Summary
Euphoria Season 3 still can’t resist a Sydney Sweeney sex scene for virality’s sake, but “Rain or Shine” is nonetheless full of scenes of genuine suspense, some clever formal tricks, and a bit of actual character depth.
I’m not sure how it happened. I’ve been making fun of Euphoria Season 3 since the beginning, and it really did look to be running out of road. The overreliance on Sydney Sweeney’s propensity for social media virality seemed to be doing all of the heavy lifting, and while Episode 7 isn’t totally immune to that impulse – there’s still a needless Sweeney sex scene in “Rain or Shine”, just for good measure – most of it is pretty effective as a character study and a tension-building exercise. Those positive signs weren’t a coincidence. We do seem to be ending the season with a bang.
One long-time character pays the messiest price for this sudden lurch into genuinely suspenseful territory, but if I were a betting man, I’d say a couple more won’t be far behind. There’s a part of me that thinks the show wouldn’t ever dare kill Rue off, just in case it needs to continue, but it’s getting increasingly untenable that she can keep surviving all this, and with yet another last-minute cliffhanger that implies she’s in serious mortal peril, the clock does seem to be ticking.
Let’s break it all down.
Backstory
As is becoming trendy for this season, “Rain or Shine” opens with some Rue-narrated flashback backstory. This time it’s for Ali, Rue’s sponsor, who has barely been glimpsed this season, which is a shame since Colman Domingo is always so great in the role. The sequences briefly chronicle Ali’s battle with drug addiction, feature a Natasha Lyonne cameo, and basically explain how he came to live a life of service, especially through a particularly challenging pandemic that saw so many of the people he was responsible for lose their battles.
The point of all this is to help flesh out Ali’s relationship with Rue. If we understand his losses, we better understand the strength of his desire to keep his charges safe. With Rue, though, that’s almost impossible. She keeps meddling with Nazis and cartels and the DEA, she keeps telling everyone about it, and she now feels vindicated in all of the above because she believes she’s basically Moses.
Ali sees through this – there are multiple scenes in this episode where Rue’s religious awakening is treated as the ramblings of a relapsed addict – but loses none of the desire to shield her from whatever’s coming. Rue ultimately strikes out alone, but something tells me we probably haven’t seen the last of Ali this season.
Cassie Does Cassie Things
We knew that one way or another, Cassie would regret deleting her OnlyFans page. In truth, she isn’t good for very much else. But in terms of selling herself for attention, she’s one of the very best, which is why she gravitates to it so strongly and why Maddy, who sees dollar signs every time she looks at her, can’t let her go. Both of these things come together here, but not in the way either of them expected.
After receiving Nate’s severed finger in the mail, Cassie found herself suddenly responsible for settling his debt and saving his life. But without her OnlyFans and having been bounced from L.A. Nights thanks to the potential controversies of casting an actual sex worker instead of an actor, she had no way of doing it. Enter Maddy.
Maddy’s plan is to have Cassie seduce Dylan Reed. After almost killing him with her bedroom theatrics, she stole his phone, unlocked it, and posted a message to his Instagram page explaining that she just gave him the night of his life. His career is probably ruined, of course, or at least damaged in a not-insignificant way, but to Cassie and Maddy, it’s a worthwhile sacrifice on the altar of their own fortunes.
RIP Nate Jacobs
While all this is going on, Nate is in a coffin. He’s not dead – not initially, anyway – but he’s rapidly running out of oxygen as an incentive for Cassie to drum up the money to settle his debt. Once Maddy turns up at Cassie’s place and sees a glass of water that Dylan was drinking out of containing Nate’s finger, Cassie has to read her in. Luckily, Maddy knows someone who can help.
Maddy probably never anticipated having to pimp herself out as part of her modern-day madame power play, but here we are. Alamo doesn’t do anything for free, and Maddy won’t give up on her cash cow. With an implied off-camera personal sacrifice, Alamo agrees to help, accompanies Maddy to the planned exchange point, and shoots Naz dead. He even helps to dig Nate up from his shallow grave. The day is almost saved.
But not quite. Earlier, a rattlesnake had slithered into the vent that was keeping Nate alive and latched onto his face. By the time the coffin is pulled free, Nate’s long dead, and Cassie is greeted with his terribly bloated face. RIP Nate and his entirely misguided redemption arc.
Loose Lips Sink Ships
Despite all this, Euphoria Season 3, Episode 7 doesn’t skimp on peril for Rue, either. Her experiences with the burning Joshua tree have given her altogether too much confidence, given how dangerous a predicament she’s in, and she continues to try to play both sides against the middle with a renewed sense of surety that might end up being her downfall.
For one thing, she mentions to Lexi, apropos of nothing, that she’s working for Nazis and the DEA, and this is later repeated by Lexi to Maddy, and by Maddy to Alamo, so if it wasn’t obvious that Rue had been rumbled before, it definitely is now. But then again, it might not even matter.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, Rue attempts to reingratiate herself into Laurie’s gang by pretending that Alamo tried to kill her for still being loyal to them (including breaking her own nose on a steering wheel, for authenticity’s sake). Laurie seems to buy this, but Wayne, on the other hand, does not. After slicing Rue’s hand open with a knife, he also plans to kill her, which he mentions to Faye. Faye feels bad about it and tips off Rue, so the two of them try to open the safe and abscond with the fortune. However, there’s no money inside, only various IDs, and Faye takes that to mean that Rue has been manipulating her all along.
“Rain or Shine” ends with Faye screaming for Wayne, and Rue once again in the lion’s den.
