Photo: HBO Max

At the end of this episode of Euphoria, an enraged Alamo Brown, dressed in his best cowboy gear, rides a horse full-tilt towards Rue Bennett, who’s buried in the ground up to her neck. As he draws closer, she realizes he intends to swing a croquet mallet right into her exposed skull. 

This is more or less what this season of Euphoria is doing to the concept of restraint. It’s an unceasing onslaught of the tackiest, trashiest, most sensational, most spectacular images of sex, violence, and the people who make their money off them both that creator Sam Levinson can come up with. The result feels like what TikTok would be in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. You can count shows that have ever gone this hard on one hand. What you do with the other is up to you.

Speaking of swinging croquet mallets, actor Sydney Sweeney does exactly that to her own reputation as vapid, possibly right-wing fetish object in this one. Her character Cassie’s metamorphosis into a TikTok/OnlyFans superstar is a wonder to behold, putting Sweeney through her paces for the pervs. She dresses like a pig and sucks her own toes. (Theoretically; I suppose they could be stunt toes.) She records erotic ASMR and small penis humiliation content. She jumps rope in slow motion. She turns kaiju-sized and shatters skyscraper windows with her bare breasts, blowing the masturbating man inside clear across the room. She is woman, pay now to hear her roar.

Just as crucial to the operation, however, is the manosphere/tradwife bullshit she spews across a series of real podcasts covering her industry. Men in America have been treated like second class citizens for too long! Wanting a woman to cook and clean is like saying the n-word these days! Democrats are the r-slur! Even in her fantasies she’s stepping on unhoused people like a giant Gavin Newsom! It’s a perfect parody of the kind of cretinous sucking-up to people’s worst selves that credulous narcissists mistake for sociopolitical insight, because it barely is a parody. Putting it all in the mouth of Sydney Sweeney? That’s some pro wrestling–level blending of fiction and perceived reality right there.

But Cassie’s storyline is engaging above and beyond it’s Showgirls-style satire of sexiness. For one thing, she hasn’t been able to quit Nate, who’s still counting on her for money and is eager to pimp her out to a big influencer if it means more cash to bail him out. Unfortunately, her most recent donation to the cause comes too late to save both his toe, which a gangland enforcer tears right back off, and his ring finger, which the guy mercilessly clips off in graphic detail. Sorry to sound sadistic, but watching this psychotic dope get brought low is one of the consummate pleasures of the season so far.

Cassie is also back to her old ways with her once-again “best friend,” Maddy. (Maddy upon hearing Cassie call her her BF: “Really?”) Offered a gig with that big influencer’s company, she dumps Maddy as her manager — then reconsiders the instant she learns Maddy secured her an audition for the primetime soap L.A. Nights. (She actually didn’t, she winds up having to bully Cassie’s sister Lexi into pulling strings, but Cassie doesn’t know that.) Cassie kind of is reminiscent of a kaiju, actually, stumbling this way and that, looking incredible but wreaking havoc almost without meaning to, including on herself.

But she has one last surprise up her sleeve: She can actually act. Raising her hands above her head to portray herself as a prisoner (it’s an echo of Jules posing for her sugar daddy earlier in the season, just as Cassie sucking her toes is an echo of Nate losing his), she launches into Shakespeare and brings the show’s hardened producer (Sharon Stone) and director (Colleen Camp) to tears. It’s not necessarily believable that Cassie, who could lose to herself at Connect Four, can understand Shakespeare, but it is funny, and that’s plenty.

Not everyone is having as much fun selling sex as Cassie is. Jules appears to successfully seduce Rue, although the tone she takes is more like a woman picking a fight than one trying to woo an ex back into bed. But when her sugar daddy discovers a pair of Rue’s ratty boxers (she writes her initials on the waistband!), he literally tosses them in Jules’s face, telling her he’ll choose the safety of his family over catching an STD from her. 

It’s Maddy who seems the most poised to thrive in the objectification economy. When Alamo and his goons corner Rue as she grabs dinner with Maddy at Bob’s Big Boy (more on that in a moment), the towering pimp and drug lord and the diminutive assistant talent manager take an instant liking to one another. Seriously, the show cuts away, and when it cuts back she’s saying “So that’s what I didn’t respect about my dad” while the two of them drain milkshakes like old friends. Maddy had just finished explaining to Rue that Jesus (?) has helped her to understand the concept of “equanimity,” i.e. there’s no difference between the terrific and the terrible, or if there is you can decide not to let it bother you. Apparently, she decides not to let Alamo bother her.

So despite his obvious threat level, she straight up disregards Rue’s obvious attempts to get her out of there before Rue herself is sent off to meet with his minions. By the end of the night Maddy’s walking up and down the line of dancers at the Silver Slipper, selecting star performers Kitty and Magick to become her next two Cassies. Both she and Alamo agree that girls like Cassie, who’s repeatedly filmed to look like the most spectacular human imaginable, are a dime a dozen. Isn’t it both of their jobs to turn those dimes into dollars?

Rue’s demise is an open question the entire time Alamo’s making nice with her unflappable high-scooll friend. He has his cold-blooded guard Bishop dismember Big Eddy and feed him to pigs for the crime of opening that safe at gunpoint, which certainly proves he means business. (Apparently the safe contained something more important to Alamo than drugs or money.) Then, tipped off by Magick that Rue tried to frame her with stolen drugs, he has Bishop, G, and Kidd (Asante Black) make her dig a hole in the middle of nowhere and stand in it. The shot of their truck driving up to nothing but a shovel stuck in the ground is one of the show’s most chilling.

Anyway, that’s where we came in at the beginning — with Alamo charging at her, ostensibly to punish her for being a rat. Elsewhere in the episode she’s able to get just enough incriminating info out of one of Laurie’s idiot henchmen to keep her DEA contacts happy. But there’s really not much difference between the drug dealers and the cops going after them, is there? To both, Rue is only worth what she can do for them. Hers is an entirely contingent existence.

So is Jules’s, dependent on Ellis’s largesse. So is Nate’s, dependent on whether he can pay what he owes. So is Cassie’s, dependent on the kindness of more popular influencers and the horniness of thousands of strangers. So is Maddy’s, dependent on her cut of the cash that flows Cassie’s way. I think Lexi gets mad at Cassie after she gets the acting gig because unlike her sister, Lexi actually feels she made her own way, 

It’s all a very ugly way to live. Shouldn’t it be? Look around you! Think of how many scams and come-ons and frauds and hustles you fend off on a daily basis. Think of the sadists who govern us, how they use and discard people. Think of the hypocrisy about human sexuality we see everywhere — trans people hounded and consensual sex work purged from the internet, while our rulers flaunt their degeneracy and our tech overlords crank out non-consensual AI porn at scale. Think of the drugs and sex we turn to for escape from the world they made for us. That’s the criminal world we live in, and with just some minor tweaks it’s the world of Euphoria, a dystopia with dick jokes. 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.