Euphoria
Stand Still and See
Season 3
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
Rue’s story is a reminder that this show still has a beating heart when it’s not obsessing over OnlyFans.
Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO
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At its best, Euphoria is a character study about the kinds of experience that might lead an otherwise well-intentioned person down the wrong path. It’s an argument for nurture over nature, a suggestion that a messed-up environment — whether a broken home or an unjust system — has the power to corrupt even the most innocent spirit. In season three, this argument has largely taken a cynical, nihilistic turn. Like the teenagers it once set out to depict, it was as if Euphoria decided that nothing mattered: The world is bad, people are evil, and joy and fulfillment are just naive illusions. This thematic turn stood in contrast to some of the stronger moments of the past seasons, when real affection and tenderness — between Rue and Jules, for example — cut through the hard shell of the show’s bravado.
This week, we finally get a moment like that, when Rue is in church (who would’ve thought?). She looks with real affection upon the image of God, a single tear streaming down her cheek. It’s not a perfect moment, but it’s a relief to be reminded that Euphoria is warm-blooded: It has a beating heart. So, how do we get to Rue having a sort of literal come-to-Jesus moment?
“Stand Still and See” opens in vintage Euphoria fashion with a backstory for Alamo. We are taken through his childhood’s pivotal disillusionment, which hardened him for life. When he was a kid, his mother brought home a man named Preston, whom she hoped could provide them with nice clothes, warm food, and a measure of security. Preston seemed scary to Alamo because of burn scars on his face, the result of an accident at the chemical factory where he worked, but he soon revealed himself to be kind and sensitive. When Preston’s settlement money finally comes in, the family unit is born: they get new clothes, jewelry, and a swanky new apartment with beautiful furniture. Preston promises to enroll Alamo in a “white school” where he can learn French. On Labor Day, they go to the beach, where Preston asks for Alamo’s blessing to marry his mother. When they get home, though, their apartment has been robbed clean. There’s nothing left. Alamo’s mom immediately picks up and leaves with Alamo, telling her son that Preston is “bad luck.”
Earlier, we heard Alamo’s mom — who is only credited as “Mama Brown” — tell someone on the phone where she was stashing her Cartier gold. When she takes Alamo to a new apartment with a new man who calls her “baby,” we learn that she was in on the robbery. Alamo’s mother teases her partner about his hired “jokers” not having been careful enough with her stuff. When Alamo looks at her askance, she tells him, coldly: “You’re not the one who had to kiss his ugly face.” Alamo feels tricked. “Never again would a bitch outsmart him,” he vows.
This backstory adds welcome depth to Alamo, even if what it suggests — underneath it all, he’s a broken boy — is not very surprising. It explains why he has trust issues and a… problematic relationship with women. He decides not to kill Rue with that polo mallet when she promises to call Faye and get his money back. Still buried up to her neck, Rue talks to Faye over speaker phone to ask for a photo of Wayne’s safe key, next to a quarter for scale. The idea is to take the photo to a 3-D printer that can make a duplicate. It’s a pretty inventive plan, and also scarily simple. Is it that easy to be a criminal these days? After sampling the drugs stolen from the Slipper — which had been replaced with laxatives by the DEA when they busted Rue — Faye answers the phone from the toilet. She’s hesitant to assist in robbing Wayne because she has genuinely fallen in love with him. She is so smitten, in fact, that she has let him give her a swastika tramp-stamp, even if she can’t tell Rue with any confidence if she is a Nazi.
Things have gotten so serious between Faye and Wayne that they decide to settle down and get pregnant. Or, as Wayne puts it, he doesn’t want Faye to mule anymore because “the only thing you should be carrying in that belly is some fair-skinned babies.” Faye only agrees to help Rue once she invokes Fez: He would’ve helped. In fact, he did help Faye when she needed it. Wayne walks into the room just as Faye is hanging up with Rue, though she fibs that she was talking with her friend in prison, presumably Fez. After depositing his gun on top of a copy of Helter Skelter (okay, we get it), Wayne scolds her for doing drugs while they’re trying to get pregnant, and rides her about taking prenatal vitamins. It seems out of character for Wayne to want Faye to do something as conventionally sane as taking prenatal vitamins — this strikes me as an anti-vax crowd — but anyway, it’s a good time to start planning, since they’re about to come into a bunch of money. It’s all coming up for them, and the only person who doesn’t see it is “that silverback gorilla, Alamo Brown.”
It’s unclear how exactly Laurie and her crew plan to pull a fast one on Alamo, but the purpose of the meeting they set is to propose a business deal. They even offer to come to his house, which means they’re confident enough to enter his turf. Rue activates her bug in preparation for the meeting, and what she captures, according to two thrilled Feds, is “jackpot.” Alamo has a business called Gold Rush Medical Services, which takes girls across the border to get cosmetic procedures done. They sail easily through customs with their ambulances and medical passes, and since the border is due to close (“don’t you read the news?” Laurie asks Alamo, when he doesn’t know what she’s talking about), Laurie suggests that Alamo bring back a shipment of 80 kilograms (that’s a little over 176 pounds) of fentanyl in one such unsuspicious vehicle. If Alamo agrees, she’ll give him the contents of his safe back. If he doesn’t, she’ll turn over these same contents to the FBI.
Alamo has no choice but to say yes. Laurie wants Rue to drive across, but Alamo rejects the idea, saying that he has people he “trusts more.” Alamo and Laurie spit-shake on it, and Alamo scares Laurie by tugging her close and promising to come down on her “like Hiroshima, Nagasaki” if she so much as tries to fuck with him. The person the deal benefits most is Rue. The Feds tell her that if it all goes according to plan, Alamo and Laurie will spend the rest of their lives in jail, and the U.S. Attorney will look at Rue’s case “favorably,” since she kept her promises and collaborated. When they tell her, “You did good, kid,” she quips: “Never thought I’d hear that.”
For once, Rue seems to be catching a bit of a break. The only thing she needs to approach the vicinity of happiness is someone by her side, a person to respond to. All season long, Euphoria has been teasing Rue’s relationship with God; in giving herself over to a higher power, she might, paradoxically, find the strength to take her life in her hands. But old habits die hard, and for now, she looks for salvation in Jules. At Jules’s penthouse, Rue tries to make a commitment: She wants to be together, get married, and have a family. But Jules has long been over Rue’s unreliability, so she dismisses Rue’s idea as “a fantasy” that is threatening to ruin what she has going for her now: the apartment, the relationship with Ellis, the space and time to paint. When Rue points out that Jules’s whole life has been constrained to the admittedly expansive square footage of her penthouse, where she waits all day to be fucked by a guy who has a family he’ll never leave, Jules slaps Rue across the face. I have to admit, I gasped. Rue crashes on the ground, the huge canvas on top of her. With no trace of remorse in her voice, Jules says that Ellis will be back soon, so “I suggest you get the fuck out of my painting.” It’s a slightly heavy-handed conclusion to a truly surprising moment — Rue has cut through the fiction of Jules’s life — but overall, it’s effective. Jules has learned cruelty.
This is how we finally find Rue in church, considering God. She waits there while the duplicate of Wayne’s key gets 3-D printed. She looks at the card the Miller family gave her, back in El Paso. She gets a call from “Mom” and is surprised to learn it’s actually her mom, not the Feds, on the other end of the line. Rue tells her about coming around on her faith: If there is a God, there is redemption, and if there is redemption, there is salvation, which Rue is in desperate need of. “I just want to start over,” she cries, “I just want to be forgiven.” Rue promises to visit soon, tells her mother she loves her, and that she’s sorry. The scene cuts to Leslie (Nika King), saying she loves Rue, too, before hanging up. While the emotional weight of the scene is aptly conveyed by Zendaya, and helped along by the setting — anything you say in church becomes loaded with gravitas — I thought it was strange to only give us one side of that conversation, if we had Nika King all along. Last we’d seen her on screen, Rue was telling Jules how much she wanted to feel needed by another person, and to have her epiphanous moment during a phone call indicates the power of relationships, of exchange. In that context, it seems counterproductive to isolate Rue in conversation. It would’ve been one thing if she were having the kind of experience, in church, that is expectedly one-sided: Like confessing, or even praying. But to have her speak one-sidedly on the telephone only to flash us her mother at the end seems bizarre.
That is, until we see what happens next. At the club, Alamo tells Rue that she is in charge of getting into Wayne’s safe with the duplicate key. At this point, I thought the duplicate key plan was dead or at least dormant, since Alamo and Laurie have an agreement that he’ll get his stuff back if he can get the fentanyl across the border. I guess Alamo is getting ahead of it, in his determination not to let any bitch outsmart him. When G drops a dead rat in front of Rue, I thought they finally found out she was a rat, but she’s only supposed to feed the club snake. Bishop tells her a story about the snake: It belonged to one of the girls, who loved it dearly. When the snake stopped eating one day, the girl took it to the vet, who told her the python was perfectly healthy; it was only saving room to eat the girl whole. Alamo loves the story because it’s a reminder that “you never know a motherfucker’s true intentions.” Bishop asks Rue if she’s going to get into the safe, since it would be “real awkward if I lied to your mother.” Supposedly, then, Alamo’s crew does know something is up with Rue and is scheming to keep her in check. Still, the best Rue can do — frustratingly, the only thing she has been able to do this season — is forge ahead with Alamo’s plan and try not to tip them off. On the drive to Laurie’s, her Bible audiobook glitches. As she fiddles with it, she drifts into the incoming lane and nearly crashes head-on into a truck. When she swerves to the side of the road, her car is smoking, and a tree is on fire. She looks at it as if it’s a miracle — a sign from God that things are about to start over, or that she’ll rise from the ashes, or something…
You thought you were going to get through this whole recap without once reading the word OnlyFans? It’s still Euphoria season three, even if this episode ventured beyond Cassie’s camera roll. When we pick up on The Girls this week, Maddy is working with Alamo’s girls. She does a photoshoot at the Slipper with Kitty, Magick, and Cassie. Fearless despite Rue’s warning that Alamo is not exactly the most trustworthy business partner, Maddy asks him if Kitty and Magick can take a couple of days off so she can take them out on the town, introduce them to people, and build up their profile. Alamo does not like the idea, even if Bishop reassures him that Maddy is probably genuine in her intentions, unlike Alamo’s other business partners.
Meanwhile, Cassie is up for her big moment as “Job Applicant” on L.A. Nights. When Dylan Reid’s character mentions a honeymoon being over, her memory gets triggered to Naz telling her that “the honeymoon is over” and cutting off Nate’s pinky toe. Cassie enters a trance-like state and begins to describe her nightmarish marriage and her bloody wedding night. Cassie is going off script, but her emotional delivery is giving Patty “the feels.” Dylan, apparently an intuitive actor, goes with it, adjusting Cassie’s tale to fit the scene (“No woman deserves to get hit,” he ad-libs). Patty and the unnamed L.A. Nights director –– can we get her a name? She’s been in several episodes! –– like the improv enough to let it roll. They keep using the word “compelling.” They speak with Cassie during lunch. When they ask her what she does for a living, and Cassie replies “post content,” Lexi complements: “On OnlyFans.” When Cassie says she doesn’t do full nudity, Lexi corrects: “What about your special requests?” When Patty says, “So, you’re a sex worker,” it’s Cassie’s turn to correct: “I’m a performer who uses my body to tell stories.” She thinks her work is empowering, like a new form of feminism, even though last week she was on podcasts talking about men’s primal need to provide. Even then, the L.A. Nights director thinks her vibe is very Jane Fonda in Klute.
Patty is under the impression that Lexi brought Cassie to the show in an attempt to rescue her from a bad path, which is partly why she offers Cassie a more permanent role if she’s willing to leave OnlyFans behind. Cassie only hesitates for half a second before accepting — she has never not taken an instruction for what to do with her life. Walking out of the lot, she screams with excitement. We’ve seen this same expression of enthusiasm before, by the pool in her first meeting with Maddy — then, as now, what thrills her is the prospect of being famous. My opinion that Cassie has been whittled down to a flimsy sketch of a kink from a thorny character is well-documented, but I will give it to Levinson that Cassie’s downfall has always meant Lexi’s rise. Patty asks her to write Job Applicant’s “risque” storyline, since she has an insider’s perspective on Cassie’s story. It’s not like it comes to her without maneuvering: In the writers’ room, she tells Patty that when she recommended Cassie to casting, she knew they’d love her. That’s my girl Lexi, making lemonade out of lemons.
Cassie’s life is changing all the time, while her husband, Nate Jacobs, is stuck in a finger-amputating Groundhog Day. When she gets home, it takes a few tries for Cassie to bring herself to delete her OnlyFans, though she is finally able to. In between tries, she calls Nate for advice, but he won’t pick up the phone. While Gillie suggests to Lexi that she simply kill Job Applicant on the show, ominously explaining that “if someone doesn’t die periodically, people get bored” (this is, perhaps, how we know someone will die by the end of the season), Cassie gets a package. It’s a note that says, “answer your phone,” along with Nate’s ring finger, wedding band still on. In that moment, Nate is meeting his inescapable fate, which is to get plummeted to near death by Naz’s guy. This time, they’re at the doomed Sun Settlers development, and Naz’s crook catches Nate in the middle of stomping on the white fritillaries that ruined his life.
• It’s perhaps telling that tonight’s episode title, “Stand Still and See,” echoes the title of last season’s “Stand Still Like a Hummingbird,” similarly one of that season’s strongest points.
• What’s going on with Nate’s character — being slowly driven out to the margins of the storytelling — is not unlike what happened to Kat last season. Does that mean it’s fair to read into it that Jacob Elordi is getting slowly but surely phased out of the show?
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