Euphoria season 3 nears finale with Nate's shocking death
A rattlesnake bite and a necrotizing wound left Nate Jacobs looking dead, turning Euphoria’s penultimate hour into its bleakest shock yet.
Nate Jacobs appeared to die in Euphoria’s penultimate Season 3 episode, and the show staged the moment like a final curtain. In “Rain or Shine,” now streaming on HBO Max, a rattlesnake bit Jacob Elordi’s character through a vent after loan sharks trapped him over a reported $1 million debt. Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, was kidnapped and given three days to raise the money to buy Nate’s freedom, but the episode ended with Nate in Cassie’s arms as his body necrotized, making the death feel conclusive.
The episode also kept Rue Bennett, played by Zendaya, in danger after she was nearly caught in a robbery tied to a drug cartel. Faye, played by Chloe Cherry, turned on Rue after being warned that Wayne, played by Toby Wallace, wanted Rue dead. The hour extended the show’s five-years-later timeline, where Cassie and Nate are married and Rue is working off debt to drug dealer Laurie, played by Martha Kelly, pushing the series farther from its high-school origins and deeper into adult stakes built on coercion, money and survival.
That shift helps explain why Euphoria still commands attention deep into its run. HBO describes the series as a drama about drugs, sex, identity, trauma, social media, love and friendship, and Season 3 has leaned hard into that mix while turning the show into a cultural stress test for how much excess prestige TV can sustain. The returning cast, including Hunter Schafer, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow and Colman Domingo as Ali, anchors a story that now treats time jump, marriage and debt as part of the same emotional wreckage that once played out in hallways and parties.
Behind the scenes, the season was delayed by the deaths of Angus Cloud, Eric Dane and executive producer Kevin Turen, along with the Hollywood strikes and creative differences over the season’s direction. Sam Levinson has said losing Cloud was “very hard” for the production and that he wanted to keep Cloud “alive” through the storytelling. He also said he has “no plans” for Season 4 and is focused on finishing Season 3 strongly. That makes the episode’s shock less like a one-off stunt than a statement of intent: Euphoria still gets people talking because it keeps turning emotional collapse into spectacle, and now the question is whether that formula can still surprise.
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