5 last-minute twists Euphoria could throw at us in the season two finale, from death to redemption
Zendaya in Euphoria. (HBO)
The Euphoria season two finale is fast approaching after eight weeks of gripping drama, cutting edge make-up looks, and more memes than the internet knew what to do with.
It’s been a while since a show has held the zeitgeist in its grip to quite the extent of Euphoria. Throughout season two, the teen drama has dominated social media feeds and water-cooler conversations, making it essential to watch the show at your earliest convenience for fear of encountering spoilers.
Ahead of the Euphoria finale Sunday (February 27), naturally, fans of the show are buzzing with theories about what misfortune will fall upon our beloved protagonists. Nika King, who plays Rue’s mother on the show, has even had to take to social media to beg fans to stop harassing them for details on the last episode as apparently even she doesn’t know what’s around the corner.
I have no clue what's happening in the season finale. I never got a whole script. Stop asking. #EuphoriaHBOMax
— iamnikaking (@iamnikaking) February 24, 2022
With a show like Euphoria and its vast ensemble of characters, the possibilities really are endless. However, to whet your appetite for the season’s impending conclusion, we’ve put together a round-up of some of the possible twists and turns which could be in store of Rue, Maddy, Nate and co.
1. Maddy’s revenge
Maddy. (HBO)
Maybe this one is more of a hope than a prediction, but after the beating Maddy has taken in the last few episodes, we have to believe a character as strong and feisty as her will make a comeback of some sort. Last week we saw the woman she babysits for her gift her the (low-key gross) purple sequinned evening gown she occasionally tries on while her boss is out of the house. Savvy and all as Maddy is, we guess she missed the hidden security camera in Samantha’s walk-in wardrobe. Could this gift symbolise a rebirth of Maddy?
Sure, she’s already had the satisfaction of watching her ex-boyfriend and ex-BFF be ridiculed on stage in Lexi’s play in front of the entire school, but we can’t shake the feeling she surely must have made a copy of that infamous DVD of Nate’s dad having sex with an underage Jules. We just hope that, should she use such a weapon in battle with Nate and Cassie, she finds a way to leverage it that doesn’t injure her supposed friend Jules in the process.
2. Jules and Nate reunite
Jules and Nate. (HBO)
Euphoria is not a perfect show by a long shot, and one of it’s most highly criticised flaws is its often-uneven storytelling. While characters like Cassie, Rue and Nate have absorbed the lion’s share of screen time in season two, other popular characters like Kat, Ethan and Jules have taken a significant step back. A casualty of us spending less time with Jules, one of the defining characters of the first season whose character development culminated in the magnificent one-off special “F**k Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob”, is that her catfishing plotline with Nate was essentially abandoned until two episodes ago.
In what has been so far the two characters’ only interaction this season, Nate managed to retrieve the aforementioned DVD from Maddy and opted to give it to Jules for her to dispose of how she saw fit. Before they parted ways however, Nate took the opportunity to tell her that he meant everything he said to her when he was posing as her virtual secret admirer ‘Tyler’, to which she responds that she did too. In the Jules-centric special, we also heard her say that even though her relationship with ‘Tyler’ turned out to be a farce, she felt she got to know him better than she ever knew Rue, even going as far to say she was in love with him.
With Rue and Jules currently split following Rue’s withdrawals-fueled, vitriolic attack on Jules, and Nate having just promptly dumped Cassie at the end of the last episode, could we see some sort of reunion between these characters who both clearly feel the other can see them in a way nobody else can?
3. Dark revelations about Cal and Nate’s relationship
Nate and Cal. (HBO)
Oh god, this one could be categorised as prediction but also under ‘We really hope not’.
We mentioned in last week’s recap that we suspected the chilling nightmare Nate had in which his father mounts him as though to have sex with him was more of an indication of how traumatised he is by their toxic relationship (and the discovery of the sex tape between Cal and Jules), rather than a hint that Cal had sexually abused his him. However, we can’t rule this out as a possibility. In episode six, we heard Nate’s mother remark that he had been a warm, enthusiastic child until the age of nine and then she noticed a sharp change in his character, he turned cold and dark. Could this change have occurred after he experienced some form of a sexual abuse from his father?
We hope this isn’t the case, and it would be off-colour to have Cal come out to his family as queer, only for him to be revealed as a paedophile, but regardless, we think it’s safe to say that Cal will be rearing his ugly head again in some way. We haven’t heard a peep from him since he walked out on his family a couple of episodes ago, leaving only a puddle of piss and decades of familial trauma behind him.
4. Fezco or Ashtray meet an untimely end
Fezco and Ashtray. (HBO)
This is probably one of the most obvious and talked about theories for the season finale. We know that Fezco never made it to Lexi’s play and we can see from the last episode’s teaser that he experiences something so horrific it leaves him in tears, screaming in agony. For all of the misery Euphoria makes us endure, we haven’t yet experienced the death of a main character so it seems likely that a shocking death among the main characters is only a matter of time. The idea that Fezco himself will die feels more like a red herring given how the finale is being promoted – could he instead be howling at the sight of his young counterpart’s death?
5. A redemption moment for Rue
Zendaya as Rue in HBO’s Euphoria (HBO/Twitter)
Perhaps more than anyone else, Rue has had a pretty rough season – she’s just gone through horrendous withdrawals from having to go cold turkey from drugs, she’s in thousands of dollars debt to Laurie, her sinister drug lord, and she’s decimated pretty much all of her close friendships and relationships. Even her own mother told her she had given up on trying to save her in last week’s episode. However in a recent interview with The Cut, Zendaya spoke about how she and show’s creator Sam Levinson worked together to ensure that viewers were left with a glimmer of hope for our beloved narrator.
“The season finale was going to be very different and then halfway through, Sam and I said, ‘We just can’t leave Rue like this. We have to put some fucking hope in this series,” she said.
“Episode eight is where we’ll see that feeling of redemption, that you’re not the worst thing you’ve ever done. I think Rue deserves it and I think anyone who suffers the same as her deserves it,” she added.
The Euphoria season two finale airs Sunday (February 27) on HBO and HBO Max in the US and Monday (February 28) on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK.
