Euphoria Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: This Is Extreme

Spoilers below.

The fifth installment in Euphoria season 3, titled “This Little Piggy,” opens with Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie working her ass off to become a massive sensation on OnlyFans. “She would never say it out loud, but Nate going broke finally granted Cassie the permission to follow her dreams,” Rue explains in one of her trademark voiceover narrations. Those dreams apparently involve making foot fetish videos; jumping rope on-camera in her bathing suit; whispering sexy, ASMR-y things into microphones with fake ear attachments; and mailing her dirty underwear to people willing to pay for it. Cassie has standards, though: She will not fart in a jar and send it to a rando who requested it—not even for $700.

After her follower count blows up, Cassie makes the podcast rounds to establish her conservative-adjacent persona. (When a host accuses Cassie of being a Democrat, she replies, “I’m not the r-word,” but actually says the r-word.) Then, in one of the most over-the-top sequences that series creator Sam Levinson has ever captured on Euphoria—yes, I know what I just typed!—he follows Cassie as she essentially becomes the star of her own, more sexually explicit version of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. The ultimate Amazon woman, Cassie stomps across Los Angeles and eventually peers into an office where a guy named Frank is pleasuring himself to one of her videos.

“Are you jerking off to me again?” she asks him playfully. Then Supersized Cassie undoes her top and slams her naked breasts into the skyscraper’s windows, smashing them so hard against the glass that I think several HBO subscribers could probably give her semi-reliable mammogram results. Eventually, her breasts crash all the way through that glass and smother Frank. The effect of this approach is the equivalent of the infamous finger-pointing Spider-Man meme, in which the first Spider-Man is Levinson and the second is the Euphoria audience, and both are calling each other out for being perverted. Or, to refer to a totally different meme: At this point in Euphoria’s run, maybe we should just accept that we’re all wearing shirts with the word “sickos” printed across the chest.

Giganto Cassie eventually prays before the Hollywood sign, which is clearly a false idol, and not merely because it represents the misleading allure of fame. “This Little Piggy” suggests pretty forcefully that the traditional pathways to success in Tinseltown are no longer what they used to be. “Last year, Hollywood made $8 billion,” Maddy tells Alamo before they decide to create a stripper-to-influencer pipeline together. “OnlyFans made seven.” Ms. Penzler (Rebecca Pidgeon), Maddy’s boss and the same woman who previously questioned why Maddy would represent a “porn star” like Katelyn (Bella Podaras), now seems impressed that Katelyn was interviewed in Forbes. “She’s making a fortune,” she notes.

Content creator houses, like the one that fellow influencer Brandon convinces Cassie to join, are the modern version of the old studio system that used to force ingenues into signing binding contracts. As for the metaphorical casting couch, that’s represented in Levinson’s world by the kind of sugar-baby relationship that Jules has with her benefactor, Ellis (Sam Trammell), who becomes angry when he thinks Jules might have slept with someone else. “I cannot be coming home with a fucking STD,” he warns her. “I like you, but I love my family and I will not put them at risk.”

Despite what Rue says in her narration of the Cassie-as-Godzilla portion of the program—“The world was hers, and she had finally been unleashed,” Rue declares—none of the women on Euphoria seem particularly liberated by these updated models of doing business. Jules has to follow the rules laid out by Ellis, whether she wants to admit it or not. Maybe that’s why Jules pushes Rue to express more emotion toward her; she wants to feel like someone actually cares about her in a genuine way. That, or she suspects that Rue might be so drugged-up all the time that she’s simply going through the motions of life rather than making informed decisions about her future. (More on this shortly.)

Meanwhile, Maddy is under the thumb of Ms. Penzler, to the point where she has to clean up dog poop in the woman’s office. Alamo might seem to offer Maddy an off-ramp to independence, but we know how that man operates—and Maddy is likely trading one devil for another. Given how zen she seems to have become about everything (“I’ve reached a stage of pure harmony,” she assures Rue), perhaps she doesn’t care either way.

Similarly, Lexi, who becomes a pawn in Maddy’s efforts to get Cassie an audition for LA Nights, finds that her reputation is completely beholden to the whims of her boss, Sharon Stone’s Patricia Lance, as well as to her sister’s seemingly boundless ego. “You are literally the most selfish, narcissistic person I have ever met,” Lexi spits at her sister after Cassie flagrantly pulls the nepotism card to get herself cast in an extremely minor part in LA Nights. “That’s what it takes to make it in this town,” Cassie responds proudly. In Hollywood, it was, and is, ever thus.

Even Cassie, who thinks she’s finally becoming the star she was always meant to be, isn’t as much of an independent upstart as she’d like to believe. She ignorantly signs contracts agreeing to let both Brandon and Maddy represent her, which will no doubt land her in legal trouble eventually. And she’s sending thousands of dollars of her hard-earned revenue to her husband, Nate—they got married just two episodes ago, remember?—who is hanging at home, getting drunk all day and depending on his wife to pull him out of debt. (Also, remember when Nate did not like the idea of Cassie showing off her wares on the internet? Now he literally doesn’t care if she moves in with the influencer with whom she might or might not be having sex.)

When Cassie lets Nate know that she’s just sent him $30K more of her money, which is only a fraction of the amount he owes, he celebrates, as so many of us do, by spinning a little Mel Tormé on the phonograph. But his celebration is short-lived since, in a scene that feels ripped directly from a Coen brothers movie, one of Naz’s goons shows up at Nate’s house with a golf club. He shatters a sliding glass door and proceeds to cut off both Nate’s recently reattached pinky toe and—because nothing on Euphoria is ever too on-the-nose—the ring finger that sports Nate’s gold wedding band. It’s, of course, meant to upset us that Nate is being physically abused like this, but he bears such a faint resemblance to an actual human being at this point that it’s hard to genuinely fret for him. I winced when his finger got snipped. But that’s not the same thing as caring.

Rue is also having a hard time caring about anything. When Alamo tells her to get in the car with Bishop and G (Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch, which, yes, is how he is listed in the credits) and let them drive her to God knows where, she does it without any hesitation. Is Rue incredibly naive—or so strung out that she doesn’t realize what’s going on? Personally, I’m leaning toward the latter explanation, because Rue generally seems smart enough to understand that when Bishop, G, and Kidd (Asante Blackk) ask her to start digging a massive hole, there’s a good chance they’re asking her to dig her own grave.

And yet, it seems to take Rue ages to grasp that she’s in serious danger, even though she’s already sensed that Alamo and everyone in his crew suspect she’s a snitch. Bishop outright tells her that he thinks she might be cursed. “I’m not saying you got a 666 inscribed on the back of your skull,” he says. “But something about you gives me the heebie-jeebies.” (She gives him the heebie-jeebies? Bishop might as well have invented the concept of giving people the heebie-jeebies.) Nevertheless, if he’s freaked out by her, that’s a definite signal she has a target on her back.

On top of all that, early in the episode Rue witnesses Alamo nearly stab Kidd with an ice pick for accidentally procuring a pair of pants for Alamo that are too short. If he’ll do that, one can only imagine how he’ll react if he thinks he’s being ratted out to the DEA.

Bottom line: Rue has to know she could easily be her boss’s next victim, and yet she seems genuinely shocked when Bishop, G, and Kidd bury her so deep in the hole she dug that only her head can emerge. “This is extreme,” she says. “Who thinks of this shit?”

Well, actually, Hollywood thinks of this shit a lot. If this imagery looks familiar, that’s because the so-called “sand necktie” is a long-standing trope featured in numerous movies, including, yes, Westerns such as Death Rides a Horse and Jeremiah Johnson. In keeping with the inescapable Western theme in season 3, Alamo eventually comes galloping toward Rue while sitting atop a horse, polo mallet in hand, seemingly prepared to knock her noggin off with one well-timed whack. The episode cuts to black before we learn whether she’s been clobbered, but it seems fair to assume she hasn’t—if only because I don’t think Levinson would stoop to beheading his female lead with three episodes left in the season/series.

The fact that Rue is so caught off-guard that she asks, “Who thinks of this shit?” suggests Levinson has a lesson he wants to impart: that there is some value in understanding and honoring the Hollywood of yore. Anyone who’s seen a film where someone gets buried up to their neck—or even a mafia movie in which someone claims they’ve received “an offer they can’t refuse,” as Cassie does, verbatim, in this episode—would immediately put their guard up in a way Rue does not.

Levinson evokes classic cinema in other manners that suggest he still believes in the power of film and television over the clickbait allure of content creation, while also implying that women have always had to sell themselves in one way or another. In one scene in “This Little Piggy,” Alamo watches Gilda, the 1946 classic that established Rita Hayworth as a femme fatale bombshell. Later, when Faye (Chloe Cherry) and Wayne (Toby Wallace) receive a phone call from Rue that enables the DEA to establish a wiretap on them, Pretty Woman, a rom-com about a sex worker who finds her Prince Charming via the world of prostitution, is playing on their television.

These references underline the misogyny that Hollywood itself has always perpetuated. But the fact that modern L.A. residents are still watching these movies, and that an HBO series created by a modern L.A. resident is referencing them, speaks to the enduring nature of these narratives. Similarly, the fact that Cassie deems her role on LA Nights as a huge boost to her profile speaks to the fact that the traditional Hollywood system still has its value.

Is Levinson ultimately trying to argue that the Hollywood Cassie worships still matters? If this episode were constructed with more clarity and intentionality, I’d be able to answer this question with more confidence. I do think that Levinson might be trying to say something along those lines. But if you don’t pick up on that from the hour of provocative and often confounding television he produced here, well, I can’t blame you for being distracted.