Euphoria Season 3 Premiere Recap: An Attempt at Reinvention

Spoilers below.

There is a scene early in the first episode of the long-delayed third season of Euphoria that, perhaps unintentionally, provides the perfect metaphor for what this series has become.

Rue (Zendaya), now a few years out of high school and running fentanyl back and forth across the Mexican border so she can pay back the monstrous debt she owes drug queenpin Laurie (Martha Kelly), attempts to drive a car over the border wall and back into the United States. She manages to accelerate up a pair of ramps that a bribed guard has set up for this purpose. But then the car gets stuck at the very top, where it teeters precariously until Rue is able to extricate herself from the vehicle and shimmy back down to American soil.

Teetering precariously is basically what Euphoria is doing, at least in this first installment of the third and (possibly?) final season of Sam Levinson’s often polarizing drama. Life is unstable for the alumni of East Highland High School, especially Rue, who is trying to course-correct by embracing Christianity but can’t seem to turn off of the metaphorical road that’s headed straight for her destruction. Creatively, Euphoria is teetering, too, as Levinson, who wrote and directed the premiere, ambitiously attempts to catch us up with an almost unwieldy number of characters, each of whom are living in wildly different realities. The tonal switches don’t always mesh. At its best, this hour of television is suspenseful, gritty, and unexpected, qualities that are most present whenever the narrative stays focused on Rue. At its worst, it forces us to watch whatever the hell is going on with Cassie and Nate, who are definitely living in a totally separate reality—possibly, on a whole other planet.

It should not come as a surprise that Euphoria feels like a different series now. Once somewhat accurately described as a high school show, Levinson’s occasionally surreal, often stressful portrait of teen life in Los Angeles is much slippier to categorize now that its main characters are careening their way through adulthood. Also, a lot has happened since the second season of Euphoria concluded in February of 2022 and took an extended four-year hiatus. Sadly, that includes the deaths of three people who worked on the series: actor Angus Cloud, who played Fezco and died of an accidental drug overdose in 2023; producer Kevin Turen, who also died suddenly in 2023, of a heart attack; and Eric Dane, who passed away in February due to respiratory failure caused by ALS. (They were honored with a title card dedication at the end of this episode.) Euphoria in 2026 had no choice but to adapt, to look different than it had before.

What it looks like now, more than anything, is a Western, which, as Levinson told the New York Times, is by design. Rue’s gig as a drug mule frequently places her against the dusty landscapes of Mexico and Texas, where Rue briefly takes refuge on a farm belonging to the Millers, an extremely conservative Christian family. But other details in this premiere episode give Western vibes, too. Levinson has widened the show’s visual aspect ratio to 2.20:1, the same scope used in many classic movies of the genre. Waylon Jennings makes an appearance on the soundtrack. Rue’s standoff with a strip joint mogul—a man bearing the symbolically significant name Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who, yes, was Mr. Eko on Lost)—culminates with an apple being shot off her head, reminiscent of a spaghetti western showdown. The nauseating scene where Rue first ingests a preposterous number of drug balloons evokes the “No one can eat fifty eggs” scene from Cool Hand Luke, which is technically not a Western but does center around a Paul Newman character who rebels against authority, making him a cowboy of sorts. (By the way, if you were wondering how far you could get into the Euphoria premiere before feeling like you might throw up, the answer is: 14 minutes.)

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Alamo Brown.

The reckless, lawless Rue is, herself, a cowboy of sorts. Or maybe she’s Caine from Kung Fu and is just walking the Earth. (Also Uber-driving the Earth? Look, even Caine would need a side hustle in this climate.) Whatever the case may be, Levinson clearly wants to make the point that, even back in good ‘ol urban Los Angeles, things are also like the Wild West: The rules keep shifting, if they exist at all, and people want to take what they can while the taking’s still possible. “This city is crumbling,” a deep-voiced Uber passenger tells Rue as she drives him around L.A. “Someone has to do something about the crime.” In the funniest moment in this episode, the camera pans to reveal that the speaker is dressed in a Batman costume.

Meanwhile, Maddy (Alexa Demie) is now working as a manager’s assistant, helping actors and influencers build their brands. She’s hustling at all times, with not a lot of money to show for it. Lexi (Maude Apatow) is, not surprisingly, working on a studio lot for an influential showrunner played by Sharon Stone. The nighttime soap that Stone’s Patricia Lance oversees, L.A. Nights, looks more like Melrose Place than anything currently streaming or airing on television, and its writers’ room, with its flagrantly progressive, finger-snapping scribes, looks like something out of a MAGA cultist’s worst nightmare. Levinson is clearly aiming for Hollywood satire here, and I am not yet convinced there’s enough room on HBO Sunday nights for two shows to do this. (The third season of The Comeback is already covering this territory quite effectively, to say nothing of Hacks or Apple TV’s The Studio.) It also seems highly likely that Lexi will figure out a way to write her actual life into an L.A. Nights storyline, which will hopefully result in Our Life: The Series.

Even characters who are mentioned but do not appear onscreen seem to be compromising their morals, dignity, or both. Jules, we learn via Maddy, is working as a “sugar baby.” Fezco is still alive but stuck in jail and pining for Lexi, who can’t even be bothered to call him. And then there’s Nate (Jacob Elordi) and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) who, and I can’t stress this enough: WHAT?

According to that aforementioned New York Times article, Sweeney called Levinson ahead of season 3 and said, “Just do me one favor: Make sure Cassie’s crazy.” Well mission a-fucking-ccomplished. In season 3, Cassie has fully lost it—and in ways that don’t seem entirely consistent with her character. In what is clearly a meta commentary on the media’s fixation on Sweeney’s body, as well as on her supposedly conservative political leanings, Cassie now lives, according to Rue, in a “a right-wing suburban bubble, pretending to be a god on TikTok.” When we first lay eyes on her, she’s dressed as a sexy puppy, down on all fours with her mouth wide and tongue panting, all for the sake of boosting her social media profile.

She and Nate, who are in the midst of planning their wedding, live in a ridiculously large McMansion whose decor and design don’t appear to have been updated since 9/11. Did they inherit this place? Or did they intentionally make it look this way? Or is this just Levinson’s ostentatious way of communicating that Nate and Cassie are trying to live the lives society suggests are synonymous with success?

Nate has taken over the construction business once run by his father, Cal (Dane), who is, presumably, still in jail. He is very stressed about a development he’s building for people in their sunset years. “A boomer dies every 15 seconds,” he tells a potential investor. “You fast-forward 10 years from now, that’s a tidal wave of death.” Ah, nothing makes a true American capitalist salivate like the promise of a lucrative tidal wave of death.

In short, Cassie and Nate—who drives a Cybertruck, a reveal that almost made me snort chardonnay out of both nostrils—are total assholes. And yeah, you could argue that they have always been assholes, forever putting their own needs before everyone else’s. But the first two seasons treated them both with some degree of nuance, showing us their emotional vulnerabilities and the circumstances that made them act guarded and, yes, also selfish. But in the season 3 premiere, they’ve become vaguely fleshed-out caricatures used as coat racks to hang various cultural issues on, including the American fixation on wealth. Cassie is determined to start posing on OnlyFans so she can make money to pay for $50,000 worth of wedding flowers. “I didn’t wait my entire life to have a ghetto wedding,” she says in total seriousness while eating dinner surrounded by approximately 97 lit candles, for some reason. Cassie may be crazy, but she’s also petty and dumb, two things I did not think she was before. (Well, not all the time, anyway.)

Similarly, the idea that Nate is trying to become his father also doesn’t entirely track. He turned Cal over to the police in season 2—wouldn’t he be doing everything in his power not to follow in his father’s footsteps? Or is Levinson trying to argue that Nate mirroring Cal is inevitable? Either way, the couple seem way too young to be living whatever this lifestyle is, which gives their storyline an even more unbelievable quality. At this stage, Cassie and Nate are not merely in a “right-wing suburban bubble.” They’re on a completely different TV show than everyone else on Euphoria.

In the midst of all this bizarre behavior, it’s clear that Levinson is nevertheless trying to build toward a redemptive ending, especially for Rue. After her visit to the Millers’ farm, she finds herself thinking often about them and their seemingly idyllic, off-the-grid existence. (They don’t have internet access. Can you even imagine such bliss?) She starts to wonder if she should embrace religion. “I’m not gonna be friends with a Christian,” Lexi tells Rue after she describes the Millers. “Why?” Rue asks. “Because they’re judgmental,” Lexi replies, an unintentionally ironic line that easily could have come out of the mouth of Hannah Horvath (complimentary).

It’s odd that, during her flashback conversation with Ali (Colman Domingo, always terrific in his two-handers with Zendaya) midway through the episode, Rue is so eager to attack the things in the Bible that contradict her own values—yet, in the present-day timeline, she never once comments on the fact that the “wonderfully” Christian Millers are clearly prejudiced against Mexicans. Would this not bother her, as a woman of color herself? I am also not convinced that Rue really and truly believes in God at this point. More than anything, she seems thirsty for a personal transformation she does not know how to achieve on her own. “That’s the beauty of this country we call America,” Alamo tells Rue, sparking a glint of optimism in her usually drug-addled eyes. “Anyone can reinvent themselves.”

In that moment, as Rue later explains to Alamo, she wonders if God has led her to this brothel and to this man, who proudly states that he is “in the business of pussy,” which sounds incredibly appealing to Rue (who’s desperate for any escape from a life of drug-swallowing servitude to Laurie). It’s not clear if those in Alamo’s orbit want her all up in their business of pussy, though—particularly Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), who seems suspicious of Rue immediately. If God really did lead Rue here, I’m not sure it’s for the purpose of reinvention.

Even if it is, can Rue even genuinely reinvent herself at this point, or is she too lost? Right now, like that car perched precariously atop a border wall, it feels like Rue’s reinvention—or her redemption—could really go one way or the other.