by Michael McCarthy
photos by HBO
First of all, just in case you didn’t read the full subject line, I feel that I should begin this review but stating that it will contain major spoilers. If you don’t want to know about things like characters dying before you watch it, don’t read any further.
Perhaps the biggest difference about this third season of Euphoria, which arrived four years after season two, is that the main characters are no longer high school students. The show’s very talented creator/writer/director Sam Levinson made the choice to have season three take place five years after season two. I seem to be in the minority, but I think that was a wise decision. At this point, the stars of the show look like people in their 20s, not high school students, so it would have been hard to suspend one’s disbelief if they were still playing high schoolers. Instead, the third season of Euphoria is largely a crime drama with suspense thriller vibes at times. Some viewers did not like this change but I think this was actually my favorite season of the series.
This season the always excellent Zendaya’s character Rue bounces back and forth between two rival drug dealers. At first, she’s working as a mule for Laurie. But soon she meets a dealer/strip joint owner called Alamo Brown, played brilliantly by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and she convinces him to let her work for him instead. As the season continues, Laurie and Alamo are bitter enemies, constantly trying to rip each other off. At one point, Rue gets arrested by the DEA and the agents want her to arrange a drug deal involving both Laurie and Alamo so that they can take them down at the same time and Rue agrees. Admittedly, I did find it a little hard to believe that Rue would cooperate with the DEA. I wasn’t surprised when she appeared to agree but I thought she was bluffing and would immediately go and tell Alamo what happened. But, no, she really does try to help the DEA bring down both dealers.
Unfortunately for Rue, her friend Maddy (Alexa Demie) becomes involved in business dealings with Alamo and she foolishly lets it slip that Rue has friends in the DEA. This gives Alamo the opportunity to move the drugs before the DEA attempts to seize them. The next thing you know he’s offering Rue a Percocet and telling her to take a week off for having successfully robbed Laurie’s safe. When Alamo offers Rue the Percocet, she immediately recognizes it and asks if that’s what it is. Alamo confirms it and takes one himself then she finally takes one. Before he tells her to take the time off, he gives her the rest of the bottle. Soon, Rue is dead from an apparent drug overdose. But most of the tablets are still in the bottle. Her sponsor, Ali, tests one of the tablets and it turns out to be fentanyl. Ali then realizes that Alamo gave her the tablets to kill her. When I thought that they were just having Rue die from a typical drug overdose, I was rather disappointed, especially since it happens pretty early in the finale. But once you realize that Alamo killed her on purpose, it furthers the plot and her death seems more important. I’m not sure I would have killed Rue so early in the episode if I was writing it, but I ultimately enjoyed the episode and think it was an excellent series finale. If there was going to be another season, however, I would have been displeased about Rue’s death because she has always been the heart of the show, whereas many of the other characters were rather pretentious and/or selfish. Not that Rue couldn’t be selfish at times but she always seemed like a good person deep down.
By the end of the finale, Ali takes a sawed off shotgun to Alamo’s club and kills him after telling the other addicts at an NA meeting that he’s going to find another way to be of service. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Ali killing Alamo. I did want Alamo to die but I’m not sure Ali was the ideal person to kill him. Ali always seemed so good natured that it’s hard to believe he’d murder anyone even if they did kill one of his sponsees. If Levinson was having Ali kill Alamo for shock value then it definitely accomplished what he wanted it to but the more I think about it, the less I like it.
That said, I have to applaud Colman Domingo for his performance as Ali, which was arguably the best acting in the entire series. If you liked him in Euphoria, you should check out the Netflix series Four Seasons in which he plays one of the main characters. But it’s nothing like Euphoria – it’s a comedy about three couples who are good friends who vacation together… and argue a lot. But Domingo is as effective doing comedies as he is with dramas.
Another main character dies in season three. Nate Jacobs, beautifully played by Jacob Elordi. But before Nate dies, he loses a toe and a finger to an Armenian mobster that he tried to defraud. The irony is that eventually he has money and wants to pay the mobster but instead the mobster has him buried alive, albeit with a pipe leading up to the surface so that he can get oxygen and stay alive in the coffin. But a rattlesnake soon finds its way down the pipe and bites him and he dies. I rather enjoyed the whole storyline with Nate his season because in the first two seasons he just kept doing bad things and getting away with them, which grew increasingly frustrating to watch. I was actually amused to see karma catch up with him this season; it literally had me laughing out loud many times. Some have argued that the way they killed Nate was either excessive or cartoonish but I suppose I thought he had it coming.
The storyline that interested me the least this season was Cassie’s. While the drug-war plotlines and Nate’s downfall pushed the series into darker territory, Cassie’s OnlyFans storyline often felt disconnected from the rest of the season and relied too heavily on shock value. Sydney Sweeney commits fully to the material, but I never found the storyline as compelling as what was happening elsewhere.
I also wasn’t crazy about the storyline with Jules, the trans character played by Hunter Schafer. Schafer was terrific, but it felt as though Jules spent most of the season trapped in her sugar daddy’s apartment. While other characters were caught up in drug wars, DEA investigations, and mob violence, Jules was largely reduced to painting and occasionally hanging out with Rue. By the end of the season, her storyline felt repetitive and underdeveloped. I think it was a mistake to have so many of Jules’ scenes take place in the apartment.
Ultimately, I think Euphoria season three was more effective as a crime show than it was as a drama about high school students in the first two seasons. I was also glad that Eric Dane’s character Cal wasn’t present aside from the first episode because I thought Cal was even worse than Nate, who was his son. If this season had featured Cal and Nate doing more bad things and getting away with them I think I would have reached a boiling point and hated it. Fortunately, Cal is gone and Nate finally faces consequences for his actions. Euphoria may have abandoned the formula that made it a hit this season, but in doing so it delivered what was, for me, the strongest season of the series.
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