Euphoria
Kitty Likes to Dance
Season 3
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
Rue’s career as an underground drug runner turns into a nightmare as Maddie helps Cassie realize her Hollywood dream.
Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO
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Looking at his sewn-up toe in tonight’s Euphoria, Nate Jacobs tells Cassie that the toe, which was mercilessly clipped off by Naz — to whom Nate owes “a million-ish” dollars — could serve as a metaphor for their crumbling marriage. In this figure of speech, the marriage, like the toe, seemed as if it was lost forever, but by being smart enough to preserve it on ice, they were able to save it. When Cassie presses Nate on what he’s saying, he suggests maybe their marriage is more like the scar the sewn-up toe will leave, as much a demonstration of strength as it is of weakness. The gist, in any case, is that he’s going to fix it all and get them out of this mess, as long as she can have faith in him a little longer.
“The fairy tale is over,” Cassie announces, before packing her stuff in a pink travel set and leaving for Lexi’s apartment complex, to “work.” The fairy tale of their marriage might be over, but Cassie’s Hollywood dream is just starting under Maddy’s careful guidance. Cassie’s pursuit of pornographic Internet fame is juxtaposed variously with Jules’s thwarted artistic expression, Lexi’s misguided ambitions, and Kitty’s survivalist instincts at the Silver Slipper. Kitty (Anna Van Patten) is a new girl at the club who came in to fill in for Angel.
Rue first meets Kitty in manager Big Eddy’s office, as she’s getting evaluated by Alamo. Rue sweats buckets; her disheveled appearance stands in stark contrast to Alamo’s cheery mood. He’s happy because their plan to kill Paladin worked; Rue is nervous because, as many readers anticipated, she is now an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. After discovering several kinds of drugs in her car, the feds put Rue in an interrogation room and give her two options: Go to federal prison or be an informant. One of the feds advises: “If you want to turn a curse into a blessing, this is your opportunity.”
In her journey from teenage addict to D.E.A. informant, Rue has made many bad decisions. So far, though, she had mostly been a danger to herself. Besides saying some seriously mean things to people who loved her, like her sobriety sponsor, Ali, Jules, and, most memorably, her mom and sister, Rue’s path was mainly self-destructive. In early adulthood, having (somewhat) kicked her drug habit, she has inadvertently put several lives on the line, including her own. In the interrogation room, Zendaya convincingly embodies the despair in Rue’s realization that not only she won’t be able to charm her way out of this one, but she has become a weapon in a fight much bigger than herself.
I have watched Martin Scorsese’s 2006 masterpiece The Departed hundreds, if not thousands, of times; I seriously appreciate the high-stakes drama of a double-crossing crime thriller. Zendaya puts up a valiant effort to infuse Rue’s new situation with emotion, but it’s not enough to make up for the fact that Rue, while Euphoria’s protagonist, has become passive in her own plot. It makes narrative sense that Rue would have ended up here; her underworld career was bound to escalate in one way or the other. But we are halfway through the season, and so far, Rue has made only one choice, which was to work for Alamo, and that was in the first episode. Other than that, every choice has been made for her. Even her first assignment as a rat is kind of cut out for her: When she asks the feds what to do when the guys at the Silver Slipper realize that the drugs they have replaced in her fanny pack are sugar pills and laxatives rather than the real stuff they bought from Laurie, they shrug. Alamo will think it’s Laurie’s fault, not hers. His trust in Laurie is already broken to begin with.
The feds put a bug app on Rue’s phone; all she has to do is dial “Mom” to activate it. They want Rue to set up another deal with Laurie, but she knows that it will be impossible in the immediate aftermath of Paladin’s death. Laurie has a funeral for the parrot, while Wayne, Harley, and company scheme serious revenge, but “killing them all” doesn’t seem “painful enough.” Rue offers to set the feds up with a different dealer, though one doesn’t immediately come to mind; she has been out of the game for a few years and has to ask Maddy for a connect. It’s the highlight of tonight’s episode to see Rue, Maddy, Lexi, and Cassie in the same scene together. They used to be all in the same show!
Each girl has set off on a totally different path. Well, Maddy and Cassie’s paths are different, but they collide: The realization of one’s ambition will be the other’s success. Maddy has made Cassie over, taking her from “suburbs to the city.” She directs Cassie in a photoshoot by the pool in Lexi’s apartment complex while one Gillie (Gideon Adlon, Odessa’s sister, Pamela’s daughter) tries and fails to operate a leafblower to fan wind into Cassie’s hair. Rue is on her own secret and more dangerous journey, but seeing them all together, each with their own agenda, we are reminded that they are all, more or less, looking for the same thing: To save their own ass and make a ton of money.
Even Lexi, who urges the girls to listen to themselves — “You’re looking for drugs, you’re selling your body on your porn site, and you’re, like, some Internet pimp?” — gets roped in. About twenty minutes into tonight’s episode, there is a sequence that exists as if in a vacuum. Lexi calls Jules with an opportunity: The soap she works on, L.A. Nights, needs a fictitious work of art. Jules enthusiastically accepts the commission to make a painting in the style of the French pointillist Georges Seurat. Her work painting in the lot is juxtaposed with Cassie’s makeover montage, as if both scenes are supposed to mark the girls’ arrival in their respective Hollywood dreams. But there’s a problem with Jules’s canvas: It’s less “Sunday in the Park” and more… Seurat if he was possessed by an edgy young girl with progressive sexual politics. In other words, the painting’s picnic is populated by ghoul-like figures with boobs and penises. When Patty Lance wonders who in their right mind would paint something like that for a soap, Lexi offers, weakly, that Lexi is trans. That ensures that Patty and the other network execs are nice to Jules as they tell her she has to get rid of the nudity in the painting. When Jules tells them it’ll take her a couple of hours to do so, they punt the scene to the following week.
Patty makes sure Lexi knows the mistake will cost them $191,000, which makes Lexi cry in frustration. Looking at her painting, Jules cries, too, even though she took the note well enough. In an act of rebellion, she throws a bucket of red paint on the painting and draws a massive yellow penis in the center of it. Because we have no clear idea of who Jules is as an artist, or what she hopes to accomplish, both her interpretation of Lexi’s assignment and her decision to sabotage the opportunity to make it up to the network are inexplicable. If she is willing to play ball with the establishment, then indeed, as Patty asked, what would have possessed her to give them this picture? And if she’s not willing to, then why is she so disappointed?
There is less ambiguity when it comes to Lexi. She doesn’t want to be “a net negative,” as Patty put it. She also clearly wants to feel some sense of power: She gets smug satisfaction out of pursuing a career in more “traditional” channels, unlike her sister and high school friends. Lexi’s evolution from an over-achieving teen to a desperate-to-please assistant makes more sense than some of the other characters’ arcs –– I’ll get to you in a second, Nate Jacobs –– but the fact still remains that she has, with Jules, been relegated to the margins. Their storylines are not very compelling, nor very convincing. These inconsistencies are indicative of this season’s wobbly perspective and lost center of gravity.
Before we get back into the pornographic weeds, let’s check in with Nate. He studies images of the American West while waiting for his much-anticipated Planning and Zoning Commission meeting, still blue from his wedding-night beating. Pitching the commission on a garden of white fritillaries that would allow the Sun Settlers community to be developed around the endangered species, Nate is desperate. He even quotes the Bible. His motion is denied immediately, but Nate won’t take no for an answer. “My marriage is in shambles because of you,” he tells the commission’s chairman, Bill. “Are you trying to ruin my life?” He gets on his knees and begs. “I’m trying to do a good thing,” he pleads, “I can’t be bad.” The chairman is unmoved, and Nate sobs on the floor. Jacob Elordi gamely delivers Nate’s desperation, but I have lost the thread on Nate’s storyline. I understand that he is in deep shit, but how he got here is such a mystery that his desperation has fallen victim to Euphoria’s Achilles’ heel: It’s more symbol than meaning.
Cassie rents herself a pink-walled apartment “across the pool from Lexi” with cash she got from pawning her wedding ring, having decided to “invest in herself.” She wears a skintight cheetah-print jumpsuit, approved by Maddy, to a party at the house of an influencer with over 20 million followers, Brandon Fontaine (Jeff Wahlberg, nephew of Mark). Maddy prepares Cassie for battle as soon as they arrive: The girls there are “stray dogs” and “bitches,” not to be trusted. “Stay sharp, stay focused. Let’s fucking win,” she encourages.
Despite looking initially frightened, Cassie quickly rises to the occasion. She dances with Katelyn — the same girl Maddy represented on OnlyFans before getting in trouble with her boss — and makes out with her. She seems to be genuinely enjoying herself; she even looks too eager. The images of her dancing are juxtaposed with Kitty giving a group of fratty-looking, backwards-cap-wearing boys a private dance. While Cassie escalates her own involvement with Brandon and Katelyn, joining them in his room for cocaine, Kitty is subjected to sex with the men. Seeing it through the security monitors in Big Eddy’s office, Rue can tell that it doesn’t look right. But when Big Eddy comes in, he is nonchalant, only asking if Kitty is “making her money’s worth.” There is only so much doubt Rue can express without blowing her cover. During a poker game with G, Alamo, and Bishop, which the feds listen in on, she nearly goes too far with a suggestion to reconnect with her contacts in Mexico, now that Laurie is out of the picture. The more Alamo probes, the more he can sense that Rue is hiding something. He concludes she must be using again.
It’s a fortuitous exit from a conversation that could derail quickly. Rue is trying to think on her feet so she can give the D.E.A. something; she knows the club’s drug stock is running low. When she sees a visibly shaken Kitty in the bathroom, she asks if anyone is forcing her to work at the Slipper. This could be a way to get Alamo and his people, and also an avenue to find an answer for what happened to Angel, whom the other girls think has “run away” from rehab. In narration, Rue speculates that Angel always knew she wasn’t coming back, which suggests the possibility of a moral drive meeting her responsibilities towards the D.E.A. to motivate Rue’s informing activity. This nuance would be a welcome addition to Rue’s journey, but first things first: She’ll have to get past Magick.
Magick overhears Rue’s talk with Kitty in the bathroom and relays what she heard to Big Eddy, as proof that Rue can’t be trusted. Rue comes into his office to get her phone, which she forgot there, bug still hot. She gets a call from Jimenez, one of the feds, who warns that her position has been compromised by Magick. The two women yell over each other, one accusing the other of lying, of stealing drugs, of snitching, of being “a Spanish hoodrat.” Their fight is interrupted when Harley and Wayne, wearing Obama masks, storm in. They hold a gun to Eddy’s head, demanding he open the safe. When he refuses, they threaten to shoot Magick and Rue, but end up shooting Eddy in the stomach instead. He finally agrees to open the safe when the men threaten to shoot him in the balls. They make out with the contents of the safe. While Rue puts pressure on Eddy’s wound, Magick scrutinizes the security footage under Bishop’s directions over the phone. The truck doesn’t have license plates, and you can’t see the men’s faces, but you can see the bottom half of the getaway driver’s face, and it shows, clear as day, Faye’s signature plump lips. Rue, sensing the possibility of getting away with all of this, immediately identifies Faye.
Cassie’s night doesn’t end up quite so bad. In the room with Brandon Fontaine, she and Katelyn engage in competition over the man’s attention after Cassie reveals to Katelyn that she’s there with Maddy, her “best friend” and rep. Cassie does the most and wins Brandon’s attention. Meanwhile, Maddy looks for her all over the house, banging on the door to Brandon’s room, and ultimately resorts to having his crew unlock the door. They do so, with cameras, hoping to “go viral.” Cassie doesn’t miss a beat when the camera finally shoves up to her face: “It’s just me, Cassie,” she beams, “and that’s my handle.” On the way home, Cassie’s phone blows up with notifications. Maddy warns that now that Cassie has the public’s attention, she will have to work to keep it. Cassie looks happy with herself; proud, even. But we know that her happiness is provisional at best. The writing is on the wall; the question is only if Cassie has it in her to read it.
• As Maddy and Cassie drive away from Cassie’s right-wing suburban bubble home, a pair of girls — one brunette, one blonde — watches them from the curb. It’s a small nod to their departed innocence, about their life as well as their friendship. They drive past the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd, a Hollywood institution that shut down during the pandemic.
• Speaking of Maddy and Cassie: They tell a pearl-clutching Lexi that Bhad Bhabie, the rapper most commonly known on the Internet for being the “cash me outside” girl, made 53 million dollars in her first year of OnlyFans. Bhad Bhabie shared the clip referencing her on X.
• In another racially motivated expression of aggression, Laurie’s guys drive away from the Silver Slipper yelling out of the truck, “Kiss my white ass, motherfuckers!”
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