Camellia Peebles
The following review contains spoilers for Euphoria Season 3, and the entirety of the series
Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) clicks his golden rings together when he wants you to be afraid. It is his tell, his signature, the little metallic click that lands before the threat does, and the first time I saw it I understood that I was no longer watching the show I started. There is a running joke about him that is sharper than anything in the season: he lets a racial slur roll off him without blinking, but the moment someone calls him a pig he loses it entirely, and an entire war escalates over the insult he actually minds. Being called a pig.
Ah…nostalgia!
Euphoria, for two seasons, was a body covered in glitter under neon slants, black lights, and avant-garde camera angles and storytelling centered on the trauma of drugs psychologically. In its third season, a man is clicking his gold rings together in a strip club while he manages a war between cowboys and Nazis which centers itself around him.
I am not telling you that this does not work. What I am going to tell you is that it is simply not the same show we remember.
The interesting thing is the rupture itself, the decision to take a series whose entire visual and emotional language was built on one thing and rebuild it around something else entirely. Swapping what made the show unique with something cinematically familiar—but effective.
Euphoria did not evolve in its third season. It severed. And the severance is worth looking at closely, because it tells you what the show actually was, by showing you what happens when all of it is removed.
Start with the surface, since the surface was always the point. The original Euphoria was an aesthetic before it was a story: the liquid eyeliner and the rhinestones laid along a cheekbone, the neon bleeding across a high school hallway, the camera swinging upside down through a party as a song swallowed the dialogue. That look was never decoration. It was point of view.
The glitter was Rue’s high made visible, the seductive shimmer the drugs laid over an ordinary, unbearable world. When the show was beautiful, it was beautiful the way addiction promises to be, and the makeup was doing the same work as the monologues, turning interior states into things you could see.
The Fracture
Season 3 strips almost all of the show’s original charm away. The glitter is gone. The distinctive character fashion is gone. (Luckily, the on-point soundtrack has yet to fail.)
Unfortunately, what replaces it is colder, harder, more grounded, and keyed to gold instead of glow—Alamo’s rings, his revolver, the brassy Western palette of a story that has decided it is now a cowboy crime saga set among a lone strip club and two groups of outlaws inadvertently getting into a turf war, with Rue Bennett in the middle. Only Maddy (Alexa Demie) really keeps a costume language of her own; everyone else has been stripped of the visual identity the first two seasons spent so long building. The dreamscape is over. We are awake now, and the waking world is lit like a desert at dusk.
There is a reading where this is the most honest thing the show could have done, and I want to give it its due. If the glitter was the lie addiction tells, then a cold and grounded Euphoria is the comedown made visual, the world after the shimmer lifts. The aesthetic departure could be the content. The trouble is that the show does not just dim the lights on Rue’s world. It dismantles the architecture that made any of it cohere, and once that is gone, the new look is not a comedown. It is a different building.
Consider who is simply not there anymore. Kat is written out. Elliot disappeared. Fezco, one of the most beloved figures the show ever produced, disappears into jail. McKay’s very problematic storyline was swept under the rug. Lexi (Maude Apatow), whose entire second-season arc was her creating a play that staged everyone’s lives back at them, the most meta and self-aware thread the show ever attempted, is demoted to a background character, ignored by the very story she once narrated from the wings.
Excuse me, are we at the right table?
Jules (Hunter Schafer), the romantic center of two seasons, is reduced to a sugar baby, who drops out of art school thinking youth is permanent. She’s present without purpose, a name on a call sheet. The show did not write certain actors out because their stories ended. It wrote them out because it had decided to be a different show, and they did not fit the new blueprint that took four years to deliver.
Then there is a significant four-year time jump between Seasons 2 and 3, which functions less like a creative choice than like a held breath before a panic. Suddenly it is years after the high school boyfriend-stealing, drug-selling shenanigans. Suddenly there is a strip club. Suddenly there are cowboys and Nazis and a fentanyl war between them, and Rue is the mule running drugs through the middle of it.
What you need to know is Rue Bennett borrowed a case of drugs from Laurie (Martha Kelly) in Season 2—claiming she would sell them, but having no intention of doing so. So once Laurie finds her in Season 3, working at an ice cream stand, and calculates the interest, Rue is in deep shit. Which makes her Laurie’s new drug mule, all while bragging about how good she has become at it.
The leap forward reads as a show that did not know where its characters could go next, and so flung them somewhere new entirely, trusting the genre shift and impatient fandom to generate the momentum the relationships used to.
Is the closure in the room with us?
And what becomes of the relationships the first two seasons spent their whole lives building? They are abandoned mid-sentence. Nate (Jacob Elordi), the villain everyone was taught to hate and then taught to pity, the boy in love with Jules whose own father was also in love with Jules, never once confronts any of it. He marries Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), takes an unexplained loan from financiers the show barely introduces in order to “build a community,” and is then buried alive. Finishing him by burying him alive—only for a rattlesnake to find its way down an air pipe.
He was a monster, sure. But the audience was owed a reckoning, and instead got a burial. All while Cassie ignores his mailed severed finger and calls from the Armenians detailing Nate’s fate if she doesn’t pay up, in favor of doing sex work for attention.
At least her character has been consistent.
Maddy, who remains the single most propulsive person on screen, never gets her conversation with Nate either. The relationship the show orbited for two seasons is denied its culminating scene, and Maddy is folded into the plot instead, tangled up with Alamo, mistaking predation for a business deal, sinking into debt that might cost her her life. A life as Mrs. Alamo.
Cops, Robbers, and…Cowboys?
The body count is the tell. Laurie, the Nazi crew boss Rue muled for before Alamo took her, throws herself from a roof during the big DEA sting. Rue is forced to go undercover for the DEA, which is its own departure worth a whole essay, a protagonist whose interiority was the entire show now repurposed as a procedural asset.
After the bust, Rue takes drugs from Alamo, who has every reason to lace them, and we’re meant to be surprised when the drugs are laced.
Rue, the consciousness we lived inside for three seasons—the one the tear-shaped eye glitter belonged to—overdoses on predictably laced drugs on Ali’s couch. That moment, more than any costume change, marks the real rupture: the aesthetic collapses because the point of view that generated it no longer exists.
The Man Who Kept the Soul
If anyone comes out of this whole, it is Ali. Rue’s sponsor from the Narcotics Anonymous rooms is the only character with a real, sustained arc across all three seasons, and Season 3 pays it off. He keeps a book of the dead, the names of every kid he could not save, and he writes Rue’s name in it when she dies sleeping on his couch.
He puts on his pristine military uniform, faces Alamo down at the Cowboys strip club in a stylized duel, asks a stripper named Kitty to roll a bottle off the bar and they draw when it hits the floor. Alamo cheats, drawing before the bottle falls. But—luckily for Ali—Alamo’s own henchman, tired of their boss’s tyranny, secretly emptied the boss’s gun.
With Alamo’s death, Laurie’s suicide, and Rue’s OD, the strip-club war resolves, tidily, almost mythically. It is telling that the only arc the show carries all the way through belongs not to any of the beautiful, glittering teenagers, but to the man in the recovery rooms. Wherever Season 3’s moral center is, it is there, not in the gold.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I do not want to pretend the new show has no pleasures, because it does, and they are real.
Alamo’s right-hand man, Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), is a standout character. The calm one with the perfect afro, smooth style, small white dog and genuine fondness for Maddy, is one of the best new characters the series has produced.
In the show, he has to visit Laurie with Rue over an incident in which Alamo sent a pig to Laurie’s house, and they returned it. So it was time to try and play nice.
“I didn’t know Blacks like Westerns,” Laurie marvels as she watches one on TV.
“It ain’t about Black and white,” he refuses the frame she is offering. “It is cowboys and Indians.”
“Which one are you?” one of Laurie’s henchmen asks.
“I’m a motherfucking cowboy.”
Before shooting Laurie a wad of cash—pantomiming a showdown before poisoning her favorite bird Paladin with fentanyl for the pig slight.
A show can work and still be a complete departure. Euphoria Season 3 is a competent, occasionally electric crime Western with strong new characters and a real visual identity of its own. It is also wearing the name of a show about a teenage girl’s addiction rendered in body glitter and blacklight, and it has kept almost nothing of that show except the names of some of the people in it. You could rename it. You could call it a spin-off, a parallel-universe experiment, a Western that borrowed a roster, and almost nothing would be lost in the translation, because the translation already happened on screen.
After the Four-Year Wait
That is the thing I keep coming back to. Not that Season 3 is bad. Not that it is lazy, because it clearly is not; someone wanted this departure badly, wanted the gold and the dust and the rings clicking in the dark. The big cinema feel and drug turf war. I keep coming back to the simpler, stranger fact underneath all of it.
They took the glitter off, and when they did, the show underneath turned out to be a different show.
