Much has been said about this season of Euphoria, and I am going to add my opinion here but please, don’t read it if you can’t deal with spoilers. Really. Go.
Okay, if you are still here I need to first say that in the beginning, the early seasons of Euphoria, I was hooked. Like many, this season I often felt like watching an episode was more administering a medication than a pleasure. In fact, it was a bit like the fetanyl laced drugs that finally took Rue our beloved anti-hero. It wasn’t really healthy for me, but I kept taking it.
First off, the absolute disdain that this season shows for all women isn’t even pretending to hide. Previously, the female characters were certainly not always admirable but at least they had a depth. In this season the only two females that weren’t straight up sex workers whose entire purpose on screen was their degradation were Rue and Maddie — and both of them only escaped that fate because they themselves were the degraders, using other women to avoid being used themselves in a similar fashion. Rue is less guilty than Maddie in this regard, but let’s be real - she positions herself as superior to the strippers but is just as much a commodity in Alamo’s world, and her fate no different than the countless sex workers he has disappeared when they no longer serve his interests.
But if exploiting women weren’t enough, a show that up until now really kind of glorified drug use, then trots out one of it’s now in real life deceased from a drug overdose actors, Angus Cloud, who played Rue’s close friend Fez, in order to moralize about the exploitation of users with fetanyl laced drugs. I suppose they meant it to be a tribute, but to me it felt much more like they were using his death to grasp at some kind of likability in a season where little likability was to be had.
Throughout the season we have the never ending string of reading the Bible, seeking meaning. And I had to wonder what on earth the writers were doing. First, we get the already suspect Sydney Sweeney as an only fans porn star with very few boundaries admitting to her MAGA-esque leanings - though of course she is positioned as a tragic idiot so despite so many critics thinking this was an homage to MAGA I have to say if anything the point was to call them unintelligent opportunists. Then having accepted this, we are treated to a series of monologues on Bible reading and we end with a prayer by Ali that almost seems TO Rue as opposed to God. And Cassie’s sister tells us all about how the Bible is full of sex and violence "(to which ever the idiot Cassie replies “oh is there a new one?”. But also how she’s read it but it doesn’t change her behavior, but it also creeps her out.
So who finds salvation in this (hopefully) last season of Euphoria? Probably really only Ali who has decided to give up on helping people, blows away Alamo the drug kingpin, and then goes and lives with weird traditional Christians on a ranch.
Are we to believe that the solution is to destroy the systems of drug production and return to traditional values? Would Rue have survived if she had just stayed there and had a simple life in a prairie gown? Would that have been enough for her? Will it, in the long run, be enough for Ali?
We were treated in one episode to Rue buried up to her neck with Alamo on a horse rushing toward her to play polo with her head. We also got to see Nate’s character get buried and then killed by a snake before he could be rescued. We got to see a thousand humiliations and soul destructions including watching the sensitive beautiful Jules be nothing more than a kept woman painting pictures in a wealthy man’s apartment so he can travel between his wife and she.
It was as though the writers just wanted to say LIFE SUCKS in the most dramatic possible ways. And I get it, these are dark times, but….
Exploitation isn’t fun anymore, read the room.
If it ever was.
And this entire season was exploitation and manipulation of the audience.
I am glad it’s over. And in a way I am glad I watched it because now I can be curmudgeonly angry about it.
But I also wanted so much more for the characters I came to love in the first season. The emotional depth they once had - gone. The hope - gone. The energy - gone. The point——
Gone.
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