Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Every new episode of Euphoria Season 3 is a little more dizzying, but so far, Episode 5 takes the cake for the most nauseating or whiplash-inducing tonal shifts. Here, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) makes more of her Hollywood dreams come true, while Nate (Jacob Elordi) continues to suffer at the hands of loan shark Naz, and big-time pimp Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) finally catches on to Rue (Zendaya).
The jokes about show writer and director Sam Levinson wanting to become Quentin Tarantino feel most real in this episode. It starts with a flashback to Nate losing his toe in Episode 3, blood gushing, toe flying in the air, before it cuts to a shot of Cassie’s pedicured feet. As she sucks her toes before the camera, we learn that she has amassed 50,000 OnlyFans followers since appearing in influencer Brandon Fontaine’s (Jeff Wahlberg) livestream, with her “best friend” and manager Maddy (Alexa Demie) behind the scenes telling her what to do and monitoring her social media stats.
With Nate’s encouragement (after all, she’s wiring him money in tranches of $30,000), Cassie goes wild selling sex. To him, they’re Bonnie and Clyde, or more insultingly, “Beyonce and Jay-Z.”
The montage of Cassie making content, joining meninist podcasts, and selling jars of her fart culminates in a scene where she turns into a giant and terrorizes downtown Los Angeles. A toy police helicopter hovers before her, telling her to “get on her knees,” before she sashays and swats it away with her ponytail. Levinson ends his homage to 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman with Cassie the Giant exposing her breasts to a tiny man in an office building.
But the fantasy doesn’t stop there. Back in the real world, Brandon tries to convince Cassie to drop Maddy and join his TikTok house instead. For the unfamiliar, a TikTok house is a place where influencers can live and make content together. And if Addison Rae and Alex Warren could become celebrated forces in the entertainment industry after a stint in the Hype House, then why can’t Cassie Howard?
In an effort to keep Cassie as her client, Maddy lies about securing her an audition for a small role in L.A. Nights. She convinces Lexi (Maude Apatow) to arrange one anyway, even though Lexi isn’t keen to make a star out of her “narcissistic” older sister. At the audition, Cassie delivers a sexy but monotone monologue from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and it’s exactly the kind of acting that a soap opera needs.
Digging One’s Own Grave
Things are still going awfully for Nate. He lives alone in his trashed mansion, from which he may be evicted, but the money that Cassie just wired in is good news. Nate celebrates, dancing around the living room with a cocktail in hand, until one of Naz’s henchmen breaks through the backyard door.
Nate’s recently reattached toe is also a short-lived victory. After a quick cat-and-mouse around the house, the henchman catches up to him, throws a few punches, tears the toe out, and then cuts his ring finger off. There are three episodes left, which leaves plenty of time for Nate to lose any or all of his remaining 18 digits. He’d better count his days, with whatever fingers he still has.
The ice under Jules (Hunter Schafer) is also thinning. At her swanky penthouse, her sugar daddy, plastic surgeon Ellis (Sam Trammell), finds Rue’s boxers on the floor of the closet and confronts Jules. She says they’re from a friend (which is mostly true anyway) and promises, “It’s nothing like that.” But Ellis is now wary of contracting a sexually transmitted disease and passing it on to his wife.
But things are much worse for Rue. After the robbery in the last episode, Alamo is a lot more antsy about the “Judases” around him. He has a man killed by Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), who uses what I can only describe as a device that’s like if you attached a knife to a massage gun. We don’t know who this character is yet, even as he’s already chopped up and literally fed to the pigs, but it does tell us just how comfortable Alamo is with being cruel and violent, and it makes us a little more scared for Rue.
Neck-braced dancer Magick (Rosalía) also tells Alamo about the suspicious things Rue has been doing at the Silver Slipper, like planting cocaine in Magick’s locker and asking Kitty (Anna Van Patten) if she’s being forced to work at the strip club. Alamo realizes that Rue should have recognized the robbers by their voices, knowing they were Laurie’s men, but didn’t tell him about it.
He follows Rue to a diner, where she’s chatting with Maddy. While he sends Rue away for a “job” (we know he’s setting her up for retribution), he learns more about Maddy’s work as a talent manager for OnlyFans models, and cuts her a deal involving Magick and Kitty.
Meanwhile, Rue has been tasked with digging a hole in the dirt near Alamo’s mansion. She’s told that the hole has to go up to her throat, and when she’s finally dug herself that deep, she’s buried from the neck down. With her head sticking out of the dirt, Alamo comes out on horseback, swinging a polo mallet. But before we could see him punt Rue’s head with it, the screen cuts to black.
Euphoria Season 3 is currently streaming on HBO Max.
