Like a Fever Dream from a Different Series

For its first two seasons Euphoria was a strange, but kind of relatable, show (especially relatable if you were anywhere close to high school age at the time). Yes, it was full of sex and drugs, but it had its own kind of grounded reality that wasn’t too far off from the real world. It tried to play by our rules, even as it had an artistic flair to its production. Director Sam Levinson, and his production team, certainly took some liberties when it came to giving the film a theatrical flair, but that was part of the magic that sucked you in. Nothing on television looked like Euphoria, but it certainly made you feel like the teens you were following felt real.

The time between season two and season three of the show, though, clearly changed things. That break was longer than the time between season one and season two, over four years between seasons (without even the benefit of two television specials to help bridge the time). Four years where everyone moved on, worked on other projects (in the case of Levinson, The Idol, which was awful), and then had to find themselves again for the series. Four years where everything, apparently, completely changed.

The Euphoria of season three is a very different show. It’s no longer this weird, arthouse show following teens as they struggle through high school. It’s not, functionally, a low-rent Tarantino production, just without even any of his artistic flair. It’s a functional, but not incredibly interesting, crime series replacing what Euphoria used to be, and it makes you wonder: just what happened to this series, and the people making it, that they thought, “yes, let’s reinvent every aspect of this series so that it barely resembles the show you used to know. That’s clearly what the fans wanted.” It wasn’t, and even if the series didn’t end with this third season, there’s no way I think it could have come back for further stories after all of this.

The third season picks up five years after the end of the second season. We find Rue working as an indentured drug mule for Laurie (Martha Kelly), the drug queenpin that Rue borrowed a bunch of drugs from (back in second season) and then never paid back. She now owes Laurie millions (counting interest), thus her job running drugs back and forth across the border. This puts Rue into contact with Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who runs girls, getting them hooked on drugs so they’ll work in his strip clubs (doing more than just stripping). Rue thinks Alamo might just be her salvation, getting her away from Laurie, but she might just be trading one devil for another.

Meanwhile, Cassie has gotten engaged to Nate, who took over his father’s construction business, and their nuptials are coming up quickly. However, a recent construction job has hit a major snag, with a rare and protected flower growing on land Nate had set aside for a massive construction job. All of Nate’s money is invested in this project, so he had to borrow money, a lot of it, and some of it came from a very shady man, Naz. Naz wants his money back, and he has no problem hurting Nate, quite severely, to motivate him. Cassie turns to making erotic content online to try and make some cash, and this gets her back in contact with Maddie, who works in Hollywood and has contacts that could further her career. And then, once Rue gets Maddie in touch with Alamo, all of the erotic business could really take off… for a price.

There are a few different issues with this season of Euphoria, but all of them functionally boil down to the fact that this season doesn’t feel like it connects in any way to the previous two seasons (plus) that this show got. It feels like we’ve missed a lot of vital material that would give this season connective tissue to what we’d seen before. If this had come as, say, the fifth season of the show and we’d watched the slow evolution of the series from high school drama into crime thriller, it might have worked. Might. But because we’re getting dropped into it after a five year jump, and the resulting show is so different from what we’ve known, it feels like a critical step in the evolution is missing, and the show is much worse off for it.

Take Rue’s story and the crime drama around it. Is it hard to believe that Rue, a drug addict who has shown she’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal, would somehow get in debt to a cartel and have to basically work off her debt to them? No. That’s a world she could have inevitably ended up in. But because we miss the five years that came in between what we see is Rue, in high school, finally getting her shit together before, suddenly, five years later she’s a drug mule working in a low-rent Tarantino world that makes no sense when compared to what we knew. Her jump only works if we see the time in between.

I think the shift is even more stark for other characters on the show. Cassie goes from ditzy high schooler to an OnlyFans porn star between seasons. Nate changes from an abusive, closeted man into this guy that owes money to a gangster. Maddie becomes an assistant to a Hollywood manager, and then finds herself managing porn stars. For each of these characters what we knew about them before has nothing to do with where they are now. These could be completely different characters, new people with new names, and in the bounds of the world it would make just as much sense.

Hell, when we consider how much of this season is obsessed with sex work it’s actually shocking that the one character that was a sex worker, Kat Hernandez, isn’t on the show at all. She’s the one character that actually could make sense in this world, but she was basically shoved off the show during its second season, and not a single one of her friends even makes reference to her this season at all. I’m not even sure what the show is doing with a move like that.

Not that the show knows how to close things out for the characters it still has. The series ends with this third season, but few of the characters we’re following have any kind of conclusive ending. Cassie and Maddie end on a kind of question mark with their lives, while Jules, Rue’s on-again / off-again girlfriend doesn’t even get a question mark. She’s left in limbo with no resolution to her storyline at all. Some people meet bad ends as the show rushes towards its ending, such as it is, but it really doesn’t feel like it knows how to conclude anything for all the characters it’s brought back and continued following.

Part of me wonders if Levinson really just wanted to make a crime drama but was contractually stuck making one more season of Euphoria. It’s either that or the creator was so bereft of ideas of where to take the series after the second season (which, if we’re being honest, was already a pale imitation of the first season) that this was all he could come up with. Whatever the case is, this season of the show simply doesn’t work. Whether Levinson meant to try something new or if he just couldn’t come up with better, it feels like he would have been better off leaving well enough alone. As uneven as the second season was, it at least gave us something of an ending for the characters. This third season trots most of them back out just to leave their stories hanging and unresolved.

It sucks because Euphoria started with such promise. That first season is an incredible piece of work, artistic and interesting and unlike anything else on television at the time. To see it devolve into a third-rate crime drama worse than most of what HBO regularly cranks out feels terrible. This show could have ended on a high note, but instead it can’t even give us the courtesy of a proper ending for its survivors. This will go down as just another series that carried on far longer than it should, ruining its reputation for years to come.