Euphoria Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: Good, Old-Fashioned American Problems

Spoilers below.

During the incredibly tense conclusion of the sixth episode of Euphoria’s third season, Rue narrowly avoids crashing into a truck, drives off the road, and climbs out of the driver’s seat, where she sees a barren tree that has gone up in flames. Or, to put this in a far more biblical way: A burning bush appears before Rue, who is (maybe?) the HBO drama’s equivalent of Moses.

Technically, that piece of dry shrubbery probably ignited because Rue’s smoking vehicle triggered a fire. That said, if I had just been listening to an audiobook of the Bible, and then I saw a burning bush, I might also be inclined to think it was more than a coincidence—even if I was still stuck in the Book of Genesis, as Rue is. (The burning bush doesn’t show up until Exodus.)

That wildfire-waiting-to-happen isn’t the only allusion to Exodus in this installment of Euphoria, which—and I’m just as surprised to be writing this as you are—is the best of the season so far. Episode 6 is suspenseful, cleverly plotted, occasionally funny, and even moving in certain moments. It’s also very much something that we might have analyzed in the “Bible as Literature” course I was required to take as an English major in college.

The story that Bishop tells Rue about the snake that once belonged to a Silver Slipper dancer named Sweet—I assume Sweet did a routine with her python that went something like this—seems an overt reference to the biblical transformation of Aaron’s staff into a snake in Exodus, similarly representing God’s ability to perform miracles. Aaron, the brother of Moses, is considered a prophet, and certainly Bishop has some prophet-like qualities. “There are people trying to fuck you,” he advises Alamo regarding Maddy’s agenda. “I don’t know if Maddy Perez is one of them.” Bishop seems to pick up on vibes and know shit about people that he should not have any way of knowing. Seems at least prophet-adjacent to me.

Even the title of this episode, “Stand Still and See,” is pulled from a verse in Exodus 14: “Moses said unto the people, ‘Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you today: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more forever.’” But who is Moses in the Euphoria universe? Alamo seems to think it’s him.

As a flashback to his childhood in the late 1970s tells us, Alamo is forever altered by the betrayal of his mother (Danielle Deadwyler, hitting it out of the park every time she shows up on screen these days), who doesn’t put him in a basket and send him down the river, exactly, but does sacrifice his trust in her so she can amass wealth and land a hot man. That act leads Alamo to develop a God complex, one that allows him to justify punishing women who he thinks have deceived him. “As long as he lived, never again would a bitch outsmart him,” Rue says in her narration at the end of the flashback. That’s one of the reasons why he threatens Laurie after they agree to do one final fentanyl run before the U.S./Mexico border gets sealed for good. (Well, that and the fact that she and her associates are blatant white supremacists.)

“If you as much as try to fuck me in the slightest, even put up a pinky up my ass, I will come down on you like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, not a motherfucker left standing,” he hisses in her ear after they seal the deal with a spit handshake like little kids. At the same time, Alamo believes he is saving women in the manner Moses saved the Israelites, simply by giving them jobs that require them to use their feminine wiles to pad their bank accounts. This, in a different context, is exactly what his mama did. That’s why he is threatened by Maddy, who might be offering these women a way to make even more money, with far more flexibility and autonomy than Alamo is willing to provide them. Alamo’s entire ethos and sensibility, right down to the late ’70s aesthetic of his strip club, was formed in his childhood. He’s still operating from the mindset of the little boy he was then, scorned and freshly embittered. He probably believes he can part the Red Sea, but that’s more hubris than actual divine power.

Let’s be real. Rue is the one who saw the burning bush. She’s also the one who actively seeks guidance from a higher power, even praying to God in an actual church shortly before the burning bush incident. (It’s a nice touch on the part of Sam Levinson, the creator, writer, and director of Euphoria, that Rue briefly glances down at the text of the Ten Commandments while she’s sitting in the pews.) Throughout this episode, she also does things that suggest she is trying to save the Israelites (her peers) from their oppressors (not the Egyptians, but a society that expects them to achieve success based on outdated and/or exploitative business models). Another equally valid way to interpret Rue’s behavior is that she’s doing what a lot of newly religious people do: judge the living shit out of everyone around them.

One could easily argue that she’s not judging Maddy when she tells the latter to be wary of Alamo, so much as genuinely warning her. I tend to agree with that. But she is for sure judging Jules during their conversation at Jules’s loft, which ends abruptly when Jules smacks Rue across the face, knocking her to the floor and underneath the (hideous?) painting that falls off of Jules’s easel. “Ellis is going to be here in 45 minutes,” Jules says, “so I suggest you get the fuck out of my painting.”

Rue confesses, as much to Jules as herself, that part of her problem is that she has no responsibilities to anyone other than herself and that she has “to live for something greater than myself.” “I just want good, old-fashioned American problems,” she says, meaning the kind of low-stakes, regular concerns that people have when they’re married with kids and get to worry about stuff that doesn’t involve drug-running or becoming a DEA informant. “What you’re talking about is a fantasy,” Jules replies in what is basically a thesis statement for Euphoria season 3.

Whatever America that Gen Zers like Rue and Jules thought they were going to inherit as adults is gone. People like Alamo and LA Nights showrunner Patty Lance, who still believe in the concept of honest and dishonest work based on the definitions they’ve been conditioned to embrace, are still clinging to some version of that fantasy. So is Nate, most recently seen trying to destroy endangered flowers on the Sun Settlers property while avoiding getting his ass beaten yet again. Maybe Rue, idealizer of conservative Christian farmers, is, too.

When Jules rejects the idea that she and Rue could somehow live a version of this idyllic family life that Rue envisions, that’s when Rue lashes out. “You’re just a little toy that he keeps locked in a little room,” she says of Jules’s relationship with Ellis, adding, for good measure, that he essentially holds her in a painting prison until he feels like fucking her. She’s not exactly wrong. Which is why Jules smacks her.

That interaction plays a key role in causing the emotional breakdown that Rue has in the church, after taking a phone call from her mother. “I don’t really want to be stuck with all the mistakes I’ve made,” she tells her mom in desperation. “I just wanna be free to start over. I just want to start over, and I want to be forgiven.” Zendaya breaks Rue’s heart open in this scene with such understated commitment that I actually cried a little. I know! I cried! During Euphoria season 3! Who could have seen that coming?

Yet nothing moved me more in this episode than Cassie’s entrance into the world of LA Nights, which involves her totally going off-script in her role as job applicant, triggered by the phrase “the honeymoon is over.” (Theoretically, this piece of dialogue should have triggered her when she was first rehearsing her lines, but I guess things change when you’re in front of the cameras?) The levels of meta in what transpires from here are, frankly, awe-inspiring. Naturally, Stone’s Patty, an obvious avatar for Levinson, allows the improv to continue: “I find it rather compelling,” she says. “Let’s just let it roll.” Then, when her director—who is played by Colleen Camp but, as a character, is never identified by name, even in the credits—wonders if they should call “cut,” Patty adds, “I don’t know, it feels fresh and it’s giving me the feels.” I can’t tell if Levinson is mocking critics for thinking this is how he makes creative decisions, or mocking himself because this is actually how he makes creative decisions. Either way: It’s funny.

So is the entire conversation in which Cassie gets upgraded to a recurring character while Lexi fails miserably in her attempt to discourage this development, and Patty concludes she is “saving” Cassie by giving her a job in Hollywood that will absolutely pay her less than OnlyFans. Again, the subtext in this scene—watching Sharon Stone, a smart actress objectified by her work in ’90s erotic thrillers, attempt to counsel a young actress that she believes is being objectified—makes it richer. So does the fact that Patty asks Lexi to write Cassie’s storyline.

“If someone doesn’t die periodically, people get bored,” Gilly, a friend of Lexi’s played by Gideon Adlon, suggests in her infinite wisdom about how good TV works. Which prompts Lexi to consider an arc in which Cassie somehow dies because how else should Cassie expect this to go? This is the same sister who wrote an extremely elaborate play about what a garbage person she is! This one small development has pushed me from mildly caring about what happens in the last two episodes of Euphoria to not being able to wait to see what happens in the last two episodes of Euphoria.

Gilly’s comment, as tossed-off as it is, feels like a promise that a major character will die before the third season ends. At first, when that huge truck seems destined to plow into Rue’s car, it appears as though Rue might be the one to go. She still could be. After all, she’s been tapped to journey across the Mexican border in this one last run for Laurie, and that can’t possibly go well. But it could just as easily be Nate, given how many body parts he’s already lost; or Maddy, since she’s flown a little too close to Alamo’s sun; or even Cassie, considering that her husband’s severed ring finger just got mailed to her in a box along with a note that says “ANSWER THE PHONE.”

Even though “Stand Still and See” contains a lot of talking, which Gilly deems “boring,” it has raised the stakes for where things could go in the next two weeks of this journey. Frankly, that’s more than I expected from Euphoria at this point. In God’s (and Rue’s) name, I say: Amen.