Warning: Spoilers abound.
A lot could change in four years. In Season 2 of HBO’s Euphoria, we watched Rue Bennett (Zendaya) spiral through her drug addiction and choose sobriety in the end, promising a clean life from there on out. But this arc doesn’t really amount to anything, because now, she’s a drug mule, and with Episode 1 of Season 3, Euphoria is reintroduced to us not as a dark teen drama but as a Gen Z-ified Breaking Bad.
There’s a lot to acclimate to this season. Labrinth’s original score for the show has been replaced by needle drops after he posted a strongly worded exit message on Instagram in March. We’ve moved out of the small, fictional town of East Highland and into Hollywood and the Mexican desert. Rue, who still owes money to dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) for failing to sell $10,000 worth of drugs in high school, delivers drugs from Mexico to the U.S. Often, these runs require her and her friend Faye Valentine (Chloe Cherry) to swallow a kilo of fentanyl packed in golf ball-sized balloons, cross the border, and shit everything out on a strainer when they get to Laurie’s.
Halfway through Episode 1, Rue carries out a deal and meets Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a drug kingpin and pimp in a cowboy hat, which he wears just in case you didn’t get the memo that Euphoria is a neo-Western now.
It turns out the party drugs she brought over had been laced with fentanyl, which just killed one of Alamo’s strippers and wasn’t part of the deal. Confronted by Alamo, she explains that she doesn’t want to work for Laurie anymore, and that she felt like God had brought her to him for a reason. Alamo smiles mischievously as she explains her situation, already planning to exploit this poor girl, and teasing at Rue’s central conflict for this season.
Other than that, our protagonist seems to be doing well. She’s still sober and meets up with her mentor, Ali (Colman Domingo), to discuss the next steps to full recovery. When she’s in Los Angeles, she crashes with her best friend Lexi Howard (Maude Apatow).
While Rue works as an Uber driver during the day, a few of her other friends now work in entertainment. Lexi is an assistant to showrunner Patty Lance, played by Euphoria newcomer and veteran femme fatale Sharon Stone. Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) works in talent management, representing influencers and actors like Lexi’s celebrity crush, Dylan Reid (Homer Gere).
Rue hasn’t talked to her ex-girlfriend Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer) since the end of Season 2, but Lexi tells her that Jules is now a sugar baby. With the mention of Jules, I thought we’d get a glimpse of her life after high school. But instead, and to my horror, we catch up with Lexi’s sister Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Maddy’s ex, Nate Jacobs, played rather unenthusiastically by Jacob Elordi.
What’s Up with Nate and Cassie?
To recall, Nate had cheated on Maddy with her best friend, Cassie. After being found out, Nate and Cassie made it official. And in Season 3, they’re introduced as an engaged couple “living in some right-wing suburban bubble,” as Rue put it. Is writer-director Sam Levinson laughing at Sweeney, or with her?
While Nate has taken over his father’s construction business (with Cal Jacobs fully out of the picture after his grand, pissy exit in Season 2 and the passing of actor Eric Dane), Cassie is “trying to make it big on TikTok,” creating suggestive content. When we meet her, she’s dressed as a sexy puppy dog — which feels very wrong to even write — and shaking ass for the camera around her and Nate’s gaudy suburban mansion. But Cassie insists it’s not sex work and tells Nate she’s keen to make her own money.
Later on, however, she mulls starting an OnlyFans account just so she could stop pestering her fiancé about spending more money on the wedding. Despite the mansion and the Tesla, it turns out that Nate is fiscally conservative, unwilling to shell out $50,000 for the floral arrangements that Cassie wants, and he warns her that her work as a content creator could ruin the business.
“I didn’t wait my entire life to have a ghetto wedding,” Cassie tells Nate over dinner. At this point, I wondered what made her so vapid and shallow. In the first two seasons of Euphoria, she was a teenager desperate to find true love and to become a professional figure skater. She wanted to be taken seriously. Now, she wants living room renovations and a fancy wedding, and seems content with the loveless, transactional relationship that she and Nate have drifted into after fighting so hard for it in Season 2.
Euphoria’s third season is shaping up to be its messiest, a spectacle, for sure, but in the way that a car crash might be. In trying to stretch its world from high school hallways and teenagers’ bedrooms to cartel routes, the show risks losing the intimacy that made it such a hit (I’m still waiting for Rue and Jules to talk again). As I watch Episode 1 of Season 3, I already think the show might be better off wrapping things up now before it truly loses its essence, because you can tell Levinson is itching to make another Assassination Nation.
Euphoria Season 3 is currently streaming on HBO Max.
