Not Crazy, Just Lost

Where the first Euphoria special focused on Rue, this second special, “F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob”, is focused on Jules, the girl Rue was dating who left her at a train station when Rue was unable to run away with her. That first special was like a play, set within a diner and never straying (outside the opening and closing scenes) away from it. The episode was built as a conversation, with Rue talking to her sponsor, Ali, over late-night plates of pancakes. The second special tries to do something different, with Jules having a conversation with her new therapist, Dr. Mardy Nichols (Lauren Weedman), so she can discuss everything that’s bothering her. But while the concept is the same, the execution is very different.

“F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob” is not set up like a play. While its main mode of conveying its story is via a conversation between two characters, it doesn’t remain within the confines of the therapist’s office. As Jules discusses what’s going on in her life, what’s bothering her – Rue and her drug addiction; Jules’s mom, Amy (Pell James), and her drug addiction; pressure from her father, David (John Ales), to forgive her mom; and an online tryst she had with a guy named “Tyler” (Jayden Marcos) that she is still stuck on – we see past scenes, and future dream sequences, from Jules’s perspective, drawing us out of the room and into other locales.

It’s a strange choice, to be sure. I get that the creators might have felt like this conversation couldn’t just be in a single room, that they needed to cut away to show how things affected Jules. The scenes they do show are effective, giving us raw details we wouldn’t have gotten simply from a conversation. But that does also violate the conceit of the episode: if we hear it only from Jules’s own mouth, we have to decide what we feel is the truth and what is her exaggerating, like we did with Rue in her story. Shifting the focus this episode doesn’t give the same weight to the conversation; here the show tips its hand.

Honestly I think I like the Rue episode, “Trouble Don’t Last Always”, better because it keeps the focus squarely on the conversation. It develops Rue and Alu as characters, and it creates a strong dynamic. We don’t get that same kind of relationship between Jules and Dr. Nichols. Naturally, Jules isn’t going to treat her therapist to the same kind of relationship Rue and Ali has; the later pairing have known each other for a few weeks and have a shared history of addiction, where Jules is meeting her doctor for the first time, and they’re still learning each other. That, plus the doctor’s professional methods, means their pairing will feel different.

But even then, the doctor never really comes into focus. She’s a passive observer for much of the episode, only breaking in to occasionally say, “go deeper on that,” or, “tell me more.” Once in a while she gives input on a story Jules is telling, but by and large she doesn’t really have a say on the direction of the episode. This is Jules going freeform, finding something to say about what happened to her and why she’s where she is, not just as a person but also as someone in this office, forced to talk to a therapist after trying to run away from home.

I wish that dynamic between the two characters was stronger. I don’t think there’s any specific reason why this had to be their first meeting as patient and doctor. Jules could have had a therapist that wasn’t mentioned before simply because it wasn’t relevant. We get slices of each character’s lives on the show, but we don’t see everything, and Jules having a therapist could be one of those things that was never addressed but was just assumed until it actually came up. That way we could have a more lived in dynamic between the two and a shared history they could play off of, even if this is the first time we’re meeting the doctor on the show.

This is also the less interesting conversation between the two, just in general. Rue’s episode focuses on everything she has going on in her life, and while Jules is (or, really, was, since they broke up) a part of it, her story isn’t defined by Jules. She has other people in her life, other things going on, and her addiction is her real story. Contrast that against Jules where everything she discusses really gets back to Rue. She loves Rue but hated having to carry the weight of Rue’s recovery for her. She hates her mother because of her mother’s addiction, and while the show tries to question that, asking why she can hate her mother but love Rue when they’re going through the same problems, it still feels like it’s holding all of Jules’s life and comparing it to Rue.

And then there’s “Tyler”, the boy Jules knows online. She had a strong, sexual, online relationship with him, and she still pines for what she had. She says it was, in many ways, better and more real than her relationship with Rue. And because of that, we’re again comparing something to Rue, and her whole story wraps itself around the other girl. There is more to Jules than Rue. She’s a trans girl still figuring out who she wants to be after her transition… if she even wants to finish her transition. There’s far more we could unpack there, but every time matters about her personal life away from Rue come up, the show doggedly drags it back to Rue. It makes you wish the show had more to say about Jules.

Although, Jules is also a lot. I liked the focused, quiet pace of the conversation between Rue and Ali in the first special. The energy here, with Jules, is very different. Far more needy. It takes a long time for the episode to get you settled in with Jules, to make you care about her so that she can find herself again. About half the episode went by before I finally settled in and was really interested in Jules’s story, and whether that’s just because Jules struggles to define herself, or because Rue got to go first with her special and that puts Jules’s story at a disadvantage, it does make it so that I didn’t care as much about Jules and her episode. I found her to be a lot, dumped on us very quickly, and I struggled to want to be there with her.

Again, that might be because her episode comes second, and it’s also a different kind of episode from Rue’s even if the show still tries to make it a conversation between two people. And that’s nothing against the actress’s performance. Hunter Schafer does fantastic work this episode, letting all of Jules’s messy emotion play out on her face. It’s a stunningly great performance, one that makes you forget the actress and just see the character. It’s just wasted on an episode that really isn’t about Jules, deep down, but Rue instead.

The first Euphoria special impressed me and I was really hoping this second special could be just as good. It’s different, and there are moments that are great, but where the first episode felt like something outside the norm for the series, “F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob” feels like a far more traditional, and far less interesting, episode of the series. I get what the creators were going for here, I just don’t think it works nearly as well.

And, in the end, we’re still left without a clear picture of Jules. We don’t know much more about her than we did before, and the gaps the show fills in down elucidate anything we needed. This is a rudderless episode that could have been so much more. We need a Jules episode that’s about Jules, that keeps the focus on Jules and builds her up as a character. Instead we get a backdoor Rue episode and it’s not nearly as strong because of it.