Reader, we have waited for this.
For two whole seasons, Nate Jacobs strutted around East Highland in those obscene tight polos — blackmailing teenage girls, framing innocent men, gaslighting Cassie in roadside diners. Through all of it, somehow, he kept winning. Every viewer screamed at their TV asking when, exactly when, this man would finally face a consequence.
Friends, the time has come. Four episodes into Euphoria Season 3, Sam Levinson has unleashed a sustained, deeply specific demolition of Nate Jacobs’s entire personality. He’s broke. He’s bleeding. He’s missing actual body parts. His wife has fled to Hollywood. On multiple occasions, the man has dropped to his knees in public. It is glorious. It is what we are owed.
So in the spirit of celebrating this much-delayed comeuppance, let’s rank every public humiliation Nate Jacobs has suffered in Euphoria Season 3 so far — from “ouch, that’s gotta sting” to “I genuinely cannot believe HBO let them do this on television.”
Where We Left Nate Jacobs Before Euphoria Season 3
When Season 2 wrapped, Nate was — improbably — still kind of winning. Sure, he had just handed his own dad Cal over to the police with a flash drive of incriminating evidence. Even so, he walked away free, intact, and very much The Guy in East Highland.
Then Season 3 jumps us forward five years, and at first glance, things still look pretty good. Nate lives in a hideous yellow McMansion. He drives a Cybertruck (a choice). On top of that, he runs his father’s construction company and proudly wears a ring on Cassie Howard — a woman whose entire personality currently orbits around wanting to marry Nate. Spoiler: those good times are about to end with extreme prejudice.
Onto the rankings.
5. SunSettlers Sinks Nate’s Real Estate Empire (Episode 2, “America My Dream”)
We open the rankings with a slow-burn humiliation: the slow death of Nate’s identity as a Big Important Businessman.
Nate’s grand vision for Euphoria Season 3 is “SunSettlers” — a real estate development project he positions as the cornerstone of the Jacobs construction empire. It will make him rich. It will prove he’s a self-made man, not just a guy who inherited his dad’s company. Most importantly, it will fix everything.
It does not fix everything.
In Episode 2, California red tape buries the project. Then — in a detail so funny I genuinely cannot recover from it — workers discover a rare protected plant growing on the construction site. Yes. A small piece of vegetation single-handedly torpedoes the financial future of a man who once held his own father at gunpoint. Meanwhile, Nate’s debt to local loan shark Naz balloons into the danger zone, and we, the viewers, feel the first delicious tremor of the avalanche to come.
A man brought low by a flower. Iconic.
Image Via HBO
4. Cassie Pulls a Hollywood Exit on Nate (Episode 4, “Kitty Likes to Dance”)
There is something profoundly satisfying about watching a man who built his entire ego on controlling the women around him just… get left. Not screamed at. Not dragged. Quietly abandoned for better prospects.
By Episode 4, the dust has somewhat settled on the wedding bloodbath, and Cassie has had a revelation. She is too pretty, too ambitious, and frankly too over it to stay in a urine-colored house with a husband who’s a million dollars in debt and missing toe parts. So she packs up her Hollywood dreams and bolts. Nate stays behind, alone, in the suburban hellscape he built specifically for her.
The man who once manipulated Cassie into believing he was her destiny now sits in a half-empty house with no wife, no money, and no plan. We are not crying. He might be, but we are not.
Image Via HBO
3. Naz Crashes Nate’s Wedding in Public (Episode 3, “The Ballad of Paladin”)
Now we are in the big leagues.
Picture it: a luxe wedding at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena. Roughly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of flower tunnels. Lobster, caviar, and a massive rose sign spelling out “C&N,” because subtlety is for people who aren’t Cassie Howard. Nate is finally getting the storybook moment — which means, naturally, the universe is about to charge him for it in front of every single person he knows.
Enter Naz, Nate’s loan shark. Apparently, Naz decided Nate’s wedding was the ideal venue to publicly out him as a deadbeat. He crashes the reception, confronts Nate in front of the guests, and informs him he is about to become his “worst nightmare.” Cue every Jacobs family acquaintance, every guest with a phone, and presumably every gossiping Pasadena society mom watching Nate Jacobs get exposed as broke and dangerously in over his head — at his own wedding.
In a single ballroom moment, the fantasy of Nate Jacobs as a powerful, in-control man dies a public death. And we have not even gotten to the part where his actual flesh dies on a different floor.
Image Via HBO
2. The Zoning Board Grovel: Nate Jacobs Hits Rock Bottom (Episode 4)
Bruised. Limping. Recently de-toed. Recently de-wifed. Nate Jacobs in Episode 4 is a man clutching SunSettlers as his last possible salvation, banking everything on the local zoning board to spare him from financial annihilation.
So he walks in. He pleads his case. He delivers an impassioned speech about his vision, his future, his dreams. Then, in front of a roomful of city officials and concerned local citizens, Nate Jacobs drops to his hands and knees and sobs.
This is the same Nate Jacobs who once choked Maddy in a swimming pool. The same Nate Jacobs who stalked teenagers on dating apps. Yet here he is — on a linoleum floor, weeping, begging strangers to please, please let him build his condos.
They reject him outright.
If Nate had a soul, this would be the moment it left his body.
Image Via HBO
1. The Wedding Night Massacre: Nate Jacobs’s Worst Moment in Euphoria Season 3
We have arrived. The all-timer. The reason this article exists.
After Naz humiliates Nate at the reception, things calm down enough for the newlyweds to head home. They make it through the front door. And then — Naz and his henchman are waiting for them.
What follows is one of the most brutal sequences Euphoria has ever put on screen. Naz beats Nate within an inch of his life. He throws him against the staircase railing. He drags him across the floor. All the while, Nate sobs and begs, and his brand-new wife stands a few feet away having a full breakdown about her ruined wedding night.
Then it somehow gets worse. As Nate bleeds out, Naz casually amputates his right pinky toe as a warning. Afterwards, he turns to a hysterical Cassie and delivers the line of the season: “Some women inherit wealth. You inherit debt.”
Reader. Reader. I had to pause my TV.
It is the everything of it. The setting (his marital home). The audience (his sobbing bride). The body horror. The fact that Cassie is more upset about her evening than her husband’s foot. The fact that the toe ultimately survives, per Episode 4, but the dignity absolutely does not. After this, there is no coming back. This is the moment the Nate Jacobs we knew for six years officially dies and is replaced by the Nate Jacobs who grovels at zoning board meetings.
A perfect humiliation. A flawless takedown. Ten out of ten, no notes.
Image Via HBO
So… Has Nate Jacobs Hit Rock Bottom Yet?
Look — there is a real argument that this is not quite the comeuppance Nate deserves. The Nate Jacobs Euphoria Season 3 downfall is coming at the hands of a loan shark, not Maddy, not Jules, not Cassie, not any of the women whose lives he actually ruined. The karmic math is a little off. After all, we came here for Maddy to ruin him.
However, Episode 5 (“This Little Piggy”) drops next, and the trailer teases even more torture and humiliation. Notably, Maddy and Nate still have not shared a single scene this season. Clearly, Sam Levinson is cooking something. We have already had this much grovelling, this much public shame, this much toe-related violence — and the season is not even halfway done. Buckle up, friends. Nate Jacobs has not hit rock bottom yet.
We will be watching. We will be ranking. And we will be very, very entertained.
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