Euphoria Season 3 Addresses Plot Gaps, But A New Challenge Threatens to Overshadow Everything

Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Euphoria” Season 3, Episode 1

After a nearly four-year hiatus, HBO’s provocative series “Euphoria,” created by Sam Levinson, has returned with its third season. Fans have eagerly awaited to see whether the new episodes would address any of the narrative missteps from previous seasons. Unfortunately, it seems that the show has not quite managed to resolve its past issues.

What exactly are these unresolved issues? Over its first two seasons, “Euphoria” has been known for delivering shocking storylines that, disappointingly, often fade away without resolution. To illustrate, let’s revisit two notable instances: the conflict involving Tyler (played by Lukas Gage) and Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) from Season 1, and Rue Bennett’s (portrayed by Zendaya) dangerous encounter with a drug dealer in Season 2.

In the inaugural season of “Euphoria,” the tumultuous relationship between high school sweethearts Nate and Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) hits a rough patch. In a bid to provoke Nate’s jealousy, Maddy openly flirts with a stranger named Tyler at a party. Enraged and unable to control his anger, Nate retaliates by breaking into Tyler’s home—not once, but twice. He brutally assaults Tyler, leaving him in need of medical care, and then deceitfully frames him for strangling Maddy, leading to Tyler’s wrongful incarceration. In reality, it was Nate who had assaulted Maddy. Despite the gravity of these events, the storyline is abruptly dropped and never revisited.

In Season 1 of “Euphoria,” on-again, off-again high school couple Nate and Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) are temporarily “off” — so to make Nate jealous, Maddy successfully seduces a random guy named Tyler at a party in full view of everybody. Irate and unable to keep his temper under control, Nate breaks into Tyler’s house not once but twice and not only beats the guy so severely that he requires medical attention, but frames Tyler for choking Maddy and sends Tyler to jail. (Nate is the one who abused Maddy, point in fact.) This all happens and then never comes up again.

Similarly, in Season 2 of “Euphoria,” Rue runs afoul of a seemingly meek but incredibly dangerous drug kingpin named Laurie (Martha Kelly) after losing a suitcase full of expensive wares. Laurie, apparently trapping Rue in her house, says Rue will pay a price … only for Rue to escape and for this plotline to be dropped for the rest of Season 2. So does Season 3 try and fix this?

Here’s the thing: “Euphoria” Season 3 does bring the Laurie plotline back, but in the Season 3 premiere, the approach is so genuinely lazy that it feels like they remembered this whole ordeal at the last minute. In Rue’s voiceover — a device that works less and less as “Euphoria” continues, to be really honest — we learn that she worked at a smoke shop for a few years before Laurie found her. When that happens, Laurie tells Rue that, based on interest and inflation, Rue owes her upwards of $43 million, and Rue reluctantly agrees to work for her.

What this means, in practice, is that Rue — aided by her Season 2 friend Faye, played by Chloe Cherry — has to swallow bags full of drugs and transport them from Mexico back to the United States. (The viewer is treated to an interminably gross sequence where the two of them keep trying to force the bags down and choking, to say nothing of the way they struggle to, uh, hold those bags in as they cross over the border, something Faye fails to do by the time the pair gets back to Laurie’s house.)

While this obviously solves the problem of this dropped plotline, the bigger issue here is that choosing the Laurie story, of all dropped plotlines, to come back in Season 3 simply drags Rue down. Rather than see her character leave her addiction and struggles with drugs behind, drugs are now the center of Rue’s life. It’s nice, in theory, that Sam Levinson circled back to this, but to choose this plot point only serves to force Rue to regress. So where can all of this go from here? 

If the way that “Euphoria” tries to pick up lost plot threads is to only return to ones that feel narratively unsatisfying — surely, someone out there wants to see Nate pay for his actual crimes instead of watch Rue swallow balloons full of drugs — then there’s not really any major improvement this show can make in its third and hopefully final season. (As of this writing, Sam Levinson revealed that he has no plans to stretch this into a fourth season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.) Frankly, the fact that it returned at all is astonishing when you consider that Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Zendaya have become three of the biggest and most marketable movie stars around since Season 2 aired back in 2022. So where we go from here?

Based on the first episode, the answer might just be “nowhere good.” Levinson famously writes this series without a writer’s room, and this myopic approach tends to hurt his work rather than help it; even if other dangling plot threads get addressed, it’ll likely feel as unsatisfying as the one between Rue and Laurie. Judge for yourself as “Euphoria” airs its third season, with new episodes dropping every Sunday night at 9 p.m. EST on HBO and HBO Max.

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