So inconsequential, I can hardly think of a title. | I'm watching Euphoria, so you don't have to. (Episode 3 Review)

The question on everyone's mind is, has Euphoria gotten boring? I'm not going to lie and say that the show is maintaining my interest or that I look forward to watching episodes each week and reporting back to you. I am finding this season very difficult to get through. There are just aspects to it that feel completely disconnected from one another. This has always been the problem with Euphoria - one of the main issues I had with season one is that there seemed to be two shows going on: One where one kid was really trying to deal with their drug addiction, and another where a bunch of young teenagers were just getting into all sorts of incredibly extreme sexual situations.

I felt really gaslit at the time by the number of people saying that Euphoria season one was realistic. It wasn't realistic to my experience of my teenage years, and it wasn't realistic to a lot of people's experiences either. What was realistic was a very specific form of traumatizing teenage experience, and it packed a lot of that trauma into that first season. Season 2 seemed to understand how intense this had been and how little it served beyond shock value, so season 2 mellowed out and, in mellowing out, started to find its actual purpose.

This was when Euphoria clicked for me, and I realized it was a scathing indictment (or at least a pretense of one) of American culture.

With Season 3, it's like this signal keeps going in and out. Episode 2 seemed to tap back into this indictment of American culture, but the events of episodes 1 and 3 feel completely detached from one another, and grow increasingly Tarantino-esque as time passes. It seems like every character that is female, other than Rue, ends up as a sex worker, except for Rue, who ends up as someone working for a pimp. Everything seems to surround sex and the sexual, and if this were a show that explored sex and violence in a way that felt coherent, this might actually be revolutionary.

Instead, it seems to jump back and forth in what it wants to be, so I must return to my original thesis from episode one: this is simply a directorial reel for Sam Levinson to get future work in better shows than this. I half expect, eventually, that one character will end up being a nurse so that he can have a scene in there proving how great he'd be at directing an episode of The Pitt.

This episode was the wedding episode, and despite having just watched it, I can hardly recall any of the events. We find out Jules is also a sex worker, albeit a high-level sex worker, so that no one calls Sam Levinson transphobic. She is in some intense BDSM relationship with an older man who pays for everything in her life to be lavish and beautiful.

Maddie has a hard time at the wedding, and we don't really see much else besides her struggling. Rue gets pulled away to go and run some kind of gang thing with the group she's now with against the group she used to be with. They kill a bird; it's not that important. I don't doubt that it's going to be the back-and-forth tit for tat of the entire season, just this kind of gang war brewing for the right to keep Rue.

Nate has clearly gotten himself in way over his head as a Property developer and is either scamming people out of their money or just running out of money and not able to run his own business. By the end of the episode, on the eve of his wedding night, he's getting his face bashed in and his toe cut off by two guys whose money he has not been able to pay back. Cassie is crying her face off, with a bloody nose and chest heaving in the middle of a bright yellow rug in the center of her home. This is the most Tarantino-esque mask-off moment Levinson has had in the show so far. It is really clear the career he wants, and unfortunately, he was born just a little too late for that.

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