‘Euphoria’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap – Here Comes the Bride

Call me naïve, but I assumed that Nate and Cassie’s wedding was going to be something that Euphoria spent all of Season 3 building up to. It felt like a big deal, like a way to get all of the characters in the same place for the first time since high school, and to allow the various long-simmering tensions, interpersonal dramas, and private neuroses to erupt into very expensively catered chaos. Instead, Sam Levinson decided to slip the nuptials into Episode 3, “The Ballad of Paladin”, which shares time pretty much equally with a brewing tit-for-tat gang war between Alamo and Laurie, which Rue is trapped in the middle of, and more point-of-view scenes for Jules, who returned to our screens, and even then only briefly, in the previous episode.

The case against this episode is that the split focus detracts from each storyline, all of which deserve an entire episode to themselves. But it’s a difficult case to make since it becomes obvious that subverting our expectations of a Euphoria get-together is basically the whole point. You spend a good chunk of the episode wondering how the various combustible dynamics will trigger a spark that burns the whole place down, and then you keep getting consistently wrong-footed until the true threat presents itself after the wedding is over.

It’s almost annoying how well it works. I’m much more used to making fun of Levinson’s bad choices. But there’s a kernel of sneaky genius in all this, not to mention a couple of strikingly good lines and visual compositions, that make that difficult to do. So, let’s break this rather unexpected episode down, shall we?

The Sugar Baby Chronicles

First, a bit more on Jules. In a hasty cold open, we briefly chart her post-graduation life, which involved art school, a few words of encouragement from a fellow student extolling the virtues of high-class prostitution, and then dropping out of art school to pursue prostitution full-time. To be fair, her justifications aren’t outlandish. She doesn’t need a degree to be an artist, but being a struggling artist doesn’t pay for a penthouse suite.

We also learn a bit more about her primary – now sole, as far as we can tell – client, the one footing the bill for the penthouse. He’s a married plastic surgeon named Ellis, and if Nip/Tuck taught us anything, it’s that good-looking plastic surgeons might as well wear a sign around their neck reading “I have certain proclivities,” which is what Ellis says when Jules asks him whether his wife knows how he spends his downtime.

Ellis’s proclivities include wrapping a naked Jules in cellophane like a very tall sandwich, so I suspect he might be a serial killer, but the subject never comes up again. Jules doesn’t seem to mind.

One Plus One

Remaining on Jules, Rue invites her to Nate and Cassie’s wedding as her plus-one, and she reluctantly agrees to “dress sexy” by turning up in such a ridiculously sheer outfit that I genuinely laughed out loud at the brazenness of it. Her attire is rivalled only by Maddy’s, who is similarly dressed to kill, but whatever point she’s trying to prove kind of falls by the wayside, since she becomes emotional off-screen and leaves midway through without having had anything to do with anything.

Here’s why Levinson is smart. In previous seasons of Euphoria – the Season 2 finale was literally about basically all these dynamics – the wedding would have kicked off in the usual way; the outfits would have been signposts indicating chaos was rapidly approaching. Instead, “The Ballad of Paladin” gets Maddy out of the way early and leaves Jules to have two conversations, one with Cal, who was disgraced on account of sleeping with and recording himself sleeping with Jules while she was underage, and the other with Nate, who had his own… let’s say complicated relationship with Jules during that time. And both conversations are entirely civil, surprisingly frank, even a little flirty. Nothing goes wrong in the way you’d expect.

But it does, of course, go wrong.

Alexa Demie in Euphoria Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia

Toeing the Line

Euphoria Season 3, Episode 3’s “Big Bad” is Naz, the Russian loan shark, who wasn’t even invited to the wedding! But he turns up regardless to threaten Nate very loudly about all the money he owes, a considerable amount of which has been spent on the lobster and the flowers. Cassie overhears, gets very drunk, and starts crying.

You’d think this would be enough damage done to the wedding, but it keeps getting worse. Cassie’s attempts to confront Nate are even more public than Naz’s, and at one point, she fires a champagne cork into his eye. After Nate later carries her over the threshold of their plush palatial home, Naz and one of his large goons are waiting for them inside. Nate is beaten, Cassie’s thrown aside and her nose is broken, and then Nate’s pinky toe is removed.

It’s a great scene, this. It’s framed from Cassie’s perspective largely, so she remains front and centre of the shot as Nate tries to escape up the stairs behind her, is beaten all the way up, and then dragged all the way back down. There’s an unmistakably comedic note to the whole thing, but the fact that Naz goes through with the punishment creates a very real sense of peril. I’m looking forward to the honeymoon period.

Not the Parrot!

And then there’s Rue, who is pulled away from the wedding at Alamo’s behest to make a drop at Laurie’s, which is really a pretext on which to assassinate Laurie’s titular parrot, Paladin, as revenge for Laurie letting another pig loose in one of the Alamo’s strip joints (animal lovers are not going to love this episode).

Levinson pulls the same trick here as he did with the wedding. Earlier, a scene between Laurie and her Nazi relatives implied that they were considering kidnapping Rue when she arrived, and the scene proceeds with that tension in the background. But it doesn’t happen. Bishop poisons Paladin without anyone realising, and he and Rue are allowed to leave with a deal having been made that all of Laurie’s product will henceforth be tested to ensure it doesn’t contain a lethal dose of fentanyl. Granted, I’m not sure she’ll honour that deal once she realises the parrot hasn’t made it. But that’s a problem for later.

Another problem for later: On her way back home, after a brief one-way call with Fezco about the parkour-based prison escape he’s planning, and while listening to her Bible audiobook, Rue is pulled over by the DEA. Earlier, she had told Alamo that she was hoping to ultimately go legit. Perhaps this will be her chance – albeit not quite in the way she expected.