Nate Jacobs was never a character you could trust on HBO’s Euphoria. According to Jacob Elordi (who plays Nate on the show), he thinks of him as an “emotional terrorist.” But in season 2 episode 6 of Euphoria, we saw just how willing Nate is to completely terrify those around him and use his power to his advantage.
While we got to see what was happening in the aftermath of Rue’s runaway from her mother, we also got to explore what really happened when everyone learned the truth about Cassie and Nate.
**Spoilers for Euphoria season 2 episode 6 lie ahead.**
**Content warning for discussion of assault.**
What Euphoria has in Nate Jacobs is the perfect villain to explore those kind of men who use their power and status and feel invincible. We saw it in season 1 when Nate choked Maddy and, essentially, got away with it. We saw it with what he did with Jules, and now, it all came to a head when his future livelihood was threatened, and he was willing to do whatever it took to keep it.
After his father abandoned his family, Nate realized that the only thing he cared about was his father’s business because it would one day be his. The problem? Nate lost the tape of his father sleeping with an underage Jules to Maddy, who now hates him because he slept with her best friend Cassie. Maddy is the kind of woman who is completely loyal until you’re on her bad side, which both Cassie and Nate are, and Nate knew that. So, what does he do as a full-on villain? He decides to use a gun he found in his father’s desk to threaten her.
And not just threaten her by showing her the gun but by playing a version of “Russian Roulette” until she tells him where the tape is. He later reveals that the gun was empty and it was a “joke.” So what he did was threaten Maddy, assault her, and use a weapon to get answers out of her, causing her more trauma than he already had before, all to make sure that his future was secure.
Nate, Jules, Cassie, and Maddy
The last few moments of this episode for Nate were a series of frantic thoughts playing out before us with Nate’s stoic response. If he’s not angry and screaming, he barely has a personality, and it’s that quiet response to things that is the most frightening. After terrifying Maddy and leaving her rolled in a ball on her bed, he took the tape of his father and Jules to Jules, to then tell her that he meant everything he texted her while pretending to be someone else.
He’s emotionally manipulating Jules at the same time he’s assaulting and traumatizing Maddy and leading Cassie on. That doesn’t mean Cassie is innocent in this; she’s wrong for what she’s done to Maddy, but most of the problems surrounding this entire group stem from Nate Jacobs, and surprisingly, the only one who really sees that is Rue.
Cal Jacobs’ choices
When it comes to characters who refuse to accept themselves, Euphoria is full of them, but one that causes harm to others time and time again is Cal Jacobs. Played by Eric Dane, Cal is a “family man” who is hiding behind this All-American mask and projecting an image out into the world to hide the fact that he is a closeted bisexual man—something we learned he had begun to act on in high school, until Nate’s mother Marsha told him she was pregnant.
But Cal’s actions have informed Nate’s darker nature for longer than he knows. In season 1, we found out that Nate had found his dad’s tapes when he was a kid, watching as his dad consistently cheated on his mother and filmed the encounters without the knowledge of those participating. And in season 1, Cal did it to Jules (Hunter Schaefer), who was underage but told Cal she was 22 years old.
That knowledge informed how Nate viewed his father, and for the most part, it forced him to “protect” his family, meaning that Nate would use emotional manipulation to get what he wanted, like getting close to Jules to threaten her to leave his father and his family alone.
All of that has come to a head given that Cal basically left his family, and it resulted in Marsha spending her time drinking and trying to be buddy-buddy with Nate, including telling him that she would have choked Maddy, too. Basically, this family would rather hide their secrets than have any kind of honesty, and that “perfect family” image has turned Nate into the villain we see throughout the series.
But Cal’s actions and choices have ended up being Nate’s entire dark personality. Marsha even says that he got all of the bad parts of his father and none of the good things. And it’s true. Nate is evil, manipulative, and the most realistic villain on television because there are men like Nate at every turn.
There’s a lot to unpack in the final episodes of season 2, and one of them needs to be Nate’s second assault on Maddy even if he said it was a “joke.”
(image: HBO)
