Euphoria Season 3 Review: HBO's Bleakly Provocative Drama Can't Escape Bad Habits

The second season of HBO's Euphoria really should have been the end, but it seemed clear even then that it wasn't. Maddy (Alexa Demie), the queen bee of her high school, says as much to her best friend Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) — though the pair are discussing something very different within the context of the show. At the end of Season 2, Maddy discovers Cassie has been sneaking around with her psychotic ex-boyfriend, Nate (Jacob Elordi at his most quietly menacing), and that reveal triggers a vicious fight that leaves her with a bloody nose and Maddy with a bruised foot. For, say, a normal friendship, that might be the end of the strife: Cassie admits that Nate had broken up with her just moments before their altercation anyway. But Maddy turns, a little pleased and a little sad. "Don't worry," she sighs. "This is just the beginning."

Maddy's meaning is clear: Nate isn't done with Cassie yet; the cycle of his abuse has only just begun. But it's startling how well that metaphor extends to the workings of Euphoria itself. Audiences felt as battered and abused by the show as Maddy and Cassie looked after their brawl, and the idea of more of any of it felt like a sick joke. Hadn't these characters been through enough? Hadn't we all lost enough of our humanity, trudging through the storm cooked up by A24, rappers and executive producers Drake and Future, and creator/writer/producer/director (sigh) Sam Levinson? We'd been sandblasted by the traumamaxxing and come out smooth-brained on the other side, that much more numb to circumstances that should shock and appall us. Euphoria's darkest moments have since been compressed into crunchy reaction GIFs, divorced of all their context. It's enough to make you feel like none of it really mattered at all, or at least like the show had given us all it could. 

The creative monolith that is Levinson has likewise fallen spectacularly from grace, marred by one quiet controversy after the next. For Euphoria fans, he became their proverbial straw man: When Season 2 was bad, it was entirely his fault; when it was good, it couldn't possibly be his doing. Nearly every actress who appeared in the show admitted to pushing back against his dogged obsession with nudity. If the barrage of exposés didn't kill Euphoria's prospects, his failed side quests — from the egregious Malcolm & Marie to The Idol, the final boss of the male gaze — should have. But the series persevered, Maddy's ominous warning looking more and more like a spell from Levinson's pen to HBO's ears. Season 2 of Euphoria was just the beginning — of the show's downward spiral, possibly, but Season 3 is determined to rise from the ashes… somehow. It's not easy conjuring up a new thought about this latest chapter of Euphoria, but I will say this: The show is a Western now, but that's actually not as ridiculous as it sounds.

4.2

Euphoria Season 3

at HBO

Like

• Stunning cinematography and costumes as always
• Emmy winner Zendaya!

Dislike

• Gross-out gags get old fast
• The same conflict dressed up in grown-up clothes

Returning to this blindingly bleak universe after everyone has moved on (including most of its actors) feels like a backslide of biblical proportions, but Season 3 has the benefit of starting relatively fresh. A five-year time jump should wipe the slate clean for Rue (Zendaya) and all her friends from Euphoria High. Rue is now "California sober," and might be the better for it. She seems calm and centered, living joyfully in the present, when we catch up with her somewhere along the Mexico-U.S. border, speeding across the wastes with the wind in her hair and Christopher Cross blasting on the radio. It doesn't take long for Euphoria to drop back into its default state of dread when it reveals why Rue is traipsing back and forth across the border in the first place. She still owes deadpan druglord Laurie (Martha Kelly) a fortune from her antics in Season 2 — and naturally, she doesn't have the cash to pay her back. 

"And that's how I became a drug mule," reveals Rue's casual narration, delivered over shots of herself and her pal Faye (Chloe Cherry) choking down golf ball-sized bags of fentanyl, drool dripping down their chins as the camera lurks above at a lofty blowjob angle. Sonic tributes to Ennio Morricone, alongside tacked-on fart gags, soundtrack their trek back across the border. Even before they return to Laurie's drug den, skidmarks between their thighs, Levinson's statement is clear: Love me or hate me, you're gonna be talking about this anyway.

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Rue and Faye's escapade in Mexico is just the first of many doses of psychic damage Euphoria inflicts in its third season, but our heroine fortunately decides quickly enough that she deserves better than this. (As do we!) She's thinking of trying out religion, an idea that takes root after crossing paths with an uber-Christian family in Texas. That they're also quite obviously white nationalists is a detail Rue neglects to share alongside her mystical account of her time with them. "They seemed so happy" is all she'll say about this family, and maybe that's all that really matters. More than ever, Rue just wants to be happy — but she, alongside the rest of Euphoria's returning cast, spends this season circling the drain instead of crawling upward, finally, into the light.

The first episodes of Season 3 take on a familiar format. Rue catches us up on the lives of Maddy, who works in management as an assistant; Cassie, who's engaged to Nate and making awful OnlyFans content; Lexi (Maude Apatow), now an assistant on a daytime soap; and Rue's old flame Jules (Hunter Schafer), who dropped out of art school to become a sugar baby. (Fez, the affable drug dealer played by the late Angus Cloud, is serving a 30-year prison sentence, but Rue stays in touch.) Many of these updates are frustrating in their own little ways, but none more so than Jules'. Remember her very special episode, in which she states that she's no longer interested in men and starts working to dismantle her constant need for male validation? Levinson wasted little time walking all that back in Season 2, and Season 3 doubles down by saddling her with a much older high roller, a plastic surgeon who waxes poetic about "slicing women open for a living." She struts back into the picture with a not-insignificant boob job and a chilling kind of confidence, done up like a bimbo-ified Botticelli model. Rue, with cash of her own now, doesn't hesitate to buy some of her time. "I'm your sugar daddy now," she declares, oblivious to Jules' trepidation. Will the third time be the charm for her and Rue? Would it even matter if it is?

Watching this fractured friend group reassemble, you're left wondering what, if anything, there is left for them to say to each other. Maddy rekindles her "friendship" with Cassie for all the wrong reasons, quietly working to dismantle Cassie's surprisingly semi-healthy relationship with Nate. The feeling it inspires is less like deja vu and more like consummate boredom: It makes sense that these crazy kids are still struggling to unlearn the habits that made their high school existence hell. A five-year time jump is not quite enough time to drop all their baggage and stop hurting each other and themselves. But given the "role models" around them who represent adulthood — like Nate's deviant dad Cal (the late Eric Dane in his final TV role), who drifts through this season with booze-induced self-acceptance — you'd think the wake-up call would have already rung. 

Cal's role as a cautionary tale is about as subtle as this season gets, at least in the first three episodes made available to critics. Otherwise, Levinson lays the pastiche on thick, reminding us that Euphoria is a show about kids trying to figure out who they are and what they want in a world where the only options seem to be porn, drugs, and organized violence. This season's use of the American West as an aesthetic touchstone is actually really effective, if only because it embraces how tacky and bleak this show has always been. The act of moving west to become an influencer, as so many beautiful girls did at the top of the decade, is framed as a modern-day Manifest Destiny; the OnlyFans boom is likened to the California gold rush. Are those dated references? Incredibly — but Levinson is coming in hot with a vintage aesthetic that reorients us with the state of the world circa 2020, rehashing the shock of pandemic lockdown and the fury of the Black Lives Matter riots in one breath and relishing in gaudy nods to Graceland and Old Hollywood in another. He can't claim to be original, but when the look of one's entire show up to this point is allegedly stolen from photographer Petra Collins, a fresh perspective — even a derivative, kitschy one — feels like a wise move.

Obviously, Euphoria looks good, shot on some bespoke and stunning film stock. But it's also, aside from a few shocks of violence that any Nate haters still out there will likely love, pretty uneventful. What gives this season its propulsion (and doesn't it always?) is Rue's noir-tinged climb through purgatory. In her efforts to get out from under Laurie's thumb, Rue thinks she's found salvation in one of her clients, a strip club tycoon named Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). "Maybe God brought us together," she suggests when she rolls up to his mansion in middle-of-nowhere California with a fanny pack full of drugs. The way Levinson's longtime cinematographer, Marcell Rév, photographs these sprawling vistas, wide with possibility and hope, you kind of hope she's right. 

If nothing else, it's a relief to see Rue free of the drug abuse, soul-crushing withdrawals, and severe relapse that punctuated her Season 2 arc. Per Levinson, Euphoria Season 3 embraces the third step of AA, surrendering to a power greater than ourselves — but for Rue that's not really God so much as it is Alamo's own sinister regime. It's admittedly intriguing watching her conflate the two, blinded by the good tips (and good sex) she gets working in one of Alamo's titty bars. It's even more gratifying to watch that illusion slowly shatter: Zendaya reminds us why she's won two Emmys as she grapples with the idea that something may be very, very wrong here. Alamo's girls either drop dead from drug abuse or disappear somewhere in the desert, lost among the dunes and the underbrush. Rue's overworking mind, her elastic, expressive face, is not unlike that desert; Rév shoots it like the topography of a map constantly shifting. Euphoria, as always, is at its best when it remembers that Zendaya is its universe. Capable as she is, though, she's not enough to save it from the fate that haunts all false provocateurs: irrelevance. 

Premieres: Sunday, April 12 at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Max
Who's in it: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Colman Domingo, Eric Dane, Martha Kelly, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Who's behind it: Sam Levinson (creator, writer, director, producer); Ashley Levinson, Drake, Adel "Future" Nur (executive producers)
For fans of: Spaghetti westerns, Skins, Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2
How many episodes we watched: 3 of 8