Euphoria
Rain or Shine
Season 3
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
A main character finally gets put out of their misery.
Photo: Eddy Chen
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From the way things were going, it was obvious that one of Euphoria’s central characters had to die. Gillie tipped us off last week when she told Lexi that a character has to die periodically to keep the viewer engaged. That the sacrificial lamb would be Nate was also obvious, given that he hardly had a line of dialogue that wasn’t “ow,” “no,” “please,” or “stop” since his wedding. But it’s also reasonable to expect some more deaths at what will almost certainly be a centerpiece confrontation between Laurie and Alamo’s crews next week, if Rue can make it out alive to see that happen. After returning to the novelistic tones of earlier seasons for a few episodes, tonight’s Euphoria is all ramped-up action. Sam Levinson continues his effort to merge his ensemble’s storylines, and the result is like a pile-up on the freeway.
At over 70 minutes, “Rain or Shine” at least begins with that more novelistic tone. We get another vintage Euphoria backstory, this time detailing Ali’s road to recovery. Levinson is at his strongest when we see Ali as we have never seen him before, but it’s bizarre to open on a character that ultimately has nothing to do with the major events of the episode. In fact, Ali’s say over the outcome of the story is so limited that he can’t even convince Rue not to go to Laurie’s. More than that: Ali doesn’t have anything to do with Rue’s religious journey. She only tells him that God has spoken to her, and though Ali has undeniably been a force for good in her life, she seems to credit her Christian awakening to the Miller family in El Paso, whose homestead she interprets as her promised land, the place God is calling her to.
It’s a shame because Colman Domingo’s performance is a highlight of the show. In his flashback, we see him smoke crack in a motel room with a prostitute (Natasha Lyonne! Why must Levinson tease us like this?!), only to go back to his family and beat up his wife within earshot of his two daughters. Ali finally lands on a new life after he wakes up in the hospital with a scar down the middle of his chest. He asks the nurse not to give him any morphine and makes a life out of transforming his “mistakes into blessings,” namely by helping others recover. When the pandemic suspends meetings, Ali takes it upon himself to check on his sponsees individually, but many of them can’t survive the isolation. Ali keeps a book with their names and the dates of their deaths. All of this throws into relief the depth of Ali’s relationship with Rue. Her well-being is important to him not just because he cares about her; it literally gives his life meaning and a reason to be well, too.
Ali is also the only person in Rue’s life who knows, with any measure of actual comprehension, what she’s going through. Rue tries to tell Lexi about how her newfound faith has given her hope that she can redeem the “evil” she has done in her life, but Lexi doesn’t really listen. One, she has work to do on the L.A. Nights sex-worker storyline, which the network loved; and two, she doesn’t trust anything Rue says anymore, least of all that she’s an informer for the DEA. These two reservations, however convincing, don’t entirely explain her cruelty towards Rue, telling her that it’s obvious she has been using again and that it’s no wonder her mother doesn’t speak to her anymore. There seems to be little attention paid to Lexi as an actual character; she’s a mere plot device.
Rue needs to tell her about the DEA so Lexi, in a moment of rage over her friends’ and family’s broken moral compasses, can relay the information to Maddy, who will catastrophically give it to Alamo. This is how we get there: Rue feels judged by Lexi and storms off to Cassie’s, but Cassie doesn’t open the door. That’s because she’s hog-tied on her bed, with Naz looking over her because she has neglected to wire him the appropriate amount of money. When Cassie got her first call from Naz to pay up, she had already deleted her OnlyFans account on Patty Lance’s recommendation. But the studio decides there’s no reason to “invite controversy” to the show by hiring a real sex worker, so Maddy and Cassie are forced to pivot. Maddy gets fired by Ms. Penzler for “misrepresenting” her firm. She’s furious at Cassie for deleting her account, and when she finds Cassie wailing on the floor after speaking to Naz, Maddy literally kicks her while she’s down. She slaps Cassie across the face. “I’m your fucking boss, bitch,” Maddy reminds her.
That we see Maddy slap Cassie soon after seeing Jules do the same to Rue is indicative of the strange complacency to which Euphoria has resigned itself. There is a circularity to its heightened conflict, as if, writing big scenes, Levinson keeps reaching for the same gestures, no matter who is involved. Cassie continues to breeze through the plot like a sentient inflatable doll. Maddy sets her up on a dinner with Dylan Reid and tips TMZ off to document it. In her apartment, Cassie seduces Dylan and asks him to take a picture of them. He plugs in his phone password very slowly right in front of her face so she can memorize it and use it later, to post the picture on his Instagram after absolutely rocking his shit, captioning it with the praise he shouts out to her from the kitchen — “world’s greatest fuck” — and a tag for @itsjustmecassie. While this is happening, Dylan, in a trance, I guess, from the world’s greatest fuck, scoops ice and Nate’s finger from Cassie’s freezer into a glass. He drinks water from it without noticing the finger.
Cassie hides Dylan’s phone under the mattress, and when Maddy shows up the next morning while the unsuspecting heartthrob is still sleeping, she’s happy with Cassie’s performance. Her followers have skyrocketed to over 100,000, and the photo has been trending for over seven hours. Maddy and Cassie are a team again, only 12 or so hours post-slap. Maddy notices Nate’s finger in the sink. While Cassie catches her up on “what the fuck is going on,” Nate swears to Naz that Cassie will come through with the money. After reminding Nate that he makes coffins for a living, Naz asks Nate how tall he is; at 6’5”, he’ll require a custom coffin. The scene ends with — what else? — Nate getting beaten around. It’s frustrating that we never learned how Nate got involved with Naz. Where did they even meet?
Naz and his henchman, who we learn is called Artur, shake Cassie down. Naz gives her 72 hours to cough up 1 million dollars; that’s how long it will take Nate to die from dehydration in the coffin Naz has buried him in, under the doomed Sun Settlers development, with just a little hole for air. Nate’s brother (remember him?) drives to the property, looking for him, but doesn’t hear Nate banging on the top of his coffin and begging to be let out.
This is when Cassie’s OnlyFans plot, Nate’s debt to Naz, and Rue’s underworld misadventures all converge. When Maddy calls Lexi looking for Cassie, Lexi is furious about how everyone has lost their sense of right and wrong, including Rue, who was ranting about “Nazis and Black cowboys and the DEA.” Cassie, for her part, calls Maddy for help. She puts her on the phone with Naz, who repeats the terms of the extortion. Maddy, in turn, taps Alamo. She’s still under the impression that Alamo respects her business acumen, though that impression begins to change once she gets to his house and sees he has picked out a one-piece bathing suit for her. Magick encourages her to commit to her bad judgment: “Don’t overthink it,” she says, “trade a thousand bad days for a good life.”
By the time Maddy is in Alamo’s hot tub, getting a creepy foot massage and being pressured into ever closer contact with him, she still doesn’t seem fully aware of the dangers of getting into debt with this guy. Or she is well-aware and cares about Cassie enough to put her neck on the line. Either of these justifications is convincing — despite being a badass, Maddy is still young and naive, and regardless of their history, Cassie has been her friend since they were kids — but I have a hard time believing she would be dumb enough to tell Alamo that Rue was talking about the DEA. She knows there’s something deeply wrong with Alamo’s operation, if not from the yellow-eyed panther that frames his hot tub, then at least from the fact that he won’t listen to what she has to say unless she agrees to be held by him in his hot tub, wearing the bathing suit he picked out for her.
Alamo tells Maddy that he, too, had a bad day. After getting shot by Wayne, Eddy has a scar not unlike Ali’s, except his runs down the center of his stomach and necessitates a colostomy bag. Alamo is still angry at him for opening the safe, so as punishment, he puts him in charge of driving the girl-selling, fentanyl-smuggling van to Mexico. What’s more, he has to take one of Laurie’s people. It’d be awkward to road-trip with one of his would-be murderers, but thankfully, Eddy is riding with a non-character named Mitch. The Feds are following their journey, and Kitty is excited to get a BBL. At the club, the girls commiserate with her about the prospect, but we know something bad is going to happen because she tells them that Alamo is going to pay for the surgery. That’s the same thing he told Angel about rehab.
Alamo’s plan to get the final word over Laurie is to get Rue to retrieve the contents of his safe while Eddy is on the trip. When Rue tells Ali about this one last job, he tries to convince her not to take it, but Bishop has threatened her mom, and she can’t risk screwing up the DEA’s bust by making Alamo suspicious. Now that Alamo knows that the acronym “DEA” has crossed Rue’s lips, this plan is compromised, but Rue doesn’t know that yet. It would be awesome if Rue would stop telling people that she is an informer, but she forges on over a pancake dinner with Ali. She tells him that God told her to have faith that she’ll be taken to the promised land (the Miller homestead in El Paso) and set fire to a tree. She is so confident that she is on the cusp of freedom that it becomes heartbreakingly obvious that something really bad will happen to her. Ali offers her an out: They can pick up her mom first thing in the morning, and she’ll never have to go to Laurie’s again. She agrees to the idea, but when Ali wakes up in the morning, she has left him a Post-It note: “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me —” Checks notes. Sorry, wrong show. It says: “Forgive me.”
G drives Rue to Laurie’s. He will wait for her in his truck, partway through the dirt road, until morning. Rue bangs her head against the glove compartment box when G refuses to hit her in the face for fear of knocking her out cold. The cut on her nose is necessary to convincingly tell Laurie that Alamo tried to kill her. But Laurie’s gaggle-o’-Nazis is skeptical of Rue’s return. They decide she deserves some kind of punishment for her treason, and Wayne asks her to shake on the promise that she will shoot Alamo herself. When she extends her hand to him, he slashes it down the middle.
By this point, a rattlesnake has already slithered into Nate’s coffin and bitten him in the face. It’s a tense sequence, if also airless: Nate’s fate is only too representative of his character’s arc this season, which is defined by helplessness. We didn’t see Nate get himself into this mess with Naz, only that he couldn’t get himself out of it. Nate used to be one of Euphoria’s most surprising, thorny, compelling characters. His rage and torment were more Heathcliffian than Heathcliff’s own in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” RIP, Nate Jacobs: We’ve been mourning you for six weeks.
It’s Nate’s cold corpse, his tongue swollen, and the snake resting royally on his chest, that Cassie and Maddy find when they open his coffin. Maddy drives with Alamo to the Sun Settlers development, where they are supposed to carry out the extortion deal. For the occasion, Maddy wears a skintight dress with a picture of the Virgin Mary stamped on it. She tells Alamo that the reason why she’s putting herself in considerable danger for Cassie is that Cassie is a “money tree,” but even Maddy Perez has feelings, and she looks scared. Alamo gives her a leather suitcase, which she drops in front of Naz’s car. But when Naz opens it, there’s no money. Before he can protest, Alamo shoots him square in the chest. If Maddy could already tell, in the hot tub, that she was in over her head with Alamo, now the impression is sealed with blood and a stake in Cassie’s career: Alamo demands 20 percent of all future earnings. Maddy effectively sells her friend, though she also saved her life. But at what cost?
At the Nazi compound, Faye is mad at Wayne for messing with Rue. He tells her that it’s simple: There’s “black and white.” When Faye says that Rue is “in the middle,” Wayne shoots back: “There is no middle.” Then he tells her that he will make her “put Rue down like a dog,” much like SS soldiers were made to kill the puppies they’d been given to care for at the end of training. This is finally enough to do what the swastika tattoo couldn’t, which is to awaken Faye to Wayne’s psychopathy. She sneaks into Rue’s room so they can finally break into Wayne’s safe. When they do, what they find is not money, but several IDs for girls in the club, including one for Angel. Rue is slowly realizing that Alamo is not just a club-owner but a sex-trafficker, a realization helped in part by something Laurie said earlier, on the topic of potential punishments for Rue’s treacherous behavior: “We could do what Alamo does and sell her.” Faye feels betrayed that there’s no money in the safe; she feels taken advantage of. Rue tries to plead with her to keep her voice down, but Faye gets worked up and screams Wayne’s name.
• Putting on the bathing suit that Alamo picked out for her, Maddy steps on a silver bangle of some sort. It reminded me that, way back in the first episode, when Rue was cleaning up after Trish’s death, she dropped something silver on the ground, too. Could all of these clues amount to something in next week’s finale?
• Laurie mentions that Rue doesn’t have a phone. Rue explains that Alamo took it, and just then, Jules calls Rue’s phone, which is on the passenger seat of G’s truck. Given that Rue’s phone is the only line of communication between Rue and the DEA, it seems like the phone is a plant that will pay off in the finale.
• At his place, Ali says to Rue something that Alamo himself said to Laurie: “The thing about fentanyl is… Why kill the customer?” He says it only happens in America, then asks Rue if she worries that the fentanyl she smuggled across the country killed people. This is another hint at Levinson’s confused, reluctant commentary on the fentanyl crisis, and a nod to Rue’s supposed moral drive. Even with all of the talk about God and redemption and good and evil, we have barely scratched the surface of what is compelling Rue to act. It was the DEA that found her; she didn’t go to them. And though she rightfully feels good about helping put Laurie and Alamo behind bars, she would do well to heed Ali’s advice, which is to “start by changing yourself.”
• Let’s place our final bets. I think Alamo and Laurie will both wind up dead in a confrontation. Though Rue will probably make it out alive from the grip of the gaggle-o’-Nazis, I suspect her deal with the DEA won’t turn out to be as sweet as she thinks it will, and she will go to the FBI about Alamo’s sex-trafficking. I think we will see Jules for a total of two minutes in the season finale, and she will say something cutting. I think we’ve seen the last of Lexi. Finally, I think both Cassie and Maddy will end up at the Slipper. I will even hazard that Maddy will take Alamo’s place as the boss there.
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