Euphoria (2019) [HBO] [** Spoilers **]

My feeling about Euphoria has always been that he's trying to tell his own story through Rue, but he's had to put her into a world with other people to do it, but he's not anywhere near as invested in anyone else as he is in Rue. Which is understandable, but also maybe where more collaboration would have helped.

It probably is an extremely realistic portrayal of addiction, and for me that's fine, because I'm invested in Rue as a person, and she is what I understood the show to be about when I started S1, so I'm fine with the cycle. But it's understandable that anyone watching it for an ensemble show about messy teens, or prefer other characters to Rue, aren't going to be "enjoying" it as much.

I'm also on the fence about Levinson in general. I watched his film Assassination Nation a while back and I dunno, there's just something off-putting about a middle aged man telling so many stories through teenage girls?

Caught up on the most recent 2 eps there and they were a marked improvement on what came before.

Not sure if it was meant to be funny or not but everything in ep6 with Cassie, Lexi and their mother was hilarious.

Yeah, the first scene she had with Maddie she was a bit touchy with her, definitely gave me weird vibes.

I remember from S1 Maddie had a thing about getting rich and living comfortably with minimal effort, so maybe she's going to do something stupid there. The way she's been trying on her clothes and jewelry and what not. There's only a few episodes left this season so maybe they're setting something up for S3? 4 eps doesn't feel like enough time to do something worthwhile there.

I forgot about the alarm click, I do remember that scene where it zoomed in on it for no apparent reason. Wasn't there a storyline in S1 with Kat and one of the guys who was paying her for whatever it was she was doing on camera. I wonder if they're circling back to that.

I see lots of people speculating that Ashtray is the missing kid from the Jacobson family portrait. Can't see a family like that just being down one kid all of a sudden and nobody asking questions 😄

I just assumed people thought Nate's mother was using and left him, which makes zero sense. The kidnapped by a junkie theory makes slightly more sense 😄

I thought Nate was the smallest child in the family photo though, so I thought the missing kid was the oldest or middle child.

Apart from Rue's story I feel like nothing has really been continued from S1.

I saw some rumours that the actress who plays Kat has some disagreements with Sam Levinson about her storylines this season, which resulted in him cutting lots of her scenes. I don't know if that's true, but she's definitely had barley any screen time this season. And yeah, her break up scene was bizarre. It was funny, but made zero sense for the character. And wasn't there a thread of her camera girl storyline left hanging from S1 too? Like someone was watching her, or someone who knew her was watching? I can't remember but there was definitely something.

Oh I know that's Euphoria's whole thing, go big or go home, but a lot of this season felt like filler. It's slightly annoying that Levinson put so many more interesting things into Lexi's play than he put into the actual series. But again that's Euphoria for you.

The opening of episode 8 with Cassie going off was hysterical 🤣

Yeah, I'm not sure what he had done that was arrest worthy either. Unless Nate lied to Jules, which wouldn't surprise me. I'm not sure what is or isn't a crime in the US, or even state by state. Was he soliciting sex? I think he was just using a hook up app. Or maybe it was filming it all without anyone's consent? I'm sure it was only last week that the voice-over said Nate wasn't bothered about protecting his dad anymore, but did want to protect the business which would be his 🤷‍♀️

I agree, this season was very messy. I see lots of people mad that they have to wait until 2024 for answers. But there's stuff from S1 that never got answered in S2. I don't think he has answers to a lot of it.

I assumed the police picked up on Faye very specifically naming Laurie as a big time dealer and arrested her after they were finished at Fez's. Some time passed between Rue escaping and the last episode though, so why she didn't show up at some point in there, I don't know.

I still think Rue's story is the most grounded and has the most time and effort put into telling it, but that whole suitcase/Laurie detour this season was a big miss for me.

They had extra time to write S2 because covid shut everything down before they'd filmed any of it. Levinson apparently scrapped most of what he had planned and rewrote a lot of it during the shutdown, along with the special episodes. I'm not sure time does him any favours.

Just reading an interview with the kid who plays Ashtray and he said that Fez was supposed to be the one shot at the end of S2, and it was only changed to be him the day before they filmed it. Which means 2 seasons in a row they changed the ending for Fez. I assume he'll be in jail in S3 so it doesn't really matter, but it's just makes you wonder how much Levinson actually plans anything.