Did Nate Jacobs Really Die in ‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Episode 7? That Buried Alive Scene Explained

Few characters in prestige television have inspired the kind of complicated, slow-burning audience appetite for consequence that Nate Jacobs has. HBO’s chaotic drama has spent its third season pushing its characters deeper into emotional collapse, and no one has been pushed further or more literally than Jacob Elordi’s Nate, the show’s most prominent male presence since it first premiered in 2019.

Since taking over his father Cal’s business, Nate had blown through most of his investors’ funds and found himself essentially broke, spiraling into a debt that turned ugly fast. Since Season 3 kicked off, Nate had been in a precarious predicament after a business arrangement left him in debt with loan shark Naz, losing a toe twice and his wedding ring finger across a bruising run of episodes.

Then came Episode 7, titled “Rain or Shine,” and the scene that sent the internet into full meltdown. The loan sharks holding Nate hostage over his debt buried him in a shallow grave with a small vent to the outside world, giving Cassie three days to come up with the money to buy Nate’s freedom. Cassie wriggled her way out of the situation with help from Maddy and Alamo, who showed up at the drop site and shot one of the loan sharks dead, ending the standoff, allowing her to reunite with Nate. But some time prior, a rattlesnake had come through the vent and bitten him, making the whole endeavor pointless.

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Nate Jacobs ends the episode incontrovertibly dead, as Cassie weeps over his necrotizing body. It is a fitting end for a character who was terrifying in the beginning but pathetic as of late, and the show leans into that irony fully, wrapping years of escalating menace inside one of the most unglamorous demises a prestige drama has delivered in recent memory.

Behind the scenes, the production went to striking lengths to make the moment feel real. A behind-the-scenes video revealed that production used a boa constrictor with a fake rattle for the coffin scene, while the shots of the reptile approaching the drain used a real rattlesnake, interestingly named “little b*tch”. Elordi, reflecting on the sequence in that same video, was characteristically unbothered, saying in a behind-the-scenes clip released by the show, “That’s a cool way to go. Nate is someone who’s made so many mistakes and made so many dark choices. It’s cool to see it all come to what it’s come to.”

Creator Sam Levinson aimed to tap into the audience’s thirst for poetic justice while simultaneously challenging their desire for retribution, and the result is a death that feels almost mythological in its construction. With Nate gone, so too is the HBO show’s most prominent male actor, leaving the finale with an enormous emotional and structural hole to fill heading into its concluding hour.

The ‘Euphoria‘ season finale airs Sunday on HBO and streams on Max, with Cassie and Maddy now left holding the fallout of a crime scene neither of them planned for. Whether Rue survives her own spiral into the finale is a question the show has been building toward all season, and the loss of Nate reshuffles every remaining dynamic entirely.

Whether you loved him, loathed him, or spent years waiting for karma to catch up with him, Nate Jacobs went out on the show’s terms, not his own, so share your reaction to his exit in the comments because this is exactly the kind of ending ‘Euphoria’ fans will be arguing about for years.