'Euphoria' Season Two Finale: The Fight Is Good
This story contains spoilers for the Season Two finale of Euphoria.
It might be hard, I know, to pare Euphoria down. To peel off something like the "Holding Out for a Hero" number from Lexi's play, or every single song that you didn't see coming over the course of eight episodes, or whatever the heck is happening with the Jacobs clan this season, to actually figure out what this show is actually trying to tell us.
You really have to listen. And if you want to, it's usually buried somewhere in the dialogue. It's like what Ali keeps telling Rue during their diner conversation, back in 2020's special episode: "Believe in the poetry." Season One, at least by my estimation, should come with a tagline of something Rue's therapist taught her in a separate episode, that bad times still happen in the good ones. That you can do nearly everything right and still fail—something we see in the weeks before Rue's relapse in last season's finale. “I guess it’s true," Rue says at one point. "Life is always this way.”
Now, after a hell of an eight-week run, Season Two of Euphoria debuted its final episode on HBO this Sunday. And let me tell you: I was searching for that line until the final seconds. The episode, which blends together Act II of Lexi's play, a flashback to the funeral of Rue's father, a heartbreaking showdown at Ashtray and Fez's apartment, and closure (?) for Nate Jacobs, was such a nonlinear, meta-upon-meta clusterfuck of Euphoriaisms that I was at a loss of what was supposed to tie it all together. Leave it to Narrator Rue to tie a tidy bow.
As the finale draws to a close, Rue lets us know that she stayed sober throughout the rest of the school year. Her parting words are actually something she recalled Ali saying: that the mere idea of being a good person is what can actually move you to become a good person. Is there a better way to sum up what's going on with just about the entirety of Euphoria High, which is stuffed with hallways of pretty awful-acting kids who sometimes show a flicker of heart underneath it all? Think about it. You have Elliot, one half of a terribly codependent relationship with Rue who almost led her to a fatal ending, finally acknowledging that he fucked up through a pretty damn emotional song. His voice burns with the hope that both he and Rue will be good people after all of this—even though they're both unsure what this is.
We can't bear to go into too much depth about Fezco's looming imprisonment, or Ashtray's likely death. But both brothers commit a crime every day. If you ask any of the cops in their town, both are technically bad people, we're guessing, in their eyes. In what might've been their final moments together, both Ashtray and Fez are fighting to be better—attempting to sacrifice oneself for the other. They want to be good.
And how about Nate, arguably the worst of them all? He waltzes into a confrontation with his dad with a USB in one hand and a gun in the other. Literally: kill your dad, or prevent him from doing what he did with Jules with anyone again. For the first time, maybe in the entire time that we've known the guy, he does the right thing—taking the USB with him as he turns his back on pops.
Of course, we have to bring it back to Rue. Thanks in part to the nuance of Zendaya's performance, we had seen glimmers of the Rue we met this episode—the maturing, recovering, even hopeful person—underneath the worst moments in her addiction. After what was likely the worst night in her life, Rue still returned home, going straight to her mother, at the end of Episode Five. In the Season Two finale, Rue still hasn't mustered the courage to apologize to Jules, but she still gives her a kiss on the head. Almost good, even if not fully. It's the effort that counts, I'd bet creator Sam Levinson would say.
Dare I say that things are looking up for most of Euphoria High in Season Three? The best we can do is hope.
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