‘Euphoria’ and ‘Hacks’ Say Goodbye. Plus, ‘Star City’ Takes Off.

Key takeaways

• Rue dies from a single fentanyl-laced pill, presented as a dying hallucination. The finale structures her death as a fantasy morning in which she imagines fulfilling all her promises: showing up for Fez, reconnecting with her family, being present for the people she loves. The shift into hallucination is marked by childhood images and the realization that Fez's prison escape was never real. She took one Percocet from her boss, whose supply was established earlier in the season as fentanyl-contaminated. Sam Levinson has said publicly that if he were using drugs today the way he once did, fentanyl would likely have killed him. The finale's argument is simple and brutal: in 2026, one pill ends the story.

• Ali's strip club rampage functions as a genre fantasy about fentanyl grief. Coleman Domingo's character quits AA, picks up a drink, saws off a shotgun, and kills the traffickers responsible for Rue's death. Chris traces the sequence directly to films Levinson has championed publicly, including Dirty Harry, Rolling Thunder, and Taxi Driver, and argues the rampage represents the revenge fantasy that families of fentanyl victims carry and can never act on. The hosts debate whether this reads as earned catharsis or as exploitation, and land somewhere between the two.

• Angus Cloud's death from fentanyl became part of the show's ending. The actor who played Fez died during the hiatus, and the finale incorporates his character's prison escape and appearance in Rue's dying vision. Sam Levinson has confirmed in interviews that Cloud's death changed what the finale was going to be. Both hosts call it one of the most personal and human ways any television show has handled the loss of a cast member, because it made the real-world tragedy canonical rather than silently written around.

• The season's core problem is that it never fully committed to either mode. Levinson writes and directs everything, and the show delivers powerful individual moments. But the connective tissue is often convoluted or ignored. Jules gets almost nothing to do, Cassie and Lexi are barely present, and the plot mechanics around Maddie revealing Rue as a DEA informant to Alamo never receive the emotional payoff they set up. The hosts compare the limitation to what happens when a film director's instincts are stretched across eight television episodes without a writers' room to stress-test the seams.

• Hacks chose not to kill Deborah, and the hosts have mixed feelings about it. The Hacks finale revealed Deborah has cancer, sent her and Ava to Paris, then had Deborah choose clinical trials over assisted suicide in Switzerland. Chris describes this as "Chewbacca-ing," walking an audience through the emotional experience of losing a main character and then reversing course. He acknowledges Hacks earned the choice with three seasons of consistent tone, but the contrast with Euphoria's willingness to follow through on Rue's death makes the retreat more visible.

• Star City is the best new show in a long time. The Apple TV+ spinoff of For All Mankind is set in 1960s Soviet Russia, following KGB officer Lyudmila Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) running a mole hunt inside the space program and cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) sent to the moon as a politically convenient replacement. Shot in Lithuania with brutalist production design, starring Rhys Ifans as the chief designer, the show brings trained British and Irish actors into Soviet roles in a way that achieves the same credibility Chernobyl managed. Chris calls it the "Andor of For All Mankind" and singles out Englert's performance as immediately distinctive. No prior knowledge of For All Mankind is required to follow it.

People, organizations, products, and links mentioned

• Sam Levinson — creator and director of Euphoria
• Zendaya — plays Rue
• Coleman Domingo — plays Ali/Martin
• Angus Cloud — played Fez; died from fentanyl exposure
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — plays Alamo, the trafficker antagonist
• Hunter Schaefer — plays Jules; does not speak in the finale
• Maude Apatow — plays Lexi
• Marshawn Lynch — appears in the finale
• Rhys Ifans — plays the chief designer of the Soviet space program in Star City
• Anna Maxwell Martin — plays KGB officer Lyudmila Raskova in Star City
• Alice Englert — plays cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova in Star City; daughter of Jane Campion
• Agnes O'Casey — plays Arena in Star City
• Ruby Serkis — appears in Star City; daughter of Andy Serkis
• Elliot Salt — appears in Star City; previously in Slow Horses
• Ronald Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi — showrunners of both For All Mankind and Star City
• Nick Murphy — directed the opening two Star City episodes
• Jane Campion — director of The Piano and Top of the Lake; Alice Englert's mother
• Mike Schur — executive producer of Hacks; creator of Parks and Recreation and The Good Place
• Joanna and Rob — hosts of the Ringer's Prestige TV Podcast, who went live after the Euphoria finale
• The Searchers (1956) — John Ford film invoked for Ali's final scenes
• Dirty Harry, Rolling Thunder, Taxi Driver — films referenced for Ali's rampage
• Chernobyl (HBO) — referenced for production style and cast overlap with Star City
• Battlestar Galactica — Ronald Moore series; invoked to describe Star City's depth with secondary characters
• Euphoria (HBO)
• Hacks (HBO)
• Star City (Apple TV+)
• For All Mankind (Apple TV+)
• Paramount — in the process of purchasing HBO/Max

Notable moments

• Aidan describes Rue's death as "the automatic existence life switch that is fentanyl," calling it effective precisely because it offered no redemption arc and no sacrifice, just sudden absence.
• Chris calls Ali's rampage a grief fantasy representing what families of fentanyl victims want but can never act on: the ability to shoot addiction itself.
• Ali is framed throughout the finale's closing scenes like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, the irredeemable outsider barred from domestic life. He is then invited to the dinner table. Both hosts call this inversion one of the episode's strongest choices.
• Chris coins "Chewbacca-ing" to describe Hacks pulling Deborah back from death, invoking his earlier critique of Rise of Skywalker: "You have stolen people's feelings and then said JK."
• On Star City, Chris says simply: "The show is fucking awesome," adding that watching trained British and Irish actors inhabit Soviet characters in Lithuanian locations achieves the same uncanny gravity Chernobyl pulled off.
• The hosts marvel that Apple greenlit a 1960s Soviet spy show, a spinoff of a modestly performing series led by Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin rather than a bankable American star—making no apparent commercial concessions to help it find an audience.
• Chris's final word on Levinson: "Whatever you say about this show and whatever he does next, he believes it. There is no lack of courage of convictions here."

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