Euphoria Searched for an Epiphany. What It Found Was Nonsense.

The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria.Euphoria’s troubled protagonist, Rue (played by Zendaya), spends much of the drama’s final season dodging one potentially violent death after another. As a drug mule turned strip-club employee turned arms dealer turned informant, she barely survives being buried up to her neck, getting dragged by a horse down a dirt path, and becoming target practice in multiple shoot-outs.Yet when she does die, midway through the series finale, which aired last night, the scene unfolds quietly: Rue, recovering from a long day of double-crossing her employers and suffering a wound on her palm, overdoses on the fentanyl with which her painkillers have secretly been laced. The sequence stands out for its contemplative beauty. Rue, asleep, dreams of walking through her childhood home and seeing her mother, reaching for her before being embraced in return. Reality and fantasy blur. She smiles even as she gasps for air, then drifts off into endless slumber.If only Euphoria had maintained that restraint across the rest of its bloated ending. Rue’s fate underlined how addiction can be a frustratingly misunderstood disease, but the show around her undercut that message again and again through its over-the-top storytelling. In its conclusion, Euphoria tried to provide both a serious look at the fentanyl epidemic and an extended homage to action-Western tropes about good and evil. The result was scattershot and murkily rendered, undermining the significance of its heroine’s tragic journey.The episode’s frequent detours into lazy platitudes about faith didn’t help. Across Season 3, Rue, in turmoil, shows interest in the Bible. But after her death, the show’s characters allude to religion in ham-fisted ways. Lexi (Maude Apatow), Rue’s childhood friend, had been largely indifferent toward Rue all season; in her last scene, however, Lexi delivers a monologue about how enlightening she has found the Bible in the months sin