Euphoria Season 3, Episode 1 “New Beginnings” Recap: Nothing Good
Euphoria season three starts with Zendaya’s Rue trying to get out of the mud. That’s both literally—while the wheels of her dusty Jeep spin circles in the ground “somewhere in Chihuahua,” Mexico—and figuratively speaking. She’s still trying to pay off the ridiculous debt she incurred when we last saw her in season two, after her mom had thrown out the case of drugs she’d carried for Lori.
A group of jovial, unidentified men helps push her car forward, and as Rue makes a break for the border, another mysterious bag jangling around in the trunk of her car, we’re hit with a dose of what else—euphoria. But like most highs, it’s short-lived. The Jeep gets stuck on a steel beam meant to carry her over the border wall, tilting back and forth like a see-saw, in an allegory for Rue’s perpetual state as an addict: one step forward, two steps back. She ditches the automobile and heads on foot across the blazing desert, the sketchy bag slung over her back.
It’s been four years since we last saw the glitter-eyed cast of Euphoria together onscreen, and five years in the universe of the show. You’d think that might be enough time for some of them to move on from the dramatic exploits they got into at East Highland High, but overall, it seems like they’re stuck in the same cycles of self-destruction, oppression, and in some cases, both. “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school,” Rue narrates over the season’s opening images–which include sweeping wide shots of the American West that illustrate Sam Levinson’s vision of the season as part spaghetti Western, part extended noir film. “And honestly?” she adds, “Nothing good.” When Rue is taken in for the night by a Christian family in Texas, she muses that the homeschooled teens with zero internet access are the happiest people she’s ever met. Based on where we find her next, that seems plausible.
That is: living with the terrifyingly deadpan Lori (Martha Kelly) and her ragtag—to put it generously (“inbred” is the word Rue uses)—family of drug dealers. We find out what Rue was schlepping across the desert in her bag (fentanyl, of course), and in a particularly grisly montage, see how the deadly drug gets smuggled across the Mexican border, with Rue and Faye (Chloe Cherry, in all her plump-lipped, drawling glory) performing the dangerous ritual of body packing.
Colman Domingo plays Ali, one of the only responsible adults on the show. He meets Rue for a scene in which they discuss the difficulty of the Third Step in AA, which calls for surrendering to a higher power.
Now that we know Rue is a drug mule, it feels safe to assume she isn’t sober, either—but before we get to that, we’re treated to a visit with Lexi (Maude Apatow), who, with her curtain bangs and collared shirt-and-sweater combo, looks like she wandered in from a different show. Lexi’s old flame, Fezco, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after his apartment was raided in the season two finale. In show notes, Levinson shared that he wrote this season in honor of Angus Cloud, who himself died of a fentanyl overdose in 2023, “and all the kids who weren’t offered a second chance.”
Ever the observer, Lexi is back in the writer’s room‚ sort of. She’s working as an assistant to a legendary showrunner, Patti Lance, played in a brilliant stroke of casting by Sharon Stone. The actual writer’s room of the nighttime soap they’re on is filled with blue-haired Zillennials doing the Gen-Z finger clap when Lance makes sweeping pronouncements about television’s power to drive people to the ballot box. Lexi is chuffed, and she’s worlds away from the “right-wing suburban hell” her sister, Cassie, is currently inhabiting.
Maude Apatow as Lexi
We’re halfway through the episode when we’re reminded why Sydney Sweeney is the ultimate muse for Levinson’s edgelord proclivities. The first time we see Cassie, it’s from behind. She’s on all fours, wearing a dog costume—well, lingerie with dog ears, a tail, and a leash around her neck—barking and lapping up water from a bowl while her housekeeper films it for TikTok. This is all happening in the ridiculously gauche mansion she shares with husband-to-be Nate Jacobs (the egg-yolk yellow walls and wall-to-wall plush carpeting make the house feel like it was designed by John Waters’s much trashier tether). Jacobs rolls up to the home in a Tesla Cybertruck, of course, and drops his Bottega bag carelessly on the floor before stalking into the bedroom where Cassie is continuing her performance.
Naturally, he’s not thrilled with the scene and immediately accuses her of acting like a prostitute. Later, over dinner, Cassie will poutily emotionally blackmail Nate into letting her start a semi-anonymous OnlyFans to pay for the $50,000 worth of flowers she wants for their upcoming wedding. Cassie has always been transfixed by the male gaze; now she’s just found a way to monetize it. Which is apparently needed to maintain her lavish lifestyle: Nate has taken over his disgraced father Cal’s real estate development business, but is finding his proposed national chain of end-of-life facilities (“a Boomer dies every 15 seconds,” he tells a prospective business partner), less appealing to investors than he’d hoped.
Jacob Elordi as Nate
The pair still has combustible chemistry, though, and as Nate pulls on Cassie’s leash to literally walk her like a dog (shades of Wuthering Heights here—how many more times will Jacob Elordi engage in pup play onscreen this year?)—we’re reminded why these two got together in the first place.
Speaking of, Cassie and Nate’s mutual ex (friend and girlfriend, respectively) Maddy (Alexa Demie), is also working in Hollywood, though Rue’s voiceover lets us know that it’s less glamorous than it all seems. That’s evidenced by Maddy’s dimly-lit studio apartment, which seems more like a storage space for her racks of enviable matching sets than a home. She’s managing, or assisting the manager, of Dylan Reed, the star of Lexi’s nighttime soap. It’s on the studio lot that Maddy tells Lexi, who later tells Rue, that while Jules (Hunter Schafer) has been away at art school, she’s also been working as a sugar baby.
Rue’s not super happy to hear that piece of information, but as usual, she’s got bigger problems to contend with (and her own foray into sex work—clearly another big theme of the season). Lori tasks her with delivering a bag of pills to a party at a mansion, where she meets the larger-than-life Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who smokes a cigar in a blue silk robe, clinking his handful of gold rings as a menacing form of stimming. Alamo owns the mansion, a strip club, and—as he makes clear—the women inside both. Immediately enthralled by his lifestyle and desperate to stop drug muling for Lori, Rue begs Alamo to hire her. But when one of the fentanyl-laced pills she sold him immediately kills one of the girls at the party, she’s forced to beg for her life instead.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Alamo
“God brought us together,” Rue placates and pleads, as Alamo and his two henchmen, played by a wise-cracking Marshawn Lynch and The Wire’s Darrell Britt-Gibson, drag Rue outside for a literal trial by fire. Alamo balances a bright green apple on Rue’s head and walks ten paces before aiming his gold revolver at his target. “You believe in God?” he asks her. “Let’s see if he believes in you.” The apple, of course, is hit by the bullet, leaving Rue unscathed. She falls to her knees, kissing the ground.
Check back next week, but for now, at least, God is on her side.
