Well, the second season of HBO’s Euphoria is over, and with all the things this season set up, and the leftovers from the previous season, it was more of a dull ending than expected—even with a SWAT team.
Spoilers for Euphoria’s season two finale.
Cassie Howard is not having a great night. The blonde was seen getting dumped by Nate and then looking like Carrie White in Carrie as she huffed into the glass window of the gym door. She feels embarrassed and shamed by the play (and honestly, I would be, too), but Cassie has always become the worst.
She struts on stage and slow-claps, trying, once more, to mirror Maddie, who also dramatically clapped last season. Jeering at Lexi, she mockingly says how hard it must be to live in her shadow. Cassie asks if her stealing “Jake” is going to be in the play and someone in the audience goes, “Halle steals Jake from Marta?”
To that, Maddie responds, yup and yells that the two had sex while “Marta” was talking about getting back together with him. Cassie ends up having a full breakdown on the stage, and Maddie decides it’s finally time to throw hands.
She runs on stage, throws off her shoes, and slaps Cassie, who runs away. After talking a big game about how she’s crazier than Maddie, it sure seems like she’s was running a lot. They end up in the hallway, and Maddie slams Cassie headfirst into a wall. At the end up the episode, we see a bleeding Cassie in the bathroom, with Maddie icing her foot with Coke. All of Maddie’s injuries are self-inflicted.
Cassie admits that Nate broke up with her before she got on stage, and Maddie ominously tells her that this is just the beginning. Sydney Sweeney drops a masterful single tear for her Emmy reel, and the most engaging storyline of the season wraps up.
Yeah, the rest of the episode was a pretty dry blur for me. For some reason, Dominic Fike’s Elliot gets four very long minutes of screen time to play a song I watched at 2x speed, despite all the no-screen time we got for characters like Kat and Jules, who seemed like afterthoughts this season.
Blowing up the Jules/Rue relationship in such a messy way felt so strange, especially because Rue apparently just stays clean and doesn’t end up owing a drug dealer thousands of dollars. Yay? I didn’t want Rue to get hurt, but why establish that anyway? Lexi’s play was fine. Honestly, watching the reactions was the best part, but I could also barely get invested because it just kept changing scope to the point where I just got bored.
Fez is wounded and Ash is killed when the SWAT team shoots up their place. It’s … a story, I guess. Nate turns his dad in for child porn, freeing himself from Cal’s baggage. However, as someone who doesn’t care about Nate or Cal, it just fell like more screen time that could have gone to the women of the show.
Earlier in February, The Daily Beast wrote about the “drama” on the Euphoria set, which, to me, seems like creator, director, and writer Sam Levinson needs a lot more oversight than he is getting. Just because he responds well to women asking for excess nudity to be cut doesn’t make the fact that the excess nudity was written into a scene less weird.
The alleged conflict between Levinson and Barbie Ferreira, who plays Kat, has also been an issue: “The Daily Beast spoke with a handful of production sources who claimed that Ferreira indeed walked off set at least two times—not including the time Ferreira had to be helped off after she slipped and fell twice, twisting her ankle during the filming of episode four’s hot tub-puking sequence. Sources also say that at least one sex scene involving Ferreira was cut from a final version of an episode.” Neither has commented on the record, but considering how paltry Kat’s storyline was this season, it rings true.
Euphoria has moments of emotional depth, especially with Rue and her addiction, but it feels like it is time for a writers’ room and more oversight, because the lack of structure was very apparent.
(image HBO Max)
