there are spoilers ahead…like, obviously.
For the past few weeks, like the vast majority of bored twenty-somethings, i have been completely consumed by the show Euphoria. So much so that it has become a very integral part of my weekly routine. On Sunday night, after completing my homework and cleaning my room, i watch the show right when it airs and try to come up with witty things to say for my hundred twitter followers. For the following week, i scroll through discourse— this takes different forms as time progresses.
On Monday, it seems no one has anything intelligent to say, every single take i am presented with is either stupid, unfounded, or downright offensive. On Tuesday, the discourse slows down; people start doubling down on their terrible takes and stop having new opinions. On Wednesday, we become slightly more intelligent. This is the day we use to have discourse on the discourse. People with terrible takes are shamed and it begins to feel like we are making progress. On Thursday, people get tired of the discourse and start to complain about those who complain. We start to ask why can’t we ever just enjoy things normally? and this growing fatigue carries on into Friday. On Friday, all of the arguing, and complaining, and complaining about arguing reaches its climax. Come Saturday, we start to grow excited about the coming Sunday. Finally, on Sunday, we get our release, a new episode to pick apart and analyze and discuss. Rinse and repeat.
So for the past few weeks, i have followed this schedule. Trapped in this maddening cycle of recycled conversations and terrible arguments— i started to wonder if this show was really worth it. It’s not really up to me to decide if a piece of media is worth discussion, however, i began to feel that the show's intended audience did not quite understand the complex issues that it conveyed. This is not to say i don’t have my qualms with Euphoria. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the show, from the over-sexualization of alleged teenagers to the way the show approaches femininity, coming-of-age, and the complexities of adolescent relationships.
In this season, Rue is back in the grapples of her addiction and is struggling to lead a double life. She makes a new friend; Elliot with whom she regularly abuses drugs with. She lies to her girlfriend, Jules about being sober, manipulates her family, and makes quite a series of abhorrent decisions which will eventually land her on the wrong side of a menacing-yet-friendly drug dealer/human trafficker.
Cassie breaks up with Mckay, and in her lovesick grief begins a secret affair with Nate Jacobs— who is her best friend Maddy’s ex and abuser (this specific plot takes up a bulk of the season, so i will talk about it more in detail). Maddy is coming to terms with no longer having her relationship with Nate, and seems to be making more rational and ‘adult’ decisions.
Lexi starts an awkward but sweet relationship with Fez, she decides to stop being a bystander and writes a play about the happenings of her and her friends. Kat is largely unimportant in this season— she deals with a few bouts of insecurity regarding her relationship with Ethan and what she wants out of it. Nate Jacobs goes through a depressive episode, he tries to work out some of his trauma regarding his father. He falls in love with Cassie but yet still longs for Maddy.
As mentioned before, this Nate-Maddy-Cassie drama takes up a majority of the second season— to the point where it is almost frustrating. For quite a few episodes, the central focus isn’t Rue or her relationship with Elliot or Jules— instead, it is focused on Nate and Cassie hooking up without anyone knowing. In season one, it is mentioned that Cassie falls in love very easily and would do anything for the people she falls in love with. In the first season, it was Mckay, but their relationship grew rocky as McKay started college and was becoming more distant. In season one, it is revealed that Cassie was pregnant with Mckay’s child. He asks her to get an abortion, worried about how a child would impact his college football career and she complies. Cassie and Mckay soon break up, and Cassie is left depressed and single.
Vulnerable and alone on new years eve, Cassie is coerced by Nate Jacobs into riding with him to a new years party. The two share a rather unsexy car ride scene, full of what we are meant to interpret as ‘passionate glances’— which eventually leads to them attempting to hook up in a bathroom. For the sake of dramatic tension, they are obviously interrupted by Maddy, who comes knocking on the door. Nate tells her to wait just one second, leading Maddy to realize that it was him in there. Of course, she doesn’t know Cassie was in there as well, nor does she know what they were doing. The scene escalates, Cassie cries and ends up hiding in the bathtub to avoid being seen together with Nate, while he simply walks out of the door. Holding her breath, Cassie waits for Maddy to leave, but she doesn’t— she sits in the bathroom having a conversation with another man named Travis, who flirts with her incessantly. When she finally does leave, Cassie is free to escape her hiding place. She pretends to have just arrived at the party and guiltily shares a dance with Maddy. The camera pans to show Nate stoically watching between them.
This first episode serves as a catalyst, for the rest of the events in the season. Cassie is heartbroken following the events of season one and begins to find comfort and solace in the arms of Nate Jacobs. It is alluded to (via her sister Lexi) that Nate used to make fun of Cassie, and it is assumed that Cassie knows everything regarding his relationship with Maddy— including how violent and cruel he could be. And yet despite this, Cassie chose to betray Maddy by going behind her back to sleep with Nate. This season's Cassie, on a surface level is selfish, angry, and completely unlikable. Her pathetic attempts to comfort her broken heart lead to one of the worst character arcs of the season—in terms of enjoyability. While i understand why she did what she did, that didn’t stop me from cringing at every rendezvous she shared with Nate.
Cassie was my favorite character from the previous season. i liked her because she was realistic, her problems were a little easier for me to grasp. Previously, she was presented as a sweet but sometimes naive girl. In her childhood, she was abandoned by her father— who she was shown to have sought the approval of. Cassie is, well-endowed, and thus, has been sexualized by the men around her. This mixture of abandonment “daddy-issues” and over-sexualization would only serve to concoct in her; a mixture of insecurity and internalized misogyny. She constantly reaches for the fruit of male validation, at her own expense as well as the expense of the women around her. She cleverly disguises this insecurity in the name of love, but she does a ton of fucked up things for the sake of being in love. Despite this, Cassie served as a breath of fresh air from the sometimes over-the-top nature of ‘Euphoria’. While other characters were dealing with crippling addictions or fathers who were pedophiles— Cassie was dealing with sleeping with her best friend's ex-boyfriend. Which, yes, is nefarious in its own way, is slightly more juvenile in comparison to the woes of Rue or Fez.
In fact, Cassie's main opposition this season isn’t even Maddy— the ‘best friend’ whose boyfriend she’s hooking up with, it’s herself. Cassie, by the time she reaches adolescence, is used to sexualizing herself to make herself valuable to the men around her. This was unfortunately pointed out by her boyfriend in season 1, McKay, who asks her why she ‘makes everything sexual when they hang out.' Cassie does that because it’s the only thing she knows. She has never been allowed to develop her own sense of self. Outside of being described as “sweet” and “likable” she has no real personality, interests, or hobbies (as a matter of fact, she was talked out of one of the few hobbies she had, ice-skating, by her own father). She chases relationships and male attention and allows them to consume her and make her feel whole. She chases Nate, wholeheartedly devotes herself to becoming the type of girlfriend she thinks he would enjoy, and this is what leads to her demise. Through the season, she is shown to take a swan-dive into the throes of depression and overwhelming guilt.
Her obsession with Nate blossoms into a manic episode, symbolized by her fluctuating style, emotional outbursts, and painful 3-hour self-care morning routine. Cassie falls, into the abyss of her own mind. Paranoia seeps into the cracks of her facade, she cries, afraid of losing Maddy, afraid of losing Nate, afraid of losing herself. She cries, she falls, and she falls.
Cassie is a good character, to me her descent into madness makes perfect sense. To others, she seems crazy and irrational— and she is, don’t get me wrong. But there is a lot more to her. Behind all of the screaming, and the crying and the begging for Nate to control every aspect of her life (which, yuck) is a girl who is so deeply hurt and scared of being alone. She changes and morphs to fit the desires of her lovers and somehow gets lost in this act.
Of course, this doesn’t mean she is absolved from all criticism or any consequences. She still chose to betray her best friend for a boy who tolerates her at best. And continued to choose him up until the very end, when he leaves her for something that ultimately wasn’t her fault. In the penultimate episode of the show, we get to see the play Lexi had been working on all season. This was my favorite episode, fiction blurs into reality as Lexi tells the stories of her friends, digging up memories for all of them— both good and bad. The characters watch themselves, in all of their greatest moments and bad decisions through the eyes of Lexi and the rest of us who watch them at home. Cassie sits in the audience with Nate and watches how she carries herself through the eyes of someone else. In true Cassie fashion, she throws a fit when it becomes too much, getting up on the stage and interrupting the whole performance. Maddy eventually steps in and gives us the most unsatisfying beat down in the history of television, probably.
Despite how underwhelming it was, i cheered for Maddy when she finally decided to put her hands on Cassie. Because through the season Cassie had refused to confront the fact that she had done something wrong. We see that subconsciously she knows she’s wrong. She breaks down in tears the first time they were almost caught, the guilt and paranoia slowly eat at her very being through the season. And yet despite this, she refuses to admit out loud that she was wrong. When Rue first exposes her, in front of her family and all of her friends she runs away and hides. She locks herself in a bathroom and refuses to answer when Maddy asks her if it was worth it. She cries through the whole encounter, which is almost an admission of remorse. But when she is finally able to crawl back into Nate's arms that's where she chooses to go and where she stays.
She chooses Nate, and attempts to rationalize it much to the horror of her mother and sister. She insists ‘they weren’t even dating’ and attempts to convince others as well as herself that she did nothing wrong. She chooses Nate, and tells him she ruined her life for him, and that she wants to become something he can control. And Nate still leaves her in the end. It’s pathetic and sad, Cassie is forced to bear witness to the worst parts of her, a version of herself that doesn’t exist in her own mind, on a stage. All of her sexual deviance and caricature-like naivety are put on display not only for her but for an audience of her friends and her peers. And yes, it is a little bit morally reprehensible for Lexi to use the traumas of her friends for a school production, but it was still important for the characters to see themselves from the outside. For some characters, it’s a positive experience, they can humanize themselves and realize they encompass more than just their mistakes. For Cassie, it’s her breaking point.
This season was cruel and unfair to Maddy. Cassie got to sleep around with a boy who had physically and emotionally hurt her, almost without consequence. I’m not sure if she actually feels remorseful about what she did, I’m sure she feels bad enough and regrets a few things. But I know she would go back to Nate if given the chance. And that makes complete sense to me because Cassie is deeply flawed. In her head she is the most perfect version of herself who can do no wrong. She thrives on male attention and validation, and that's how she keeps going. Cassie without a man in her life is broken and miserable, at least with Nate she can cover that part of herself and pretend it doesn’t exist. Even if it means she has to sacrifice every other relationship she has built by herself. She will do it because Cassie is afraid of being incomplete. She would rather be whole and lonely than incomplete and alone.
THANK YOU FOR READING! This took me ages and i’m sorry if it doesn’t make much sense because i just wanted to talk. i almost gave up like, halfway through but i finally got the drive to finish it! if you read this far you deserve a kiss, and a hug. Thank you so much seriously. <3