Euphoria Season 3, Episode 2 Recap: Sex Sells

The official title of this episode is “American Dream,” but perhaps it should be “Sex Sells.” That old maxim has never been truer than in this moment of the Euphoria universe, where it seems like everyone is either selling, buying, or leveraging flesh—and Sam Levinson has no bones about showing it all.

Alexa Demie fans will be glad to see Maddy get more screen time—this is really her episode. We learn that she got her unglamorous job as an assistant talent manager the old-fashioned way: by marching up to her prospective boss at a diner and demanding she give her a chance. It doesn’t hurt that she’s willing to skewer her competition, telling Ms. Penzler (Rebecca Pidgeon) that, while as a child of immigrants, she didn’t even bother applying to college—let alone attend an entertainment-industry feeder school like USC—but she’s “not entitled, not a victim, not an HR nightmare.” Oh, and she “believes in capitalism.”

She gets the job, but is immediately relegated to smoking weed and doomscrolling in her studio apartment when the pandemic hits. Real-life footage of California Governor Gavin Newsom announcing stay-at-home mandates and civil unrest taking over the streets of L.A. is accompanied by Rue’s narration of young people’s westward migration in search of freedom, fortune, and TikTok fame (a shot of a blonde suburban girl named Kaitlyn doing the “Say So” dance in a Shein two-piece in front of a ring light is a particularly dystopian callback to the era).

But Maddy is a hustler, and she quickly sees the money-making potential of social media. She starts managing Kaitlyn on the side, convincing her to push the boundaries further into full-blown nudity. When Maddy ropes her agency client, burgeoning star Dylan Reed (Homer Gere), into her scheme, her boss is furious. She lays into Maddy and forces her to drop Kaitlyn as a client. Maddy’s argument that there’s a new middle ground where OnlyFans influencers can transition into mainstream careers strikes a particularly knowing chord from Levinson, who cast Chloe Cherry as Faye when she was known for making porn. To Maddy’s chagrin, Kaitlyn goes on to make more than half a million dollars a month. “If she had listened to her instincts,” Rue narrates, “she wouldn’t be an assistant. She’d actually be successful.”

It’s in this low state that Maddy receives a DM from Cassie—the first time she’s heard from her since their all-out brawl in high school. As she scrolls Cassie’s soft-core page, the wheels start turning.

Rue, meanwhile, has found her own American Dream, which she partially credits with her newfound faith in God. She’s managing one of Alamo’s strip clubs, the Silver Slipper, a seedy roadside joint where old men in cowboy hats watch young women pole dance, mouths stupidly agape (Rosalía makes a cameo as one such dancer in a bedazzled neck brace that she refuses to take off, lest she lose a bogus lawsuit she’s filed. Everyone’s got an angle.)

The club is also unsurprisingly a hotbed for drug use, and selling to the clients becomes part of Rue’s job. There’s a particularly graphic sequence where Angel (Priscilla Delgado), a dancer with an attitude who’s caught Rue’s eye, lets a client sniff powder off her nipples before going down on him, followed by a cut to Rue plunging a disgustingly clogged toilet. If there’s a message here, it isn’t subtle.

Rue ends up doing drugs and hooking up with Angel in her van outside the club, but she narrates that she’d “be lying” if she said she didn’t miss Jules.

Her longing for her first love is tied up in her shame over her continued drug use, as we find out in a flashback sequence. First, we see Rue nodding off in a filthy house with other addicts—“I wasn’t in a good place,” she says. Then Rue visits Jules at art school, but admits it “never quite felt like high school. Too much had happened between us.” A heartbreaking scene shows her leaving a tearful, desperate voicemail begging her mom to call her back so she can come home, promising that she’s sober. But given where Rue is now, it seems like she never did. “To be honest,” Rue narrates, “I haven’t really been sober since.”

Back at the club, Angel can’t let go of the fact that Tish, the stripper who OD’ed in the first episode, is missing. It turns out the two were best friends, and Angel isn’t accepting Alamo’s vague story about Tish running off with some guy. Eventually, Rue just tells her the truth: that Tish died. A devastated Angel descends into her own pit of drug-using despair. Alamo tells Rue he’ll pay for Angel to go to rehab—an offer that seems too good to be true, because it is. When Rue drops Angel off at the nondescript facility, something is clearly wrong. A glowering woman with dirt-crusted nails at the front desk barely looks up from her video game, knows Alamo by name, and says there’s no intake paperwork to be done. Rue reluctantly leaves Angel behind, and there’s an ominous feeling that it’s the last time we’ll be seeing her.

Rue pays Maddy a visit and learns that Jules, too, is in the sex trade—she’s working as a sugar baby, which “isn’t weird at all,” according to Maddy, since “every girl she meets” is one. When Rue points out that Maddy doesn’t have a sugar daddy, she shoots back, “Yeah, I’m not a fucking hooker.”

There are a lot of double standards and mixed messages going on as the women of Euphoria navigate the changing sexual politics of the day. Take Cassie, for example, who is fully embracing her new career on OnlyFans. Despite her insistence that it’s a “common misconception” that OnlyFans is porn, she’s pretty much fully exposing herself for the platform.

“It was a shame she was with Nate,” Rue narrates over a montage of Cassie posing in varying states of kink-themed undress, including with ice cream dripping off her naked breasts and sucking on a pacifier like a baby. For Maddy, “Cassie was exactly the kind of girl you’d dream of signing. Beautiful, but directionless. So desperate for attention, she’s willing to humiliate herself.”

Cassie definitely doesn’t see it that way, though. We finally have the Maddy-Cassie rematch we’ve been waiting for since season two, but it’s more Mean Girls than Rocky. Dressed in a full fur coat and side-swept bangs, Maddy literally takes Cassie’s breath away when she appears at the poolside bar where they end up downing Aperol Spritzes.

First, Cassie—in far more basic white skinny jeans and matching hot pink halter and strappy heels—gets her obligatory apology for stealing Nate out of the way.

“I found the love of my life,” Cassie says somewhat convincingly, “at the expense of the other love of my life.” “It was at that moment,” Rue narrates as Maddy glances down at Cassie’s engagement ring, “that she realized this dumb bitch had waited years for that ring just to clear her conscience.” When it becomes clear that Cassie’s ulterior motive for reaching out to Maddy was to ask her for advice on becoming famous, Maddy decides to play the long game—and turn Cassie into a cash cow—but not without first letting Cassie know in the fake nicest way possible that she’s tacky and has no taste.

Cassie also, apparently, has far less money than she thinks. We soon learn Rue isn’t the only character who has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to a terrifying criminal. It’s not clear how Nate got into this situation, but to get out of it, he plans to invite more potential investors over to help bail him out. First, his disgraced father, Cal, drops by, though Nate insists he’s doing just fine running Cal’s real estate development company, which he’s taken over.

Cal is more interested in Nate’s personal life, anyway, and immediately starts lecturing his son on the impropriety of Cassie’s OnlyFans—which he heard about, funnily, from a friend at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. Nate pushes back, pointing out his father’s hypocrisy, given that Cal was both constantly cheating on Nate’s mother and found out for sleeping with Nate’s classmates. “Once you give in to temptation, it has no limits,” Cal warns, noting that he’s “speaking from experience.” But what Cassie is doing and what Cal did “are not the same thing,” Nate says. To Cal, it’s the same issue. “I was a hedonist. I was chasing pleasure instead of being grateful for what I had at home.”

Still, Nate brushes him off the same way Cassie brushes off her friend at the party later on. Cassie can’t help but show off her OnlyFans, revealing the pictures her housekeeper took and bragging about all the money she’s making. The friend is particularly horrified by the “adult baby” images, calling them “sick.” But Cassie has a rebuttal: “If I don’t do it, someone else will. It’s just supply and demand.” Word about the OnlyFans spreads quickly at the party, which looks straight out of 2005 Orange County, with guests wearing double-popped collars as they stand around Nate and Cassie’s gaudy McMansion pool. To save face, Nate demands that Cassie delete her OnlyFans account, and when he agrees to pay for her over-the-top wedding, she cheerfully complies.

The episode ends at Jules’s apartment: a swanky penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the city. It suggests her alleged sugar-baby arrangement is going quite well, which Rue also clocks. Yes, Rue has shown up unannounced at Jules’s place, but Jules—wearing a body-skimming dress and an icy blonde wig that she eventually takes off—doesn’t seem to mind. Jules mentions her boyfriend, and Rue asks whether he has a family. “I don’t think people are meant to be monogamous,” Jules says. Rue makes a pass at Jules, who tells her, “You can’t just show up after all this time and think everything’s going to be the same.” Still, Jules ends the night by inviting Rue to join her in the bath. Although she’s still missing high school, for now, Rue is living her dream.