Euphoria Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Judge Not

"If there's a beginning, there must be an end," Rue says to open our penultimate episode. It starts with another flashback, this time for Ali (Colman Domingo), Rue's wise NA sponsor who hasn't been around much lately.

He's smoking crack cocaine with a wise-cracking prostitute with a wrist brace played by Natasha Lyonne. He's cheating on his wife, who questions him later at the dinner table with his two young daughters present. It devolves into an awful screaming match.

"Without God, short-term desires become long-term patterns," Rue narrates. "And when you have a family, you hurt more than just yourself."

Something happens, and Ali ends up in the hospital. He has his moment of clarity there when he rejects painkillers to help him through. He starts going to 12-step meetings. "Ali figured if he could change his habits, maybe he could heal his past and transform his mistakes into blessings," Rue says. "It became his mission in life."

We see Ali beginning to sponsor people, preaching about hope. He is sponsoring one such young man, who later dies, despite Ali's best efforts. "Even though he lost some battles, Ali knew he was doing good in this world,” Rue says. “And when the pandemic hit, he made sure to check in with his sponsees every day." It’s interesting that Euphoria makes a point to show how the pandemic impacted each character—a topic most other shows don’t address at all.

Ali tries to go to a church for a meeting, but it’s boarded up. "The future will be bright," he keeps telling fellow addicts. But he keeps finding his sponsees dead. "Every time he lost someone, he'd write down their name and the date,” Rue says. We see him flipping through an awfully long book of names and dates. "I guess you could say it was a book of the dead. A reminder of how the story of addiction often ends."

Now we're with Alamo and Big Eddy, who has a colostomy bag and a walker, from getting shot during the robbery. Alamo isn't exactly empathetic about it. He tells Big Eddy that he needs him to take some girls down to Mexico for a "tune-up,” or plastic surgery. Alamo adds that he needs to bring one of Laurie's boys: "Consider it your road to redemption."

Big Eddy pulls up in an ambulance to Laurie’s farm, and Wayne and Harley show up with guns loaded. The DEA is listening to everything.

"As soon as I started believing in God, my life got considerably worse, until it got better," Rue is meanwhile telling Lexi. “Life is beyond better now,” Rue says. "It might sound crazy, but I think he revealed himself to me." She's talking about the burning bush, or burning Joshua tree. Lexi brushes her off, saying Rue can stay with her, but she has a lot of writing to get done and can't keep "engaging with her revelation."

"God set the Joshua tree on fire because he could sense that I was giving up," Rue says anyway, while reading her Bible.

"So he set an endangered tree on fire to talk to you?" Lexi says. Rue doesn't appreciate her sarcasm. "I've done a lot of evil, and I've never really thought about it until now, but it's very clear," Rue says. Lexi says she wouldn't call Rue evil, exactly, but Rue is having her moment of clarity, and there's no stopping her train of thought.

Rue reveals to Lexi that she's been working with Nazis—"basically Nazis"—and that she's caught between them and Alamo. She tells Lexi she's working with the DEA, and Lexi laughs, not believing her. “You working for the Drug Enforcement Administration is hilarious," Lexi says, and accuses Rue of using. "You're sitting here judging me the whole fucking time," Rue says. Lexi says she can't blame Rue's mom for not talking to her anymore. Rue storms out to the courtyard, but notices someone watching her from behind Cassie's blinds. Someone's in there, but it's not Cassie—as Rue knocks on the door before giving up and walking away, we see a gun with a silencer pointing at the peephole.

A few days earlier, Cassie had received a call from an unknown number. It was Naz, and he threatened her not to call the police. He had Nate held hostage, and he wanted Cassie’s OnlyFans money. But as Rue tells us, "Unfortunately, some actions are permanent.” Cassie desperately tries to get her OnlyFans account reactivated, but it’s gone along with all of her followers. She never should’ve deleted it!

Meanwhile, Patty Lance has been called to her boss's office, who is questioning her decision to give Cassie a bigger role on LA Nights. “Look, I get it, you want to push the envelope, deal with the digital economy, but do you have to hire a real porn person? It's like telling me you have to hire a serial killer to play Hannibal Lecter. Why invite the controversy? Just hire an actor."

"You're right, I don't give a shit," Patty says. And just like that, her crusade to help a young Jane Fonda in Klute flies out the window along with her principles. It works out in Lexi's favor because the network loves the storyline she wrote where Cassie gets killed off. "They don't want to deal with the complications of hiring a sex worker," Patty tells her. "Do you mind calling your sister and letting her know?" Lexi is thrilled.

Maddy is getting chewed out by her boss again, too, for misrepresenting their agency. "You send one of your porno people to audition for Patty," she says. "Best of luck being a modern-day madam," she tells Maddy as she fires her.

Then Maddy finds out Cassie deleted her account. She bursts into Cassie's apartment, where Cassie is sobbing on the floor. "I should beat your fucking ass," Maddy tells her. "I should have never let you back into my life. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them." She slaps Cassie across the face and tells her she's going to work and listen to every "motherfucking word" that comes out of Maddy's mouth. She's not going to blink without Maddy's permission. She's no longer her manager, but her boss, bitch.

Cassie just keeps trading one controlling partner for another. Maddy calls TMZ and gives them a tip that Cassie will be at dinner with Dylan Reid—Maddy's old playbook, at it again. Dylan and Cassie get paparazzi'd together at dinner, and Cassie brings him back to her apartment, pouring shots for them both and seducing him to Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy.”

"I'm really sorry about the LA Nights stuff," Dylan tells her. Is he a genuine person in this world of fakes? He says he fought for her to stay on the show, but Cassie is used to being judged. "Once I got these,” she says, gesturing at her chest, “people underestimated me.” He says it's the same with fame—people only see his character, and not the real Dylan. She convinces him to take a few selfies before having sex that he can barely handle. He gets up for a glass of water, and she breaks into his phone and sneakily posts their selfie from his Instagram account, captioned "world's greatest fuck."

Maddy comes over and tells her the post has been trending for hours, and Cassie's gotten all her subscribers back. It's at that moment Maddy notices Nate's finger sitting in an empty glass in the sink, which Dylan was drinking out of moments ago. Cassie fills Maddy in on what’s really been going on, and we cut to Nate with his hands in zip ties, telling Naz that Cassie will come through with the money soon. Naz calls his goon Artur over to measure Nate and see if he's really 6'5" like he says. Why? Naz says Nate is going to need a custom coffin. "Is it possible that she's enjoying her freedom a little too much?" Naz asks Nate about Cassie before ordering Artur to drag Nate off for another beating.

Rue is visiting Ali, and he wishes she had told him what was going on with Alamo so that he could have helped her. "I ain't got shit but the people I love,” he tells her. “Only reason I'm still here is so I can do some good in this world, be of service. I show up, rain or shine. And if someone's forcing you to do something against your will, I got a 12-gauge shotgun that can take care of that."

It’s all for naught, though. Rue is beyond Ali’s earthly help at this point. He begs her not to go through with the DEA’s plan of raiding Laurie’s, but she says she has no choice, or her whole family will be killed. She does tell Ali that God spoke to her, and he's a little more receptive than Lexi was, at least.

Here's what God told Rue: "I've heard your cries, I hear your pain. Have faith, and I will take you from Egypt and lead you to the Promised Land." It’s coincidentally the same thing God said to Moses, Ali points out. Rue says that after this run, when Alamo, Laurie, and everyone else involved are in handcuffs like the DEA promised, she's going to Texas—back to the homestead she stayed at in the very first episode, with the happiest people she'd ever met. 613 Jerusalem Road, just like she wrote down. "You think this homestead is the Promised Land?" Ali asks her. "What other explanation is there?" she says.

This episode hammers home Sam Levinson’s understandable beef with fentanyl itself. "The thing about fentanyl is, why kill the customer?" Ali asks. "It's not even happening in other countries. Only in America. Nobody really gives a fuck." Ali asks Rue if she ever worries the fentanyl she smuggles will kill people, and she asks if he thinks anyone can be redeemed. He tells her that if she wants to undo the evil she's done, she has to start by changing herself.

"From creation, to struggle, to redemption—life, no matter what, is being pulled toward a brighter future," Ali says. "And even if it doesn't feel like it, right now is a blessing. If you step back from this moment and look at the history of your life, your life and the history of the world, you'll see that there's never been anything but blessing." He brings up the Old Testament and tells Rue he feels like he should mention that Moses doesn't make it to the Promised Land.

In the morning, Rue leaves Ali a note that just says, "Forgive me." Wayne and Big Eddy drive down to Mexico with Kitty and another girl in the back, and 80 kilos of fentanyl in the bed of the truck. The DEA is preparing for its big raid.

Rue, meanwhile, is with G, preparing to go to Laurie's. Rue slams her face into the dashboard of G’s truck to give herself a broken nose. Her story is that Alamo tried to kill her, so she needs Laurie's help. Laurie reluctantly takes her in, and the crew has a little neo-Nazi bonfire, shooting off guns.

Back at her apartment, Cassie gets knocked out by Artur, and Naz ties her up by her hands and feet. He gives her 72 hours to “figure things out.” That's how long it takes to die of dehydration, he says. In other words, that’s what will happen to Nate, who has been buried alive in a 6’5” coffin in the empty Sunset Settlers lot. Nate's family is looking for him, his brother walking right over where he's buried. Unfortunately, Nate’s desperate screams are attracting a rattlesnake. When the snake's shadow passes over the airhole Naz left in the coffin, Nate cries, "Thank you, God," thinking someone heard him. But the snake slithers into the coffin and strikes Nate, biting him in the throat. Pretty twisted stuff.

Cassie calls Maddy and puts her on speakerphone. Naz gives Maddy her options: hand over a million dollars, or he'll start slicing up Cassie's face.

Laurie's crew isn't really buying Rue's story, but they thank her anyway, because her lies have brought them blessings—like Faye, and their momentary domination of Alamo. But now, they say, Rue has to pay for her crimes of treason against their crew. They throw out possible punishments: cutting her eyelids off, pimping her out, giving her fentanyl. Then they suggest Rue be the one to kill Alamo herself. She shakes on it, making a deal with the devil, and Wayne slices her hand open.

Maddy has to make her own deal with the devil now, too. She meets with Alamo, who has given her a bathing suit to wear and wants her to join him in his jacuzzi. As Maddy told us a few episodes ago, she's “not a fucking hooker,” but she’s in a very uncomfortable situation as she really needs Alamo’s help. She asks him to bail out Cassie and Nate and, in doing so, lets slip that Rue got into a fight with Lexi about the DEA. Alamo, for some reason, barely flinches. Does he already know?

He makes it clear that if Maddy wants help with the Cassie situation, she'll have to "get a little closer." It's unclear what happens between them, but in the next scene, Alamo puts his gun in its holster while Maddy thanks him. They pull up to the Sunset Settlers lot to meet with Naz. She unknowingly walks right over Nate, who is presumably already dead. Artur trades Cassie for the money. "You must really love this girl," Naz tells Maddy. There's nothing in the bag, though, and just as Naz notices, Alamo shoots him dead.

At Laurie’s ranch, Wayne tells Faye that he doesn’t trust Rue, even though she’s Faye’s friend. He says that Nazi SS recruits were given cute, fluffy puppies to raise, and at the end of training, the soldiers would take a knife and cut the poor puppies’ heads off. "That's fucking sick," Faye tells Wayne. But Wayne says he's going to make Faye do just that: put her friend Rue down like a dog.

Artur starts digging up Nate’s coffin with a crane. Alamo tells Maddy that even though they didn't have to hand over the million dollars in the end, he's still planning to hold her to their deal—20% of all future earnings. "It's a steep price to pay for friendship," Alamo tells her, and she's hurt that he's making her pay even though the evening cost him nothing financially. "About time your ass wised up," he tells her, as tears form in her eyes.

They pull out Nate's coffin and open it, only to find him dead from the snakebite—with the snake still hissing on top of him. Maddy and Cassie clutch each other and cry.

At Laurie's, Faye enters Rue's room in the night. She tells Rue that Wayne plans to kill her. Is Faye more of a girl’s girl than a neo-Nazi? She and Rue creep down the basement stairs to take the money from the safe for themselves. Rue puts the 3D-printed key in the safe, but it doesn't work. Faye goes over to where Wayne is passed out drunk with his gun next to him, and pulls the keys off his nightstand. But when Rue finally opens the safe, she only finds a pile of girls’ driver's licenses, including Angel's—the missing stripper from the first two episodes. There's no money in the safe at all, and Faye starts freaking out. "I can't believe I trusted you," Faye says. "How could you do this to me? I thought you were my friend." Rue tries to reason with Faye, promising her they’ll split the money when they find it. But Faye breaks, screaming Wayne's name to wake him up, and the screen cuts to black.