On faith, fentanyl, and why Euphoria’s most controversial move was allowing Christianity to appear sincere, beautiful, and a force for good.
On Sunday night, May 31st, 2026, the final curtain fell on Sam Levinson’s high-school-drama-turned post-adolescent-Western, crash landing to a close to with bombastic Tarantino-esque sequences of bloodshed and revenge folded into a finale rife with quieter, more contemplative scenes, plus plenty of loose ends and questions that my brain has been gnawing on since the end credits rolled.
In a way, it’s the end of an era. I feel like I’ve been watching Euphoria for half of my life, or, at least, half of my adult life, with its many starts and stalls since it premiered on HBO in 2019. When I first watched, I immediately connected with the show’s soundtrack, stylized visuals, its varied cast of insecure and unwell characters, and the throughline of coming-of-age angst. Even though I could never relate to the concept of partying in high school like the cool kids (and the deeply uncool) of Euphoria High, some of the show’s character arcs and their struggles felt gut-wrenchingly personal to me and to some of the people I love the most in this world, such as the various cycles of addiction and recovery, codependence, mania and depression, strain and instability at home, and all of the raw emotion and hypersensitive connective tissue that exists between these things.
Now, in a way that is giving me flashbacks to the Game of Thrones finale 1 , I find myself once again at odds with many of my friends who have watched the show, as well as a heck of a lot of people I don’t know online who seem to have absolutely loathed the finale/the final season in general. And, to be clear, I do understand and agree with a lot of the criticism: the time jump and tonal shifts were jarring, beloved characters were sidelined (Jules, in particular, felt weirdly peripheral for someone who was once so central to the emotional architecture of the show), and there were obvious loose plot threads left dangling, character arcs that felt underfed or even largely ignored, and moments when the show seemed less like the Euphoria of old and more like Sam Levinson decided to pivot to neo-Western blood opera on a whim.
1 Listen, I get it: the final season was a bit rushed. But let’s not pretend Dany going full Mad Queen was wholly out of left field, given that she spent pretty much the entire series either craving power, drunk on power, or high off of her white savior complex.
All that being said, there’s a strong case to be made for the merits of Euphoria’s final act – and an argument to be made in opposition to reddit users’ complaints about the show’s use of Christian imagery and themes. Biblical imagery, explorations of spirituality, and themes like redemption and grace have been present for the entire series; they didn’t randomly appear in the last season as some kind of epic bait-and-switch betrayal meant to propagandize its viewers.
From the beginning, Euphoria was about the fatal shimmer of things that promise transcendence and relief from pain and grief but ultimately deliver only captivity. Sam Levinson has said as much. In his post-finale interview with The New York Times, he explained that the show was always meant to show the seduction first and the consequences after. Characters we see desperately pursuing their own personal “euphoria,” and clinging to fleeting highs ultimately surrender to their vices, often facing far-reaching consequences that spiral out of their control. The many temptations of our fallen moral world are portrayed as seductive because they are seductive. The finale simply strips away the body glitter and leaves the captivity and consequences.
That’s why, to me, Rue’s death didn’t feel like a cheap twist. It felt more like the culmination of the show’s central warning.
Anyone who has been close to someone battling the relentless demon of addiction knows the startling accuracy of the portrait that Levinson paints: one minute someone is surviving, and maybe, for a time, they’re doing better; perhaps they even seem to have really turned things around! But then, one day, out of the blue, your phone rings, and you get the call that you always feared but somehow kind of always expected. And in an instant – they’re gone, irreversibly relegated to memory, youth extinguished far too soon.
This was the reality at the height of the opioid crisis during the Biden administration, with over 74,000 annual fatalities attributed to synthetic opioids in 2023 as fentanyl poured into America through our unsecured borders. It remains the reality even now, though, according to the CDC and the DEA, the yearly death toll attributed to opioids has rapidly declined since its peak in 2022. The DEA’s seizures in 2025 alone are equivalent to more than 369 million lethal doses of fentanyl, in addition to 126 million deadly doses taken off the streets and out of circulation so far in 2026 thanks to DEA efforts. In other words, the crisis has improved, but it certainly has not disappeared. Hope remains, but so does the threat.
That context matters because Rue’s death happens in a world where the risk of relapse is much more dangerous than slipping into another messy spiral. Relapse can mean death, and it can happen almost instantaneously, as we see in the case of the girl who overdoses early on in the third season during Rue’s first encounter with Alamo Brown. Whether fentanyl use is intentional or not, the space between “just one pill” and total finality has collapsed into an infinitesimally narrower margin of error.
While I’d argue that the show stands on its own as a piece of art, when it comes to complaints that the show totally changed between the first, second, and third seasons, it’s interesting to consider the contextual implications of Euphoria’s real-world production timeline, and how the show changed in response to the ways in which the whole world changed. The show began before the COVID-19 pandemic, in a world that was already fraught and anxious – something that Euphoria explored from the very beginning. In the pilot, for instance, Rue reflects on her September 11th, 2001, birth and the anxious inner and outer world she has known since her first breath.
Flash forward to 2020, and the world outside the show changed: during COVID-era lockdowns, productions halted, isolation deepened, loneliness intensified, overdose deaths climbed – and the impact of these IRL-issues wasn’t strictly limited to the outside world. Angus Cloud, who plays the character “Fezco” in seasons one and two, died of an accidental overdose in 2023. In the NYT interview, Levinson says that Cloud’s death changed how he understood Rue’s fate.
Art imitates life, and the sum of Euphoria feels reflective of the sadness, emptiness, and dissatisfaction many young people have felt moving through the late 2010s into the 2020s. We see it in characters chasing internet fame, love, lust, identity, meaning, purpose, power, and ever-higher highs. Everyone is reaching – desperately – for a substitute salvation. To me, that’s where the faith elements and Rue’s audiobook Bible study and subsequent new Christian faith become not only defensible, but necessary, timely, and particularly powerful.
A quick peek at Reddit made it clear that a ton of people felt personally victimized by the religious themes, calling it “borderline religious propaganda”. To be fair, I can kind of understand why it might seem jarring or uncharacteristic of the show to end on a spiritually contemplative, pro-Christian, and vaguely patriotic note, with an American flag waving over the idyllic Christian homestead where Rue found refuge earlier in the season, while Rue’s disembodied voice blesses us with a soft final declaration of, “May God bless us all” (Very Tiny Tim of her!).
Ultimately, though, I deeply appreciated the inclusion of this storyline, and the time spent delving more deeply into what I’d argue has always been a throughline of the show. Since last fall, I’ve been on my own personal journey of embracing the Christian faith through independent Bible study, so, for me, it was interesting to see the ways in which Rue’s exploration of faith mirrored my own.
If the finale were simplistic Christian propaganda, Rue would have found God, gotten sober, reconciled perfectly with everyone she hurt, and walked off into a sunlit future. Instead, the show gives us something much more difficult: faith without guaranteed rescue. God does not enter the story holding a magic wand, and Rue’s budding faith doesn’t instantly heal her or crown her victorious over all her inner battles. Rue reaches for God, or at least for a language large enough to hold her suffering, but does not receive the clean, inspirational recovery arc audiences may have wanted for her. No one is handed a tidy conversion arc wrapped in a bow. Yet the finale succeeds in illustrating how faith can offer a language for grief, judgment, mercy, and hope when every secular promise has failed.
Lexi’s arc is maybe the most articulate expression of this. In one hilariously ironic moment earlier in the season, she tells Rue that she would not be friends with her if Rue became a Christian because Christians are too judgmental. It is a perfect little snapshot of modern reflex: the preemptive judgment of judgmental people. But by the time the final season’s final episode ends, Lexi finally decides to pick up the Bible herself, and she reads it, and says she maybe even needs to read it again. The Bible isn’t what she thought it was back when she scoffed at Rue for taking an interest in it. Instead, Lexi encounters scripture as a living library of human chaos: sex, violence, betrayal, grief, mercy, exile, forgiveness, death, family, and the insistence that people must persist, keep going, and keep living as best as they can even after being walloped by devastation and destruction.
People are often comfortable with religion as critique, trauma, satire, villainy, or decorative, museum-piece aesthetic. True to its track record, Euphoria stays provocative in that it actually allows religion to be portrayed as sincere, even beautiful. Beneath the bloodshed, the excess, the uneven plotting, and the abandoned threads, Euphoria ends on a positive, redemptive, and hopeful note. Levinson himself pushed back against the idea that the ending was purely pessimistic, suggesting that if people can take care of their loved ones and believe in something greater than themselves, they may still be able to carve out a future. The finale may not be happy, but it’s also not nihilistic, nor hollow. Rue does not live to attain the peace on earth that we wanted for her, but the show’s final moments suggest that we can still find a little grace in this world after tragedy strikes.
Euphoria does something bold by allowing the Bible to be more than a symbol of repression (or any of the things that Lexi purports it to be, at its core, though we know that hypocrisy and bad actors have existed in the church throughout history), for Christianity to be more than shorthand for judgment, and for the American flag to be more than an ironic set piece in some pseudo-intellectual, thinly veiled satire slop (*cough cough* One Battle After Another *cough cough*). It allows these things to mean something profound, sincere, optimistic, and ultimately – freeing.
In the shameful aftermath of all that glitter, sex, betrayal, drug abuse, grief, and ruin, Euphoria ends by suggesting that there is something bigger than all of this – something bigger than just chasing the next high and indulging in whatever makes us feel good. It also offers a powerful warning against substance abuse in a way that some might view as afterschool-special-level-preachy, but I viewed as profoundly real: while there is grace on this earth, we are not immune from consequence, and mercy is not a loophole or a cheat code. The finale asserts that our choices matter, that evil is real, and that grace, when it appears, does not erase the wreckage, but that it can give us comfort, guidance, and the will to push ever onward.
