Is ‘Euphoria’ Boring Now? The Season 3 Premiere Explained
A lot has changed in the four years since we last saw a fresh season of “Euphoria,” and creator Sam Levinson takes the show in a whole new direction on the first episode of Season 3. For this week’s recap, here’s what we thought about “Àndale,” which premiered on Sunday, April 12.
Euphoria Season 3, Episode 1 recap: The kids are alright, kind of
Just as the teaser videos and interviews promised, Season 3’s debut episode brings Zendaya’s Rue Bennett and the rest of her East Highland High friends five years into the future. None of them are living in East Highland anymore, and they all seem to have lost their zest (mostly) for the kind of adrenaline-pumping sex and violence that helped fuel the fires of this HBO series’ popularity when it first launched in 2019.
Expanding outwards from the previous setting, “Àndale” jumps between Mexico, Texas, and Los Angeles, and there’s a cinematic Spaghetti Western feel throughout with an Ennio Morricone-esque twangy music and long shots of rural landscapes. Although none of the characters seem content exactly, they all seem a lot more settled than they were in previous seasons, with Levinson playing up noticeably more mature themes of domesticity, economic hustle, and spiritual meaning.
Does that make “Euphoria” boring now? Some fans may think so, but rest assured that you’re still getting the same spicy HBO show. Watch out for spoilers ahead.
Rue finds a new religion
“Àndale” opens in the deserts of Chihuahua, Mexico, where Rue Bennett gets stuck teetering in a Jeep Cherokee at the top of a U.S.-Mexico border fence—a fittingly fantastical and comic image, underscoring her life of perpetual precarity and volatility.
Since leaving East Highland High, Rue has been coerced into working as a drug mule for Laurie, the creepy schoolteacher-turned-drug dealer from Season 2. The job requires Rue to swallow salad bowl-sized helpings of balloons stuffed with fentanyl and then smuggle them across the U.S.-Mexico border, and she’s press-ganged into some other undesirable errands as well.
Rue works alongside another down-and-out young woman, Faye Valentine, and in the past we would’ve expected showrunner Levinson to ramp up the drama and shock of their ordeal. This time it’s played for kooky laughs as we’re treated to extended shots of them gagging down their balloons full of drugs and enduring awkward conversations with Border Patrol agents.
But there’s a deeper theme at work, apparently. Rue appears to be off drugs (for the time being, at least), and an encounter with a blissful family of Christian homesteaders on one of her drug runs prompts her to talk God with her NA sponsor—and later crack open an audiobook of the Book of Genesis.
Cassie and Nate live in domestic bliss
Star quarterback Nate Jacobs was portrayed as a deeply damaged villain in previous episodes of “Euphoria,” violently abusing his ex Maddy and striking up a troubled romance with Maddy’s best friend Cassie Howard. Five years on, it seems that he’s calmed down as his devious nature has taken a subtler form.
He’s now engaged with Cassie and they’re living in a lavish McMansion. When we first see Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, she’s more extra AF than ever: Posing for a cameraphone in an erotic dog outfit to feed the TikTok algorithm. When Nate sees this new creative project, he calls her a “prostitute” and dismisses it as a waste of time.
Later, over a candlelit dinner, Cassie proposes launching an OnlyFans. Rather than fly into a rage or choke her out, Nate reacts with some reasonable frustration, as well as patience and understanding. She wants to cover the cost of a $50,000 flower arrangement for their upcoming wedding, and she sees OnlyFans as her way to financial independence. “I didn’t wait my entire life to have a ghetto wedding,” she says. (It’s one of the most problematic and also hilarious lines in the whole episode.) Nate is struggling to maintain his father’s real estate development business and clearly sees opportunity in this idea as well.
Creative hustles for Maddy and Lexi
Although he’s a certified nepo baby, Sam Levinson has addressed the trials and tribulations of the creative class in other film and TV projects, and it seems he’ll be diving deeper into the topic on Season 3 of “Euphoria.” That’s a big part of “Àndale,” as the episode highlights the daily indignities that Cassie, Lexi, and Maddy all must endure as they try to make it in America’s crumbling creative industries.
Cassie paints her OnlyFans idea in hilariously rosy terms. “Like, imagine all the unhappy men in the world. For just $50, they could get a personalized pic and text from me saying, ‘Good morning, handsome. Thinking about you today.'” A friend of hers is skeptical about how far she’d actually have to go: “That’s it?” she says.
Lexi Howard, Cassie’s much more level-headed and reasonable sister, is working in Hollywood as an executive assistant for an influential TV showrunner. She’s living in a nice apartment and has a win as she offers some well-received creative input on set. But she’s still on the outside looking in, bringing to a roomful of promising young women TV writers and getting addressed by the wrong name by a star actor.
Maddy meanwhile is getting absolutely fleeced in her job as a talent manager. She’s working with influencers and actors, but also doing boring office work, while her boss takes an 80-something percent cut of her client fees.
The criminals aren’t as creepy
Since it’s a show about drug addiction, it’s no surprise that “Euphoria” has showcased some memorable drug dealers. But most of them tend to be super scary. The one major exception would be Fezco O’Neill, the sensitive pusher played by Angus Cloud. Although Cloud died in 2023, Fezco gets a mention in “Àndale” and appears to be alive and incarcerated in the show’s universe.
This time, we meet not a peddler of drugs, but instead of sex. He comes in the form of Alamo Brown, a big-talking sex club magnate whom Rue meets after her boss sends her on a risky errand. At a party at his lavish ranch mansion, Alamo surrounds himself with a sprawling coterie of shrewd assistants and scantily-clad young women, presumably also on his payroll. Rue strikes up a conversation with him after she lingers at the party.
When one of the women dies of a drug overdose from the drugs that Rue brings over, she pleads innocence, hilariously leveraging her newfound spirituality to get out of the jam. In a final scene that is instantly iconic, Alamo tests that faith: Bringing her out to a hilltop, he uses a gold-plated revolver to shoot a shiny green apple right off of Zendaya’s head. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of Alamo in the rest of Season 3.
