Euphoria has never been a subtle series. The Season 3 premiere is no different, plunging viewers back into Sam Levinson‘s provocative story about young people searching for meaning and connection in a chaotic, often cynical, world. Now, those characters are five years older, but none the wiser.
In fact, they seem to have defaulted back to the worst versions of themselves, if they ever grew beyond them to begin with — only this time, the safety net of high school is gone. Levinson has repeatedly said he sought to explore “the Wild West of adulthood” with Season 3, visually drawing inspiration from the American West. Naturally, the first episode sets off on that circuitous journey through the lens of Zendaya‘s Rue Bennett, whose debt to drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) has come due since we last saw her.
In the Season 3 premiere, Rue is cut off from most of her friends and family since relapsing and is now working as Laurie’s drug mule, body-packing fentanyl to smuggle it over the U.S.-Mexico border, which it turns out she’s got a knack for. Albeit seemingly an effective method for drug smuggling, its limitations mean she’s also recruited Faye (Chloe Cherry) to help her out.
It doesn’t take long for Levinson, who wrote the entire season and directed nearly all of it as well, to remind audiences why Euphoria gained much of its cultural cache in the first place with an incendiary scene that’s sure to spread like wildfire across the internet featuring Rue and Faye choking down fentanyl-filled balloons covered in petroleum jelly (and the graphic consequences).
When asked about the scene, Cherry was quite matter of fact, telling Deadline: “Honestly, Sam said, ‘This is what we’re doing in this scene’…And once we were done, everyone clapped for me. I’m not joking. Everyone on set clapped.”
But the same scene, which like many in the premiere rides Levinson’s signature line between absurdity and anxiety, also highlights another sort of familiar tension in this show: That between the provocation and the depth of the material. If the goal is to make audiences squirm, Levinson certainly succeeds. Beyond that, it’s hard to tell what purpose the stomach-turning scene serves toward Levinson’s examination of entering the great expanse that is adulthood.
Naturally, Cherry teases “bad things” will come to pass to both Faye and Rue, as expected given the way the episode progresses.
Rue eventually sours on her gig with Laurie and opts to jump ship for a new kingpin. That’s where things descend further downhill for her as she aligns herself with strip club magnate and crime boss Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), after showing up to his estate on a drug run and overindulging on controlled substances and women. While he’s wary of her at first, her audacity — fueled, as it often is, by a combination of naïveté and adrenaline-seeking — piques his interest.
“Initially, he sees in her some of himself, because she walks into his domain unannounced, uninvited, and then dances with my girls and then gets one killed,” Akinnuoye-Agbaje tells Deadline. “So, I think he sees a lot of himself in her, in that, this girl has balls. I think that’s why he gives her a little grace, initially, and I also think he sees that she’s smart. She’s ambitious, and maybe there’s a way that he can utilize her in his world. He’s not sold on it, which is why he tests her and says, ‘Do you believe in God? Well, let’s see if He believes in you.'”
In the final moments of the episode, Alamo subjects Rue to said test: Pistol target practice using an apple perched atop her head. Once the bullet pierces the fruit, Rue collapses, nearly worshipping the ground she stood on as she comes down from the high of nearly losing her life. The reaction tells Alamo everything he needs to know about Rue, and so he brings her under his wing to teach her an even more sinister trade: illicit arms dealing.
“It’s a wonderful entrance and gateway to their journey,” continues Akinnuoye-Agbaje. “It really sets the tone as to who he is and to what we can expect…she passes the test, because I think if she had flinched, he would have shot her.”
Euphoria has long faced criticisms that it deals in vibes, mood lighting and fodder to be clipped for social media reactions. Such has already proven to be the case for Season 3, as images of star Sydney Sweeney as an infantilized Cassie — dressed as a baby, complete with a pacifier and ringlet hair in pigtails, which could be Levinson adding his thoughts to the tradwife conversation but is once again not decisive enough to be clear — went viral before the first episode saw the light of day.
As the credits roll on the premiere, viewers are left to marvel at the intensity of the final scene and to ponder what might come from Rue’s transition to trafficking AR-15s…and what they’re supposed to take away from it.
Though Levinson is setting the stage for a grander tale in this third season of Euphoria, he is once again dealing in a series of images, or individual vignettes that suggest a cohesive narrative and creative prowess but ultimately do little beyond poke and prod the audience, like cattle, into a reaction. If only those scenes didn’t begin to buckle under their own weight from a lack of substance underneath.
English (US) ·