s fucked a killer to keep a friend from getting killed. How do you walk back into a normal world after that?

Chapter Four. Rue Bennett’s Private Hell

While chatting with Alamo Brown, Maddy makes the mistake of mentioning Rue ranting about the DEA to their mutual friend Lexi, who was full of complaints about the conversation. (Lexi, the sole surviving square member of this crew of drug mules and pornographers, thinks they’re all mentally ill and morally irredeemable. Besides, she’s got a an episode of L.A. Nights to write, can’t you see she’s working??) It may be the single most disastrous thing anyone’s said to anyone yet this season. Or maybe not? We don’t yet get to see how much stock Alamo puts into this slip-up.

That’s because Rue has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. On Alamo’s orders, she fakes a falling-out with him by breaking her own nose to make it look as though he attacked her. (G, her driver, is aghast.) She then slumps into the compound of Laurie, Alamo’s rival, and her gaggle of giggling Nazis. She explains Alamo is convinced she’s loyal to Laurie.

“But you ain’t,” says one of the Nazis, half-asking, half-stating a fact. 

Rue’s job in Laurie’s compound is to open the safe with the 3D-printed key and steal back all of Alamo’s shit. She does this with the help of her old friend Faye, who finds her Nazi boyfriend Wade’s intent to kill Rue — to have Faye herself do it, actually — too much to bear. The idea is they’ll take the money and run, letting the DEA mop up the mess that results in whatever battle between Laurie and Alamo then erupts.

Unfortunately there’s no money in the safe when they arrive. There are just dozens and dozens of drivers licenses and IDs, including that of Angel, the stripper who disappeared after Rue dropped her off at “rehab.” Apparently this has happened more times than you’d imagine, with more girls than Rue even knew existed. Laurie, meanwhile, has told Rue that Alamo sells women who displease him, having their tongues injected with botox to keep them from talking. Dude really is a monster. 

But so is greed. When they open the safe using Faye’s BF Wade’s jingly-jangly keys in a marvelously tense sequence, the lack of money convinces Faye, who is not very bright, that Rue lied to her. (It was in fact Faye who reported there being money in the safe to begin with.) The episode ends with Faye screaming for Wade to wake up.

If you buy into the Biblical symbolism-slash-hallucinations that are driving Rue at this point, you know she should have known better. The voice of God that spoke to her from the burning Joshua tree last week spoke to her in the words God used with Moses, vowing to lead him to the promised land. It takes Ali to remind Rue that Moses never actually made it in. And when the Nazis burn what’s either a huge pile dead tree branches for a bonfire before slicing her palm open to both punish her and test her loyalty,  they show that God isn’t the only one who’s in the business of speaking through the flames.

Whether Rue survives the series finale is anyone’s guess; by offing Nate in such a spectacular way Sam Levinson proves he’s not above really punishing his players in these final episodes, even by his usual standards. The biblical imagery all points in only one direction. Alamo and Laurie and their vengeful servants are all still out there, and if her DEA link is truly exposed, or if Wade finally wakes up from Faye’s screaming, she’s in even worse trouble than she already is.

Less up for debate is the sheer entertainment value of this episode, Ali’s segment provides some of the first two seasons’ human-level pathos. Nate’s death ties a horrific bow on one of the show’s funniest and most frightening characters, who got his comeuppance and then some, forcing you to question just how badly you wanted to see him suffer to begin with. Maddy’s rude awakening shows that no one on the show is safe from the crime saga that has slowly taken it over; it’s anybody’s guess if Lexi finally gets dragged in as well. The outcome of Rue’s story will determine nothing more or less than the show’s outlook on life, fate, faith, and whether or not things ever just work out for the best. Drama, horror, crime, magic realism, softcore sex comedy, massive Steely Dan needle drops: With only one episode remaining, Euphoria is telling a lot of very different stories very well indeed, all with the same goal in mind.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.