Euphoria Season 3 Buries Its Hero Literally and Leaves Three Episodes to Answer for It

The show's fifth episode ends with Rue Bennett's head above ground and a polo mallet swinging toward it, a cliffhanger that exposes how far the series has drifted from the character study that made it essential viewing.

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This article contains full plot details from Euphoria Season 3, Episode 5, "This Little Piggy," now streaming on HBO and HBO Max.

When Euphoria premiered in 2019, it built its reputation on the psychological interiority of Rue Bennett — a teenager navigating addiction, grief, and identity in a world that offered no easy exits. Six years later, the show's fifth episode of its third and reportedly final season has Rue buried neck-deep in a remote field while a drug lord gallops toward her on horseback with a polo mallet. The screen cuts to black.

According to Coming Soon, Euphoria Season 3, Episode 5 ended with Rue Bennett, played by Zendaya, buried up to her neck on Alamo's ranch, as Alamo rode toward her while swinging a polo mallet before the screen cut to black. HBO has not officially confirmed whether the character survives the attack. 

How Rue Got There

The episode's central tension stems from Rue's ongoing work as a DEA informant. After Alamo asks her to draw a map of Laurie's farm, Rue passes the information to federal agents, who want her to help set up a wiretap on Laurie's operation

The plan begins to unravel when Magick, played by musician Rosalía, turns on Rue. At the club, Magick confronts Alamo directly, telling him that Rue had tried to frame her. She points out that she was present during the robbery, raising a question Alamo had not previously considered: why was Rue able to identify one robber's face on camera but claimed not to recognise the voices of others she should have known from Laurie's crew? 

Alamo then approaches Rue while she is having dinner with Maddy at their favourite diner, and tells her to get in the truck waiting outside. At the ranch, Bishop, G, and Kidd make Rue dig a hole "up to her throat." Once she finishes digging, they bury her up to her head. 

By morning, Alamo rides down the hill on horseback, holding a riding crop with a mallet on the end, and swings it toward Rue's head. She screams, and the scene cuts to black. 

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Absent from Episode 6

The cliffhanger is compounded by a notable structural choice. According to Just Jared, Episode 6 does not feature any scenes of Rue, leaving her fate entirely unresolved for at least one more week. Three episodes remain in the season, with the finale scheduled to air on May 31. 

Actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who plays Alamo, has hinted that Rue could survive because Alamo still considered her useful, noting that the character had become interested in Maddy's online business model and wanted to expand his operation through social media. 

A Show That Has Changed Its Own Terms

What most post-episode coverage has focused on is whether Rue lives. The more revealing question is what the scene exposes about the show itself.

As Variety's Marlow Stern observed, the third season more closely resembles a crime drama spliced with a telenovela than the show's original creation, with the kinetic visual style of earlier seasons replaced by wide shots on 65mm film. The show that once built its identity around Rue's interiority — her voiceover, her relationships, her relapse — has, by its fifth episode, placed her inside a literal hole in the ground, passive and trapped, her fate dependent entirely on the decisions of men around her.

That shift is not incidental. In making Rue a DEA informant embedded in a drug cartel, the writers have moved her from protagonist of her own story to instrument of a plot. The buried-alive cliffhanger is the logical endpoint of that transformation: maximum jeopardy, minimum agency.

According to W Magazine, the season finale will be HBO's longest episode ever — a signal that the network is treating this conclusion as a significant event. Whether it can re-centre the character who made the show worth watching in the first place remains, as of this episode, unanswered. 

New episodes of Euphoria Season 3 air Sundays on HBO and stream on HBO Max at 9 p.m. ET. In India, the series is available on JioHotstar.