A Full Explanation of What Happens to Rue in the 'Euphoria' Finale (SPOILERS)

Spoiler warning: This article contains major spoilers for the series finale of Euphoria.

Season 3 of Euphoria took no less than several hundred business days to finally come to fruition, but with it came a handful of wild storylines for the main characters. This includes Rue, whose tragic story of drug addiction and loss follows her for the duration of the series and across time jumps. So does Rue die in the Euphoria finale?

Even for those who watched the HBO series finale live, there is a bit of uncertainty of how Rue's story ends. Her storyline in the third season isn't the only one full of dangerous criminals and drugs, but it takes the front seat more often than not as Rue tries to figure out how to get through it and hopefully get out of it.

Rue follows through with her orders in the series finale of Euphoria. She risks her life to get Alamo's bag from Laurie's safe, and she barely makes it back to him in one piece.

And then, he rewards her with painkillers and a $10,000 bonus. But in the end, the painkillers actually kill Rue, though it isn't intentional.

After Rue takes a couple of them, but nowhere near the entire bottle, as some viewers might have feared, she dies on Ali's couch. He finds her the next morning and tests the pills for fentanyl.

The result is positive, and there is no bringing Rue back. According to Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, it was the only logical way for him to write Rue's ending.

"People relapse. They f--k up. They're not ready to get clean," he said during an HBO segment that aired after the episode. "There's no reason to sugarcoat it. I wanted to tell this story for Angus [Cloud] and for people who weren't granted a second chance."

He also told The New York Times, "In terms of the story we set out to tell, which is a story about addiction and its consequences, this feels like the end to me."

At first, it doesn't seem like Rue is dead. That's because there is a dreamlike state where Ali wakes up to find her feeling better despite her injuries.

Then, she sees Fez escape prison in a news segment, and she rushes out to meet up with him. From there, we see a series of scenes where Rue sees Jules on her bike from the earlier seasons, a shot of herself and her sister riding in a car with their mom, and a clip of her and Fez with their arms around each other in a field.

Then, there are shots of Rue struggling to breathe as she lies on Ali's couch. And, as Ali later confirms, it's because Rue accidentally overdosed on fentanyl due to the pulls that Alamo gave her.

She seemed to take them for her pain and nothing more, but it doesn't take much to kill her.

At the end of the episode, Ali sees a vision of her as he says grace with the religious family Rue met at the beginning of the season. And, it seems, this means that Rue is in a more peaceful place now.