‘Euphoria’ Recap, Season 3, Episode 2: Maddy in Tinseltown

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The tagline for the Silver Slipper, the strip club Alamo owns, is “Fully nude, always lewd.” This charming witticism might double as a tagline for the season writ large. Nearly all of our female characters — except for Lexi, absent from this week’s episode — have grown up to either do or facilitate sex work. If in previous seasons, Euphoria foregrounded erotic imagery to make a point about the confusing and often painful process of coming to terms with one’s sexuality, now that poignancy is gone. There are two types of women in Levinson’s Los Angeles: The dumb ones and the smart ones. The dumb ones get naked; the smart ones puppeteer them. It goes without saying, but just to be clear: There are plenty of good, sensitive, edifying stories to be told about sex work in this country. But from where I’m standing, Euphoria is not the show to tell them. That’s because it has been colored with a light shade of misogyny since day one. It’s part of the show’s DNA, from the reports of Levinson’s (mis)treatment of female nudity on set, to everything that has ever happened to Cassie.

In Euphoria, we hardly ever see men debase themselves. Even Cal, who ended up a “broke sexual deviant,” according to Rue’s narration, was always the dominant party in a sexual interaction. His humiliation has less to do with what he did than with the fact that he got caught. Drunk, demoralized, and devoid of his construction empire, he has managed to mend his relationship with Nate through undepicted means. Did they find peace in an inverted dynamic in which Cal has to respond to Nate, whose capacity for sexual intimacy he ruined forever? Or is the inverted dynamic the reason why Cal is drunk? At his Sex and Love Addicts meeting, Cal heard that Cassie is doing OnlyFans. “Once you give in to temptation,” he warns his son, “it’s over.”

Cassie is still determined to make it big on “the platform.” Her pictures, which start innocently enough from the puppy-dog idea, get increasingly demeaning. A baseball theme is indicated by a backward cap, some EyeBlack, and a glove, which is all she is wearing. The most disturbing tableau depicts Cassie as a baby, sucking on a pacifier and spreading her legs. Maddy scrolls through picture after picture of Cassie’s naked body. “Beautiful but directionless,” she muses — the two essential qualities in a girl from whom a cannier woman might make a profit.

Remember in the first season, when McKay’s frat brothers invaded his dorm room as he was having sex with Cassie to humiliate him in a hazing ritual and then McKay resumed having aggressive, unloving sex with Cassie in order to reclaim his virility? When we were watching that episode, my (intelligent and observant) husband made a good point about the camera’s perspective. That episode’s cold open dived into McKay’s background, which meant the hour’s emotional core was with him; but in the moment of his humiliation, the camera held fast on Cassie, pornographically posed on all fours. It sent a signal to the audience: Euphoria prefers to see Cassie degraded. Is there any reason we should see so many of her OnlyFans photo shoots, besides Levinson’s indulgence? The underlying misogyny of the previous seasons has transformed into full-on contempt for Cassie. She has been bimbofied into oblivion.

Last week, I wrote that Cassie is nuts, not dumb, but after “America My Dream,” I’m reconsidering that idea. It’d be generous to read Cassie as an ambitious woman who manipulates her image to get what she wants. Any good femme fatale knows who she is, a quality Maddy has and Cassie doesn’t. And like any good femme fatale, Maddy is given savvy at the expense of moral scruples. This week’s episode opens with an explanation of how Maddy came to work for Ms. Penzler (Rebecca Pidgeon). She pitches herself as an antidote to her generation’s stereotypes: She’s not “a victim” and she “believes in capitalism.” Maddy’s career development slows down with the pandemic, which also shuts down her mother’s salon. Determined to help her family, she finds a beautiful, directionless, new-to-L.A. girl named Katelyn (Bella Podaras) on TikTok. As her “career architect,” Maddy builds up Katelyn’s following from virtually zero to more than a million followers. “It’s important to have a moral code,” she concedes when Katelyn says she doesn’t want to do nudity. But it takes only a few photo shoots, and maybe some checks, for Katelyn to be comfortably naked in front of the camera.

Having established Katelyn’s following, Maddy moves to make her socially relevant by introducing her to Dylan Reid. She shows him Katelyn’s feed on … the Friends couch. But Penzler is still more powerful than she is, and despite Maddy’s argument that “the norms are changing” and girls like Katelyn are part of a “booming industry,” Penzler maintains her clients shouldn’t associate with “porn stars.” A year later, Katelyn is making $700,000 a month and Maddy is still Penzler’s assistant. She vows to follow her own instincts from now on, which is why when Cassie messages her wanting to have lunch, she seizes the opportunity.

Their poolside “meeting” is the highlight of this week’s episode. Alexa Demie and Sydney Sweeney have electric chemistry, reuniting for the first time since high school. Cassie’s jaw drops when she sees Maddy, who looks elegant and sexy in her signature fur coat, even though it appears to be 500 degrees outside. Maddy is a bad bitch, a fully formed woman with a career, perfect makeup, and manicured nails. She makes Cassie — rich and about to marry the guy they ruined their friendship over — look painfully provincial. Cassie apologizes — not for what she did to Maddy but for how she did it. That Cassie thinks her engagement to Nate means their love was always real comforts Maddy: Cassie’s life is so small that she’s still holding on to that “victory.” On her third Aperol spritz, Cassie admits that the real reason she wanted to see Maddy is that she needs help getting bigger on OnlyFans. Maddy advises that she’s trying too hard and should try being herself. “But … who am I?” Cassie asks. There is no pathos in Sweeney’s delivery, only emptiness. Just like that, Cassie surrenders her image to Maddy’s control.

That is, until Nate gets wind of the arrangement at the barbecue he hosts for his investors. Well, “investors” is a stretch — these are his neighbors from whom he’s trying to pull together $100,000 by Friday so he can win back the good graces of Naz (Jack Topalian), a gangster-inflected funeral-parlor owner to whom Nate owes $550,000. At the barbecue, Cassie shows Heather her “content.” Heather is so disturbed that she runs to tell her husband, Fred, speculating that Cassie is on OnlyFans because Nate can’t afford their wedding. But Fred blindly believes in Nate’s affluence. Nate plays his older neighbors like a fiddle, seducing them with his beauty, money, and youth. It helps him to demonstrate that he can control Cassie. In front of Heather and Fred, he gets Cassie to delete her OnlyFans account by promising to pay for the $50,000 florals. Later, in bed, he tells Cassie that he grew up in a house filled with lies and secrecy, which is why he is sensitive about those things now. A vulnerable moment from our dark prince! For the sake of transparency, Cassie tells him about seeing Maddy about her career (which, according to Nate, is now over) and that she invited Maddy to their wedding.

Okay, that’s what goes on in the burbs. But what about Rue? When we catch up with her this week, she’s proved her worth to Alamo by doing his dirty work: She cleans up after the death of Tish, the girl who OD’d on Laurie’s fentanyl-laced drugs last week. “You killed one of my bitches,” Alamo tells Laurie on the phone. “Now I’m taking one of yours.” He offers to settle Rue’s debt, and the deal is done, not that it goes politely or smoothly. It’s not that Harley addresses Alamo by a racial slur that gets to him but that Laurie calls him a “fucking pig.” Days later, he’s still thinking about it and vows to get his revenge. Meanwhile, Rue, now employed at the Silver Slipper, gets the lay of the land from the club’s manager and becomes acquainted with the girls. There’s Magick (Rosalía!), who is in the middle of a lawsuit and rocking a neck brace on the pole. And there’s Angel (Priscilla Delgado), with whom Rue has very loud sex in the parking lot.

Within a few weeks, Rue goes from unclogging toilets to helping manage the girls. Angel, who was Tish’s best friend, gets increasingly agitated by her friend’s disappearance. Alamo insists that she “fell in love” and skipped town, but Angel knows that if that were true, Tish would have called her back by now. The manager can’t get through to Angel, so Rue offers to speak to her instead. She tells her the truth about Tish’s overdose, and Angel spirals; she passes out in the club, sleeps in her car, throws up in the bathrooms. The situation reaches a breaking point: Either Angel agrees to go to rehab — which Alamo will pay for — or she’ll be fired. Alamo offers Rue another promotion if she can convince Angel to get treatment, but it’s no easy feat (“Suck my big fat fucking dick, bitch” is Angel’s first reaction). Still, Rue knows a thing or two about resisting an intervention, and finally they get on the road en route to Hope Springs, the rehab facility. Angel muses that California is a strange place: “More people go missing here than anywhere else in America. It’s like there’s a big magnet under the soil attracting evil.”

There seems to be a desire to say something about the greed and corruption at the heart of American western mythology this season. While making her housekeeper, Juana (she better be getting a cut of the profits), take photos of her dressed as a sexy baby, Cassie asks her if she thinks her life could be bigger. But Juana says “no.” “America: my dream,” she replies with a smile. Combined with Angel and Rue’s drive through the desert, Levinson seems to be pointing at the hollowness of the American Dream, which compels a person to risk their life, only to end up photographing dumb bimbos for OnlyFans.

Hope Springs is sketchy when Rue and Angel get there. There’s no paperwork to sign, and the person at the front desk avoids eye contact and has dirt under their fingernails. Angel is frightened, but Rue promises to come back for her. From the way Angel looks back at Rue before disappearing behind a door, and the fact that someone watches Rue as she drives away, I suspect we’ll never see Angel again. I hope I’m wrong! Priscilla Delgado left it all out there; I loved Angel from the moment she threw the first shoe. Meanwhile, Alamo gets his revenge on Laurie. Wayne (who, by the way, has a swastika tattooed on his chest) and Faye are in the act when they hear a ruckus upstairs. “Is that … a dinosaur?” Faye wonders. But it’s just a massive hog that has invaded the house, peeing and shitting everywhere. A flag on it warns “Remember the Alamo.” I already feel bad for this pig. He has nothing to do with any of this!

It’s only in the last five minutes that Jules finally appears. She makes a smaller appearance earlier, in flashback, as Rue tells Angel about visiting her in art school in L.A. It was around that time that Rue relapsed. She had to beg her mom to let her come home, but they haven’t spoken in two years, and Gia often avoids her calls. Rue hasn’t been sober since, though she tells Jules she’s “California sober,” which to her means some drinking and some weed but nothing “that can destroy her life.” Rue first gets the inkling to reach out to Jules in conversation with Maddy, who assures her that it’s fine to be a sugar baby. She only doesn’t do it herself because she’s “not a fucking hooker.”

Rue misses high school, and in that, she’s alone among her former classmates. Jules tells her it’s easy to romanticize things from a distance. She is living in a swanky penthouse apartment that belongs to her boyfriend and wearing an expensive-looking wig that reaches down to her hips. Rue questions the nature of Jules’s relationship, but Jules deflects. It’s true that her boyfriend has a family, but (1) has that ever stopped her before? And (2) she doesn’t think “people are meant to be monogamous.” When Rue takes that as a hint that maybe there’s a chance for them still, Jules replies, “You can’t just show up after all this time and think everything’s gonna be the same.” Jules is different now. She’s cold, hardened, and distant. The lighthearted warmth of her teenage self is gone. She invites Rue to join her in the bath.

• I wish for Juana that she could get another job with some normal people, but I also think she’s fucking with Nate and Cassie a little. As Nate waits for Cassie to get her phone to delete her OnlyFans account, Juana points to every item left over from the barbecue and asks Nate if she’s supposed to save them. The list gets so long that Nate says, calmly, “Juana, I’m going to kill you.” Juana doesn’t even flinch.

• Speaking of the above interaction: Witnessing it, Heather and Fred exchange looks like, These people are weird. Uh, yeah! No one in this neighborhood is addressing the fact that Cassie and Nate are suspiciously loaded for 22-year-olds. It’s weird!

• Cleaning Tish’s room, Rue rolls a rug and something falls out. I couldn’t tell if it’s a key or an earring, but either way, it’s something to watch out for.

• Laurie is sincere when she tells Alamo she didn’t lace her drugs with fentanyl. It was an accident: Wayne forgot to tell Faye to clean the scale from the fentanyl that had been measured before, and the substance is so powerful that it can be lethal even at a vestigial dose. It seems as though Levinson is angling to make some kind of comment on the fentanyl crisis, but it hasn’t come together just yet. Similarly, the passing acknowledgment of the pandemic’s politically charged summer vaguely gestures at the social forces influencing the youth but stops short of examining how they do so. Speaking of 2020, which Euphoria characters do you think would have refused to mask and/or get vaccinated? I think Cassie and Nate for sure, and I could see Maddy going “It’s just a flu …”

• One last thing on the sex-work theme: There was more depth and intelligence to Kat’s season-one camgirl arc than there is to any of Cassie’s OnlyFans fantasies.

• I mentioned Jacob Elordi’s new, confusingly goofy Nate in my last recap. Elordi returns to form in the sequence with Naz when he embodies Nate’s fear so completely that you can see red patches rising up his neck and flushing his cheeks. You can’t pretend that kind of bodily reaction; that’s some serious channeling. A few months ago, on Actors on Actors with Gwyneth Paltrow, Elordi said about season-three Nate, “There’s a chance that what I’ve done is not good.” Jury’s out, Jacob. But for what it’s worth, I’m a believer!

• It’s melancholy watching Eric Dane return to his role as Cal in this episode. On the one hand, it’s a joy to see him as attuned and funny as ever; on the other hand, Cal’s slurred speech — though consistent with the character’s alcoholism — is only too poignant a reminder of his untimely death.

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