Five years after the events of Season 2, Rue (Zendaya) and her friends have splintered off into disparate lives. But addiction, chaos and self-destructive habits still follow them all.
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“Man, I miss high school,” sighs Rue, two episodes into the long-awaited new season of Euphoria. It’s a line that doesn’t just jog your memory as much as jolt it with a cattle prod – that yes, you’re still watching the same show that began as a tale of teen hedonism in 2019, minting a new wave of stars along the way. Creator Sam Levinson’s drama is almost unrecognisable in this third and seemingly final instalment, which picks up four years after the SWAT raids and scandals that closed out season two.
Rue is now a drug mule, swallowing condoms full of fentanyl to traffic across the Mexican border. Cue a hail of homages to Westerns, Tarantino and Blaxploitation classics, as the corridors of East Highland are left behind for a seedy desert strip club called the Silver Slipper, and an even darker descent into American decay begins.
Zendaya in particular is in formidable form once more.
It’s not just Rue who finds herself in new surroundings. Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) is now an OnlyFans entrepreneur, living in luxury in Los Angeles, but for how much longer, it’s hard to say; her fiancé, Nate (Jacob Elordi), is drowning in debt after inheriting his father’s real estate empire. Lexi (Maude Apatow) and Maddie (Alexa Demie) have both begun climbing ladders in Hollywood, while Jules (Hunter Schafer) is now a sugar baby in New York. Their storylines all feel scattered, united solely by Rue’s narration. What sort of overlap their arcs will have, and whether their stories will converge to form any point about Cassie and co’s generation by the series’ end, remains to be seen.
Some constants remain, the good and bad of Euphoria past. This is still a sumptuously-shot show, not to mention a well-acted one: Zendaya in particular is in formidable form once more, letting glints of sadness surface from beneath Rue’s veneer of languid detachment. Less appealing is how the camera still hovers longingly over shots of its female characters’ bodies, as one-by-one, Levinson’s scripts nudge them into sex work and skimpy costumes. A common criticism of the showrunner is that there’s seldom much insight or commentary to go with the degradation of the women in his work. Two episodes into Euphoria Season 3, that criticism is yet to be answered.
Amid all the chaos of this season is a captivating existential question for Rue to consider. Flirting with religion, she begins to wonder: how much can someone ever really reinvent themselves? It is possible to carve out a new identity for yourself — or are we forever burdened by who we were in the past? As it reaches its endgame, Euphoria seems trapped by a similar tension, torn between the show it wants to be — a crime thriller with a side helping of satirical swipes at the entertainment industry ecosystem — and all that came before.
Euphoria is still bold, still daring, still lavish in its production. But it’s also still in search of a point to make. Its legacy after this final season depends on its ability to find one.
