Euphoria Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: The Best Day of My Life
Cassie and Nate finally tie the knot, and it goes about as well as expected.
There’s a saying Martha Kelly’s Laurie wheels out this episode: “the grass is always greener over the septic tank.” It was the title of American humorist Erma Bombeck’s 1976 book about the dark side of suburban life, and although it’s said as a joke, it’s really the thesis of the episode. Sunday night also features the event the season has been building toward: Cassie and Nate’s wedding.
First, we start with Hunter Schafer’s Jules. The episode opens not in the present, but in Jules’s past, and we learn about her origin story as a sugar baby through the kind of flashback structure the show has been using to fill in the four-year gap since season two. She’s at art school, living in an inexplicably giant loft with a roommate who tells her how she can make some easy cash (“It’s just like dating, except you get paid”).
We then see a sequence of Jules going on her first dates, including one with a 48-year-old lawyer named Rick, who just wants to masturbate while licking Jules’s tights. “All I have to do is see this guy twice a month, and he pays my rent? I’m going to clean up,” Jules says. She sees Randy, a “Hollywood producer worth $200 million,” and a “run-of-the-mill” finance guy, whom we watch her go down on under his desk while he makes a call.
The only one who actually matters is Ellis (Sam Trammell), a plastic surgeon with a clinical interest in Jules-as-specimen. He quickly becomes her only client, and Jules drops out of art school, for some reason. “All her fears about making it as an artist disappeared,” Rue narrates. When Jules tells Ellis that she transitioned at 14, he caresses her skin, saying, “That’s why you’re poreless. You never went through puberty. It’s beautiful.” He compares his work as a plastic surgeon to Jules’s transition, saying, “I do what God couldn’t.”
A doctor with a God complex—very original. When Jules asks him about his family, she starts to apologize for making him uncomfortable. “I slice women open for a living,” he says. “There’s very little that makes me uncomfortable.” Hopefully that’s not a piece of foreshadowing, but the following scene doesn’t do much to assuage our fears. At the penthouse apartment we now realize he’s been putting Jules up in, she stands nude with her arms raised above her head in a stress position as he wraps her tightly in cellophane, leaving only a small hole for her to breathe through her mouth. He steps back to admire his handiwork, then says, “I just might keep you forever,” before kissing her. The score—not by Labrinth, mind you—is triumphant.
Back at Alamo’s club, Rosalía is performing for a crowd of older cowboys while wearing that damn bedazzled neck brace. A man watching her heads to a backroom and meets with Rue, where she’s selling guns. She’s worked her way up at the Silver Slipper to being an arms dealer, shaving off serial numbers and upselling criminals on AR-15s. “I know a lot of Americans have very strong feelings about guns,” she narrates breezily. “But if it’s any consolation, the majority of the weapons I was selling were headed to Mexico.” Alamo names her employee of the month, but when she tells him that her goal is to make enough money to go legit, he takes it extremely personally. Per his argument, all underground economies, from running numbers to bootlegging, eventually get taken over by the government. “What was once illegal is now legit,” he says. “The question is: where does all that money go?” The government says it’s going toward education, but the kids are getting dumber, so something isn’t adding up.
This civil discourse is interrupted by the pig that Alamo sent to Laurie’s house in their ongoing feud, appearing out of nowhere, peeing all over the strip club floor. Alamo shoots the poor animal, its blood and brains splattering all over a dancer (lest we forget for a moment what this show is really about: shock and awe).
In his rage, Alamo says he wants to take what matters most to Laurie in order to break her heart. We learn that she has a pet parrot named Paladin, as we watch her coo and sing to the bird. It’s looking like Paladin’s days are numbered.
Darrell Britt-Gibson as Bishop
Back at Jules’s apartment, Rue and Jules discuss going to Nate and Cassie’s wedding. Rue is bringing Jules as a plus one. Sticking money in Jules’s bra, Rue jokes, “I’m your sugar daddy now. Dress sexy.”
Finally, we arrive at the wedding, and the show’s new costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas, who took over for Heidi Bivens, pulled out all the stops, bringing back the over-the-top looks that helped make Euphoria such a sensation in the first place. First, there’s Cassie, spilling out of her Wiederhoeft corset as she tells Lexi (Maude Apatow) in a Nana Jacqueline pink bridesmaid gown that Nate didn’t come home the prior night (we see him hiding in the bathroom, vomiting and breathing into a paper bag with either a nasty hangover, anticipatory regret, or both).
Then there’s Jules, who took Rue’s brief to dress sexy very seriously. She’s in the most naked of naked dresses, an icy blue gathered number from Acne Studios’s spring 2023 collection, her blonde wig providing more cover than the dress itself. “I can’t believe she had the nerve to show her face,” Nate’s mom says to Cal. “She showed a little more than her face,” he adds.
Maddy is there too, in a custom green dress with a matching fur stole that’s open as low down the back as it can be, with a rosary dangling past her hips. To address the question you’d be justified in thinking (why is Maddy at her abusive ex and ex-best friend’s wedding at all?), Rue narrates: “Maddy didn’t know what she wanted more—to get in between Nate and Cassie, or to make a little money.”
It’s not clear that she does either, though. Instead, we watch Maddy’s face become increasingly crestfallen as she sits in the audience of Cassie and Nate’s nuptials, which are as over-the-top as Cassie wanted them to be. She clearly got her $50,000 worth of flowers, which are arranged in pink-and-orange archways over the aisle and into a giant formation of their initials. There are not one but two flower girls, and an ice sculpture of the couple, though Cassie quickly notes that her breasts are unfortunately melting.
Cassie’s mom (Alanna Ubach) manages to make the day about herself, whispering a darkly funny monologue as she walks her daughter down the aisle about how her wedding to Cassie’s dad was the last happy moment they ever shared as a couple. “As I marched down the aisle, like we’re doing now,” she says, “it never occurred to me the brutality of the man that I never knew before. It’s like, how could I be so naive? It’s not a mistake you can fix.” Cassie’s eyes well up with tears and raw fear as her mom hands her over to her towering future husband, who has cleaned up since spending the morning vomiting. But then, when they say their vows and ferociously make out for their first kiss as husband and wife, it’s a real high, and they seem genuinely happy, beaming as they walk down the aisle.
Like her mother and father, though, it might’ve been Cassie and Nate’s final moment of bliss. The rest of the wedding goes downhill from there. Halfway through dinner, Nas, the man Nate owes money to, suddenly appears behind them, threatening Nate and telling Cassie just how deeply they’re in debt. The couple from last episode’s dinner party, who put their kids’ college fund in Nate's real estate development scheme, overhear what’s happened, and the wife calls out Cassie for letting Nate “pimp her out” for flowers.
“Is everything okay?” Lexi asks her sister. “Of course!” Cassie says, eyes red with tears. “It’s my wedding day. What a weird question to ask on the best day of my life.” Come on, Lexi, she’s clearly “never, ever been happier!”
In the midst of this chaos, Rue gets a call from Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson) that she has to do a pickup from Laurie for Alamo. This leaves Jules alone at the wedding, where she chats with both of the Jacobs men. First, she runs into Cal at the bar, who tells her what happened to him at the end of season two, when he got busted for a video where he “fucked a guy who was two and a half months away from turning 18.” He “lied about his age, just like you,” Cal tells Jules. He copped a plea deal and ended up on the sex offenders registration list, calling it the “Modern-day scarlet letter. It’s a pretty cringey line, considering the atmosphere the season is being released in, but Euphoria has never minded pushing the limits.
Cal apologizes for taping Jules, though his reasoning (“I just wanted to jerk off to it”) doesn’t exactly redeem him. The more interesting revelation is Jules connecting the dots that since the police never got the tape, Nate must have destroyed it. He finds a moment between being threatened by a loan shark and having his bride implode on him to share a private cigarette with Jules outside. The whole thing wraps up a little too neatly for two of the show’s longest-running loose threads.
Rue, meanwhile, is on her way to Laurie’s and, on the drive over, gets a call from Fez. It’s a delicately handled, one-sided call, where Rue chops it up with her old friend, who jokes about escaping prison with parkour. When she and Bishop arrive at Laurie’s, they’re ostensibly there to purchase some pills, but it quickly becomes clear the real mission is to poison Laurie’s bird. The bird is named after Paladin, the well-dressed mercenary from the old series Have Gun—Will Travel, which Laurie often has on in the background. It goes back to the Western theme Levinson wants to bring forth this season, and if anyone is Paladin, it’s the silent Bishop, with his slick outfits and deadpan one-liners. While Laurie focuses on trying to get Rue to come back and work with her, he slips what’s presumably a tablet of fentanyl in the bird’s water. Rue and Bishop leave, with Laurie none the wiser.
Back at the wedding from hell, Cassie screams at Nate, who takes shots with his groomsmen. “You’re not who you say you are,” she says, clutching a bottle of champagne. “You want me to be the perfect housewife? You want me to cook and clean and suck your cock? And you don’t even have money for food. You’re not a man. Men provide.”
Nate tries to calm her, but she accidentally pops the cork in his eye. Still, he forgives her, and she tries to forgive him too, as they drive off from the wedding in their circa-2005 Hummer stretch limo. Nate assures Cassie that he will get them out of the mess he’s created, and Cassie is pacified as he promises to be a better husband and, one day, a father.
Maddy, meanwhile, gets dropped off alone by an Uber on her dark, sketchy side street, where she walks back to her little garden studio apartment, looking beautiful and sad. If only she knew that the grass is greener by the septic tank! Rejection, in this case, was truly protection.
Back at the mansion, Nate is carrying Cassie over the threshold of their home into certain doom. The lights flick on, and we see Nas waiting for the couple. Immediately, his henchmen pop up from behind and start beating Nate within an inch of his life. Cassie gets hit in the melee and, realizing her nose is bleeding, starts wailing like a baby. “This is so unfair!” she cries out, not even turning around as Nate is dragged by his feet behind her. “It was supposed to be the best day of my life!”
The henchmen take off Nate’s dress shoes and cut off his pinky toe, and as blood spurts all over the hideous carpet, Nas says, “You know, Cassie, some women inherit wealth, but others inherit debt.”
We end the episode with Rue, driving along, listening to her Bible tapes that Ali put her onto, getting pulled over by the DEA.
A final shot shows Paladin, the bird, taking a sip of water before falling over and dying.
