Before the start of Euphoria’s second season, Zendaya tweeted a reminder that her show is intense, gritty, and explicitly not for everyone. “This season,” she writes, “is deeply emotional and deals with subject matter that can be triggering and difficult to watch.” If the season gets more intense than what was displayed on episode five, I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue watching.
After the events of last episode, which saw Elliot confessing to Jules that he and Rue have been doing drugs in secret since they’ve all known each other. Between episodes four and five, Jules told Rue’s mom, who, at the beginning of this episode, confronts her daughter. The ensuing fight was, needless to say, intense. Rue is terrified, of both the drug lord from whom she took $10,000 worth of drugs from with the promise of a return payment, and the ensuing withdrawal that she’s about to face. That fear drives her to rage at her mom, her sister, and at her best friends Elliot and Jules, who are revealed to have witnessed the ugliness of the whole fight. It seems superficial to say that the scene easily earned Zendaya at least her second Emmy nomination, if not a win.
Rue agrees to let her mom take her to the hospital, but changes her mind when they’re on the road. She gets out of the car and escapes into moving traffic, and next time we see her it’s darker and she’s clearly been running for awhile. After trying the door of one of Fez’s outposts, she makes her way to Lexi’s house. Turns out, the whole gang’s there: Kat, Maddy, and Cassie all warmly greet a visibly sick Rue, whose path to the desperately needed toilet is blocked by Lexi’s overly curious mother. When she finally uses the bathroom and is ready to go, she’s met by her mother, who’s ready to take her to the hospital at last.
Rue, though, refuses to get clean, and her discouragement is met with naïve but sweet words from Cassie. “Take it one day at a time,” she says. To this, Rue asks how long she’s been sleeping with Nate Jacobs, causing the Maddy versus Cassie fight the season has been building towards. In the ensuing chaos, Rue manages to slip out into the night once more.
Our protagonist then manages to find Fez, who takes her in understanding that she’s going through severe withdrawals. When he catches her trying to steal his dying grandmother’s drugs, though, he kicks her out, and Rue returns to the streets to break into a nice house, rob it, get caught, and run around the dark suburbs some more.
At this point, Rue has caught the attention of a local patrol car, who ask if she’s ok. She attempts to respond, but then throws up and runs away. What follows is a chase scene that plays into the tropes of classic chase scenes (crashing a pool party, performing elaborate parkour, falling into a cactus garden, etc.) but seems bizarre given the episode’s focus on gritty realism – isn’t Rue in withdrawals? How does she have the stamina for a longish chase? The stretched artistic license of the scene pales in comparison to the rest of the episode, so I won’t spend any longer on it.
Rue eventually finds herself at the aforementioned sketchy drug lord’s apartment, blinded by the physical pain of withdrawals. The woman takes a maternal role, offering Rue comforting words, a warm bath, and finally some IV morphine. Rue wakes up locked in the apartment and barely manages to escape what we can only assume to be a sex trafficking ring. I won’t go into too much detail, but this whole part of the episode was too much, going way further than the usual “hard to watch” vibe the rest of the show borders on. It touched on an all too real experience of addiction and depression that, I would argue, warranted a stronger content warning than the blanket one HBO puts before every episode.
I do have to wonder what the motivation was for making this episode was intense as it was. It felt extremely real, but at what cost? The whole thing bordered on trauma porn, seeming like it wanted to inspire discussion that could earn it praise while exploiting the experience of addiction and depression. It’s a critique I hadn’t really had of the show before, but this episode makes me question the show’s intentions.
I hope that Levinson doesn’t take his recent renewal for season three as an invitation to go deeper and grittier. Despite my earlier criticisms of the show’s superficiality, I easily prefer the comically absurd girl-group plotlines to the emotionally unbearable quality of episode five.
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Emmy is a big fan of all things TV and movies. Among her current favorites are The Matrix, Midsommar, Titane, and Fleabag. Catch her on Letterboxd @ewenstrup !
