If there is one thing Sam Levinson knows how to do, it is disturb. In the case of Euphoria, I would even say traumatize. The show’s final season was marked by the visual, moral, and physical destruction of its main antagonist: Nate Jacobs.

Nate had always been a monster in Euphoria. The difference is that, in the earlier seasons, Sam Levinson filmed that monstrosity almost with fascination. Nate was abusive, manipulative, violent, obsessive, cruel to women, cruel to men, and cruel to himself. He terrorized Maddy, psychologically destroyed Jules, used Cassie as an emotional projection, beat people up, lied compulsively, and reproduced the exact toxic masculinity he learned at home from Cal. Even so, there was always a certain glamour surrounding him. The camera liked Nate. The cinematography liked Nate. Even his breakdowns were framed like grand, stylized male tragedies. Of course, it helped that someone as talented and striking as Jacob Elordi was playing him.

That is why so many people started to feel the show was “softening” the character once he began receiving more vulnerable moments. The problem is that vulnerability does not erase violence. And Euphoria entered a strange territory where part of the audience started to read Nate almost as someone “redeemable,” especially after the exposure of his father, his emotional emptiness, and the scenes where he genuinely seemed lost. As if suffering automatically created redemption.

But Nate never stopped being dangerous.

Maybe that is why his downward spiral felt inevitable. Not because every violent character needs to die, but because the series created someone incapable of existing without control. Nate controlled his environment through intimidation, sex, fear, and the performance of a perfect masculinity he had learned to reproduce from an early age. Once he begins losing that control, what remains is a character imploding under the weight of his own emotional incapacity.

And that is when his death becomes body horror.

Nate was literally torn apart piece by piece once he left the high school environment; he continued behaving the same way he always had. He overestimated himself, tried to outsmart the law, and got involved with criminals. Losing fingers, being beaten, and being buried alive already felt like brutal punishment, but then came the rattlesnake.

The slow approach, his discovery of the breathing pipe, the snake crawling down the face of a desperate, terrified Nate, incapable of stopping his own end as it slowly approached him. There is something almost cruelly intimate about the sequence because Euphoria forces the audience to remain there with him.

The snake scene is not just grotesque. It is deliberately humiliating. When we finally see Nate dead, his swollen, darkened, almost animalistic tongue is shocking because Nate always used language as a weapon. He seduced, threatened, lied, manipulated, and destroyed people through words. So watching his mouth and tongue become something monstrous feels like an unmistakably symbolic punishment. Euphoria turns his body into an image of total degradation.

What is interesting is that the series does not frame this as heroic catharsis. There is no redemption or beauty here, only extreme physical suffering stretched out until it becomes almost unbearable to watch. And that speaks directly to the show’s biggest problem from the very beginning: its inability to find limits for pain.

Because Euphoria often seems to believe emotional intensity can only exist through the complete destruction of its characters. Did Nate need to fall? Dramatically, perhaps yes. But the way the show chooses to do it says a great deal about the pleasure it finds in excess. The sequence stops functioning purely as narrative and enters the territory of cruel spectacle, almost as if the audience also needed to be punished alongside him.

The internet, as always, became divided. Not exactly because people wanted to “save” Nate or believed he deserved mercy, but because the scene simply felt sadistic. And it reminded me of other equally graphic and unforgettable television deaths: the Purple Wedding, or Joffrey Baratheon’s death in Game of Thrones, and Ramsay Bolton’s death in the same series. Two of the cruelest and most terrifying villains in television history. Joffrey died poisoned and choking on his own blood; Ramsay was devoured by his own hounds.

And the worst part? I celebrated both deaths. Nate’s, though, with that snake slowly approaching him, still leaves me disturbed.

Maybe that is exactly why so many people were as shocked as I was. It is not only the death of Nate Jacobs, but the suffocating feeling of watching a character reduced to a collapsing body while the camera refuses to look away. And it was very difficult to watch.