Summary
Euphoria Season 3 reaches a clear turning point in “Kitty Likes to Dance”, with the fairytale having come to an end for several characters.
Euphoria is a very literal show, often too literal for its own good, so the whole enterprise isn’t partial to metaphor. This has been as true of Season 3 as any of the others, and it’s true in Episode 4, which makes Nate pondering the meaningful significance of his sewn-on pinky toe all the funnier. Nate’s barely in “Kitty Likes to Dance”; Cassie leaves him and his debts and their fairytale life behind, representing what will probably turn out to be a key turning point in the season. Still, at least the toe has been reattached after Naz lopped it off last week.
The joke is that the toe doesn’t mean anything. Anyone looking for meaning in this world will come up wanting, since there is no deeper idea to mine. That isn’t a criticism. The only currency is excess; oodles of money, drugs, and naked flesh, abandoned inhibitions, the hazy edges where the American Dream segues into a nightmare. Cassie is gone. Rue is in over her head. Lexi’s sucking up isn’t getting her anywhere. Jules’s artistic ambitions have stricter parameters than she’s comfortable with. And on and on it goes.
Undercover Rue
After Rue was picked up by the DEA, it was pretty obvious that her options would be limited. As it turns out, she has only two, which consist of doing a long stretch in Federal prison or turning rat. She chooses the latter. Armed with an app on her phone saved under the name “Mom”, all she has to do is keep a call rolling while nefarious business is afoot. But that’s easier said than done, since Alamo is already suspicious at the best of times, is in the midst of a gang war after killing Laurie’s bird, and the DEA keeps making her position untenable by doing things like swapping the drugs in her fanny pack with sugar pills.
Essentially, this turns Euphoria, or at least the bits of it that involve Rue, into an undercover crime thriller. To be fair, it’s a fairly good take on the well-worn template, and there are a handful of effective scenes that revolve around the gimmick, one being a sweaty poker game where Rue tries to pitch securing a different supplier other than Laurie, and another being an attempt to discredit Magick, who overheard her asking Kitty, a new girl brought in to replace Angel, whether she’s being forced to work at the club.
Kitty becomes a kind of avatar for Rue’s moral dilemma. She clearly is being strong-armed in some capacity, and her time in the club is deeply miserable. Rue can see this, can see Angel’s storyline playing out again before her eyes, but it’s deliberately unclear for now whether she sees her new association with the DEA as a way to do something to prevent that or simply as a way to save her own skin. When Harley and Wayne storm the club in Obama masks, shoot Alamo in the stomach, and steal the cash from the safe, Rue correctly identifies Faye as the getaway driver, so she clearly isn’t above selling out her former associates just yet. But the moral contour that is potentially emerging through Kitty is one of the smarter things that could be done with Rue’s character at this point. She can’t just keep making the most convenient self-serving decision forever.
The Fairytale Is Over
As mentioned at the top, Cassie’s fairytale suburban right-wing life with Nate has come to an end. But in her mind, she has simply replaced it with a different fantasy. Under Maddy’s stewardship, she leans wholeheartedly into her OnlyFans career, enjoying a makeover, a photoshoot in Lexi’s apartment complex – which she also moves into after pawning her wedding ring – and attends an influencer party thrown by a guy named Brandon in a skintight cheetah-print jumpsuit.
This brings Cassie into direct rivalry with Katelyn, the girl whom Maddy was formerly representing, who made good on her own terms. So, there’s an element of Maddy using Cassie to right that wrong, and Cassie, seemingly having the time of her life, rises to the occasion. She might not be very bright, but she is very beautiful, and she’s at least smart enough to know that’s all she needs.
After ousting Katelyn and luring Brandon into a compromising position, Cassie seizes her opportunity for virality. She has captured the public’s attention. Now she just needs to do whatever she can to keep it.
The Death of Art
With these two subplots occupying the bulk of Euphoria Season 3, Episode 4, there isn’t quite as much time devoted to other characters. But it is worth briefly touching on Lexi and Jules, who are having a worse time trying to make a more honest living.
Lexi calls Jules with an opportunity. The soap she’s working on needs to commission some art for the background of a scene, and Jules is enthusiastic about it. But she doesn’t realise that the kind of art network TV needs isn’t the kind of art she creates. Her summery landscape is replete with ghoulish figures with enlarged breasts and penises. Patty Lance, the showrunner played by Sharon Stone, is furious, but because Lexi explains that Jules is trans, the execs present their horror as nicely as possible. Jules agrees to “fix” the painting, and then daubs the whole thing in red paint with a giant orange penis for flourish.
It feels a bit harsh on Lexi, who has to pay the price with a verbal lashing from Patty about the financial realities of the mistake. I think this storyline is pitched slightly wrong. Jules is obviously a suffering artist, unsure of her own style and desires, and her work is clearly informed by the ostracization and confusion she has felt in her own life. But not realising that the painting was deeply inappropriate for the context in which it was commissioned, and then throwing Lexi under the bus after being called out on it, feels really short-sighted and selfish, which I don’t think was the intention.
For Lexi, it’s almost the proof she didn’t want that her earnest attempts to be a do-the-right-thing suck-up aren’t working. At one point in this episode, she berates Rue for trying to acquire drugs, and Cassie for selling her body, and Maddy for pimping Cassie out, but you can see in her own expression that she’s realising in real-time that they’re (almost) all doing better than she is. And not a metaphor in sight.
