HBO
It might be atypical for writer-director Sam Levinson to ease us again into the turbulent world of Euphoria for its second season—though its twolow season specials, centered on Rue and Jules, supplied some respite from season 1’s mayhem. In an unflinching premiere, we’re greeted with the identical, previous extreme nudity, drug use, and bloodshed, together with a second the place a person is shot within the thighs along with his penis out through the first two minutes. College is again in session!
In typical sequence style, we open with a personality’s backstory—this time, Fezco’s. The final time we noticed tv’s sweetest drug vendor, he and Ashtray had been flushing tablets down a rest room whereas police banged on their door after a tip from Nate. In a Tarantino-esque flashback to his childhood, we watch his foul-mouthed, gun-wielding grandmother (performed by The Sopranos’ Kathrine Narducci) introduce him—and Ashtray, who was deserted as a child—to her world of violence and unlawful medication. Levinson likes to shove all of his cinematic influences and favourite pop-culture references into his initiatives, whether or not or not they make sense to the worlds they’re occurring in. Likewise, this vignette, which presumably takes place within the early and mid-2000s, appears like a mafia movie set within the ’70s.
Within the current, Fez’s enterprise points concerning the disposed medication are resolved after Ashtray assaults Mouse with a hammer. We meet up with the duo on their method to a drug take care of a just lately relapsed Rue within the backseat snorting substances and rapping all of the phrases to 2Pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up.” This scene completely captures the paradoxical nature of Fez’s caretaker dynamic with Rue. He’s plagued with guilt for enabling her drug dependancy. However he doesn’t know the way to keep watch over her with out placating her with extra medication or introducing her to his deadly colleagues.
They arrive at a car parking zone to satisfy Mouse's former assistant Custer, who initiates the deal between Fez and the eerily calm drug lord Laura. He additionally brings his blond, heroin-addict girlfriend Faye who has distractingly painful-looking lip injections. Laura’s husband and son accost the fellows for bringing stragglers and pressure everybody to strip bare of their kitchen. Realizing Levinson’s carefree perspective towards depicting violence, it felt like something might occur throughout this scene. When Rue resists, he drags her into a toilet and makes her pull down her pants to show she isn’t wired and, fortunately, nothing extra. Regardless of some heads being slammed into partitions and noses injured, everybody makes it out of this harrowing ordeal alive.
The remainder of the premiere takes place at a home occasion the place, as you may think about, solely dangerous issues occur. Lexi is trying to find Cassie, who bought out of her automobile throughout an argument on their manner there. The season 1 finale confirmed Cassie in what appeared like a more healthy place following her breakup with McKay and an abortion. However she’s nonetheless trying to find love and a spotlight in all of the flawed locations, together with a comfort retailer car parking zone the place she runs into her greatest pal Maddy’s ex. Nate can’t resist ruining different folks’s lives. So he offers her a journey to the occasion, rushing at 100 mph to show he’s an actual dangerous boy. Cassie responds by hanging out the window of the automobile whereas flashing him. As somebody who bought flirting suggestions from Seventeen journal, I’m aghast by the way in which these youngsters instinctually talk. Moreover, this scene options the season’s first actually good needle drop: “Lifeless of the Evening” by Orville Peck.
When Nate and Cassie get to the occasion, they've intercourse within the lavatory. It most likely would’ve been higher to get this out of the way in which within the automobile, however what would this present be if anybody had frequent sense? Likewise, this results in my favourite and most bone-chilling a part of the episode when Maddy has to pee in the identical lavatory. She hears Nate inside and begins banging on the door so forcefully you suppose she may break it down. In the meantime, Nate is muzzling Cassie, who’s having a panic assault, and on the lookout for an escape route.
Fez, Rue and Ashtray additionally roll as much as the occasion after the entire drug deal fiasco. Fez finally ends up speaking to Lexi for many of the night time in an sudden meet cute. The 2 of them are an unlikely pairing, however they’re each form of outsiders amongst the central forged in their very own methods. Rue meets a scholar named Elliot (Dominic Fike) who appears like a SoundCloud rapper snorted some unspecified substance. The 2 of them do medication collectively till Rue’s pulse slows down. It’s exhausting to consider that we'd lose our major protagonist within the first episode of the second season. Likewise, she brings her coronary heart fee again up by snorting some crushed-up Adderall tucked in her sock.
Again to our episode of I Love Lucy, Nate lastly emerges from the toilet with Cassie nowhere to be seen. Maddy, who has the mindset of a pesky middle-schooler, is extra preoccupied with the chance that he took a dump at a celebration than the rest. In the meantime, Cassie is mendacity down in a bath that happily is half a mile away from the bathroom on this big lavatory. The format raises some questions, particularly when Maddy’s compelled to make use of a hand towel to wipe herself that’s subsequent to the bathtub and never the sink. We predict Maddy’s going to find Cassie at this second, however she throws the used towel over her shoulder with out wanting round and unknowingly hits her within the face.
Hunter Schafer in Euphoria
HBO
After we suppose Cassie’s within the clear, a random man performed by Lil Meech, who was ready in line behind Maddy, asks her if she needs to smoke weed as she’s about to exit the toilet. They speak about nothing for God is aware of how lengthy till Lexi calls Cassie, and her telephone begins to vibrate loudly towards the bathtub. We positively suppose this would be the second she will get caught when weed man pulls again the bathe curtain. However Maddy has little interest in trying out some seemingly random woman handed out in a bath and asks him to bounce again exterior.
For probably the most half, Kat and Jules are simply dancing and coming into and exiting rooms till Jules reunites with Rue in a really trippy, fantastical sequence. Nate offers Jules an ominous glare however finally ends up harassing McKay as an alternative about Cassie’s boobs in an equally disturbing and homoerotic method. In case you had been a fan of McKay, he’s primarily there to wrap up his storyline with Cassie seemingly for good, as he’s not in any of this season’s promotional supplies.
The episode culminates when Fez spots Nate and exacts his revenge. Nate is the epitome of white, male privilege in that he thinks he can name the cops on somebody and virtually have them locked up with out struggling any penalties. Likewise, he believes Fez when he tells them that every thing’s good between them and will get unexpectedly hit within the head with a beer bottle.
The episode ends as Tarantino-esque because it started with Fez punching Nate perhaps 60 instances till his face is totally engulfed in blood. It’s sensible of Levinson to start season 2 by rewarding his viewers this fashion, regardless of how in the end horrible that reward is perhaps. He’s additionally noticeably having loads of enjoyable with fan favorites like Maddy, Cassie, Lexi and Fez, which sadly made Rue’s scenes barely underwhelming, even when she’s on the point of loss of life. Nonetheless, season 2 is off to a promising begin.