SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for “In God We Trust,” the Season 3 finale of “Euphoria,” now streaming on HBO Max.
For six seasons, Ali was the man with the answers. The recovering addict with the steady voice and the diner booth wisdom, always ready to absorb Rue’s chaos and reflect something cleaner back at her. In the Season 3 finale of Euphoria, now streaming on HBO Max, he walks into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and quietly dismantles everything he once stood for.
It is his last AA meeting, he tells the room. And what follows may be the most quietly devastating monologue the show has ever produced.
Ali lays out the belief that carried him through years of recovery: that empathy is the engine of redemption. That if people could extend compassion toward addicts, healing could begin. Then he says he no longer believes it. Because if you can empathize with the addict, he tells them, you can empathize with the dealer. He will not be part of that cycle anymore.
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He goes home, saws off the barrel of a shotgun, and puts on his old Army dress uniform. He has nothing left to lose.
Colman Domingo, speaking to Variety, traced the internal logic of that transformation directly to Rue’s death. “I think he believed that Rue was his last chance,” Domingo said. “If he could help her, he would feel redeemed for his own tragedies and faults and addiction. If he could do good with Rue, he felt like a better person.”
Domingo noted that Ali’s visual transformation in that final AA scene was deliberate — down to the smallest detail. “He’s not wearing a kufi anymore,” the actor told Variety. “He looks like an ordinary guy.” The spiritual identity Ali had built around himself in recovery has been set aside. What is left is the soldier.
The actor credited series creator Sam Levinson with the structural precision behind the moment, noting that Ali’s backstory in the penultimate episode was essential groundwork. “Once we get his backstory and unpack who he is, we have that to propel us into this final episode,” Domingo told Variety. “It’s a beautiful stroke of genius from Sam Levinson.”
Domingo also reframed the Ali-Rue relationship in terms that make the finale’s grief land harder. What began as a sponsor-sponsee dynamic had quietly shifted into something closer to a surrogate father-daughter bond — a connection Ali described to The Hollywood Reporter earlier this season as unlike anything the show had previously given him.
The Season 3 finale, titled “In God We Trust,” appears to also serve as the series finale. Euphoria has aired on HBO since 2019.
