It would be atypical for writer-director Sam Levinson to ease us back into the turbulent world of Euphoria for its second season—although its two off-season specials, focused on Rue and Jules, provided some respite from season 1’s mayhem. In an unflinching premiere, we’re greeted with the same, old excessive nudity, drug use, and bloodshed, including a moment where a man is shot in the thighs with his penis out during the first two minutes. School is back in session!
In typical series fashion, we open with a character’s backstory—this time, Fezco’s. The last time we saw television’s sweetest drug dealer, he and Ashtray were flushing pills down a toilet while police banged on their door after a tip from Nate. In a Tarantino-esque flashback to his childhood, we watch his foul-mouthed, gun-wielding grandmother (played by The Sopranos’ Kathrine Narducci) introduce him—and Ashtray, who was abandoned as a baby—to her world of violence and illegal drugs. Levinson loves to shove all of his cinematic influences and favorite pop-culture references into his projects, whether or not they make sense to the worlds they’re occurring in. Likewise, this vignette, which presumably takes place in the early and mid-2000s, looks like a mafia film set in the ’70s.
In the present, Fez’s business issues regarding the disposed drugs are resolved after Ashtray attacks Mouse with a hammer. We catch up with the duo on their way to a drug deal with a recently relapsed Rue in the backseat snorting substances and rapping all the words to 2Pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up.” This scene perfectly captures the paradoxical nature of Fez’s caretaker dynamic with Rue. He’s plagued with guilt for enabling her drug addiction. But he doesn’t know how to keep an eye on her without placating her with more drugs or introducing her to his lethal colleagues.
They arrive at a parking lot to meet Mouse's former assistant Custer, who initiates the deal between Fez and the eerily calm drug lord Laura. He also brings his blond, heroin-addict girlfriend Faye who has distractingly painful-looking lip injections. Laura’s husband and son accost the guys for bringing stragglers and force everyone to strip naked in their kitchen. Knowing Levinson’s carefree attitude toward depicting violence, it felt like anything could happen during this scene. When Rue resists, he drags her into a bathroom and makes her pull down her pants to prove she isn’t wired and, thankfully, nothing more. Despite some heads being slammed into walls and noses injured, everyone makes it out of this harrowing ordeal alive.
The rest of the premiere takes place at a house party where, as you can imagine, only bad things happen. Lexi is searching for Cassie, who got out of her car during an argument on their way there. The season 1 finale showed Cassie in what seemed like a healthier place following her breakup with McKay and an abortion. But she’s still searching for love and attention in all the wrong places, including a convenience store parking lot where she runs into her best friend Maddy’s ex. Nate can’t resist ruining other people’s lives. So he gives her a ride to the party, speeding at 100 mph to prove he’s a real bad boy. Cassie responds by hanging out the window of the car while flashing him. As someone who got flirting tips from Seventeen magazine, I’m aghast by the way these children instinctually communicate. Additionally, this scene features the season’s first really good needle drop: “Dead of the Night” by Orville Peck.
When Nate and Cassie get to the party, they have sex in the bathroom. It probably would’ve been better to get this out of the way in the car, but what would this show be if anyone had common sense? Likewise, this leads to my favorite and most bone-chilling part of the episode when Maddy has to pee in the same bathroom. She hears Nate inside and starts banging on the door so forcefully you think she might break it down. Meanwhile, Nate is muzzling Cassie, who’s having a panic attack, and looking for an escape route.
Fez, Rue and Ashtray also roll up to the party after the whole drug deal fiasco. Fez ends up talking to Lexi for most of the night in an unexpected meet cute. The two of them are an unlikely pairing, but they’re both sort of outsiders amongst the central cast in their own ways. Rue meets a student named Elliot (Dominic Fike) who looks like a SoundCloud rapper snorted some unspecified substance. The two of them do drugs together until Rue’s pulse slows down. It’s hard to believe that we would lose our main protagonist in the first episode of the second season. Likewise, she brings her heart rate back up by snorting some crushed-up Adderall tucked in her sock.
Back to our episode of I Love Lucy, Nate finally emerges from the bathroom with Cassie nowhere to be seen. Maddy, who has the mindset of a pesky middle-schooler, is more preoccupied with the possibility that he took a dump at a party than anything else. Meanwhile, Cassie is lying down in a tub that fortunately is half a mile away from the toilet in this giant bathroom. The layout raises some questions, especially when Maddy’s forced to use a hand towel to wipe herself that’s next to the tub and not the sink. We think Maddy’s going to discover Cassie at this moment, but she throws the used towel over her shoulder without looking around and unknowingly hits her in the face.
Hunter Schafer in Euphoria
HBOWhen we think Cassie’s in the clear, a random guy played by Lil Meech, who was waiting in line behind Maddy, asks her if she wants to smoke weed as she’s about to exit the bathroom. They talk about nothing for God knows how long until Lexi calls Cassie, and her phone begins to vibrate loudly against the tub. We definitely think this will be the moment she gets caught when weed guy pulls back the shower curtain. But Maddy has no interest in checking out some seemingly random girl passed out in a tub and asks him to dance back outside.
For the most part, Kat and Jules are just dancing and entering and exiting rooms until Jules reunites with Rue in a very trippy, fantastical sequence. Nate gives Jules an ominous glare but ends up harassing McKay instead about Cassie’s boobs in an equally disturbing and homoerotic manner. In case you were a fan of McKay, he’s primarily there to wrap up his storyline with Cassie seemingly for good, as he’s not in any of this season’s promotional materials.
The episode culminates when Fez spots Nate and exacts his revenge. Nate is the epitome of white, male privilege in that he thinks he can call the cops on someone and almost have them locked up without suffering any consequences. Likewise, he believes Fez when he tells them that everything’s good between them and gets unexpectedly hit in the head with a beer bottle.
The episode ends as Tarantino-esque as it began with Fez punching Nate maybe 60 times until his face is completely engulfed in blood. It’s smart of Levinson to begin season 2 by rewarding his audience this way, despite how ultimately terrible that reward might be. He’s also noticeably having a lot of fun with fan favorites like Maddy, Cassie, Lexi and Fez, which unfortunately made Rue’s scenes slightly underwhelming, even when she’s on the brink of death. Nevertheless, season 2 is off to a promising start.
Where To Stream Euphoria: HBO Max.
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