Recap of ‘Euphoria’ Season 3, Episode 3: “The Ballad Of Paladin

Much like Cerberus, the mythical guardian of the underworld, this episode of Euphoria unfolds as a three-headed beast. It weaves together three interconnected narratives, each spotlighting the show’s most captivating actresses: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and Sydney Sweeney. These stories delve into crime, exuding a mix of sensationalism and violence. This multi-faceted drama is akin to the monstrous King Ghidorah, and I mean that in the best possible way.

The central event is Nate and Cassie’s wedding, but the episode kicks off with a flashback that provides insight into how Jules, an unexpected attendee, ended up at this point. Introduced to the sugar-baby lifestyle by her art-school roommate, Jules discovers it’s a lucrative alternative to retail. She’s surprised by how much she earns just by being charming, attractive, and sophisticated—qualities that come naturally to her, as she resembles a runway model. The most challenging aspect is engaging with older men, something Jules already enjoys. It’s an enviable gig if you can land it!

Jules navigates her new profession smoothly until she crosses paths with Ellis, played by True Blood alum Sam Trammell. This enigmatic plastic surgeon, seemingly named after a notorious author, draws parallels between his work and Jules’s gender transition, portraying both as exercises in personal transformation. Jules is intrigued by his intellect and eccentricity, and soon finds herself posing in lingerie for him as he wraps her in plastic—a deliberate metaphor. Ellis becomes her sole client.

Despite this arrangement, Jules remains open to other relationships, including one with Rue, who requests her company as a plus-one for Nate and Cassie’s nuptials. Jules’s tangled past with Nate and his father Cal is as complex as the history between the Irish and Oliver Cromwell, yet she agrees to attend, making a stunning and somewhat scandalous entrance. (Meanwhile, Rue sports an outfit reminiscent of a Miami Vice extra.)

Rue, however, leaves Jules in the company of Maddy, who attends the wedding of her former best friend and ex-boyfriend to demonstrate her indifference—though she ends up deeply affected. Maddy claims it’s a work obligation, omitting the fact that she’s now involved in arms dealing for a volatile strip-club owner and drug kingpin. Her task involves negotiating with Laurie, a menacing figure who previously held her captive. Suddenly, Jules’s sugar-baby gig seems far less controversial by comparison.

Rue’s not really going to Laurie’s to buy more drugs for her boss Alamo, though. She’s there on a mission of revenge. Laurie has re-released Alamo’s pig in the Silver Slipper, his flagship club, and Alamo wants payback for the trauma this inflicts on the girls. The trauma comes when he shoots the pig in the head and splatters blood all over one of his employees, but who’s counting?

The time has come, Alamo decides, to take away something Laurie really loves. Rue nominates the woman’s prize parrot, Paladin, named after the protagonist of the old Western series Have Gun – Will Travel and actually a cockatoo, but again, who’s counting? They clearly call it a parrot so that it’ll be more of a Monty Python reference when the poison that the mysterious, soft-spoken henchman Bishop slips into the bird’s water makes it drop dead on camera with a thunk and a few twitches.

Before that, there’s the tense drug deal itself. The influence of past masters of drug-fueled tension like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Boogie Nights–era Paul Thomas Anderson is unmissable, as Rue, Bishop, Laurie, and her assorted Nazi underlings talk. The underlings fight amongst themselves over Faye, whose dipshit Nazi boyfriend Wayne (Toby Wallace) keeps getting razzed by Laurie’s boyfriend Harley. Bishop, meanwhile, frightens everyone with his flat affect and appears to make a stack float through the air in slow motion until he brings it down with a finger-gun. He even blows away the imaginary smoke. Yeah, I love this guy. And he does poison the parrot.

But the night is not over for Rue. Before she can get home, she’s pulled over by the cops. Then other cars show up. Then the first guy to approach her window is wearing plainclothes, and you realize this is no traffic stop. Sure enough, he says he’s DEA, and knows Rue by name. I think you’re looking at a future DEA informant, unless Rue decides she’s not a rat and is willing to go to prison over it. Personally, I don’t see her displaying that kind of loyalty to anyone, except maybe Jules. As portrayed by the bottomlessly talented Zendaya, Rue is a natural saleswoman, and the product she cares about moving the most is herself.

The final head of the dragon is Cassie, who experiences the wedding of a lifetime (pejorative). Sure, she got her $50K of flowers. But her delightfully awful mother Suze (Alanna Ubach) regales her with the horror story of her own failed marriage as she walks her daughter down the aisle. Then Naz (Jack Topalian), the funeral-home honcho to whom Nate owes a small fortune, crashes the wedding and exposes Nate as a fraud in front of his wedding party. While his awful friends scramble to figure out if he lost all their money — he blames an endangered flower for slowing construction to a crawl — Cassie alternately cries and screams, realizing she’s married a fraud.

Once one of the most frightening characters on television, Nate is now showing more shades of his flop sweat–soaked father Cal, who was equal parts frightening patriarchal predator and comical mess before his fall from grace. He gives a short speech at the reception that is surprisingly concise and kind considering his blood alcohol level. It’s certainly a lot nicer than the one given by his ex-wife Marsha (Paula Marshall), who takes the opportunity to get one last dig in on Nate’s long-ago ex Maddy. Maddy herself shows up to the wedding in a dress nearly as revealing as Jules’s in order to make a statement about how unbothered she is by the wedding, but she Irish-goodbyes everyone when the pain of it all proves to be too much. 

In a sticky scene, Cal apologizes to a shockingly gracious Jules for fucking and filming her while she was underage — a mistake, he says, as he really had no interest in kids, just in very young adults. “Youth is beautiful,” he says, half admiringly, half as a lament for his own glory days, which we saw in a memorable flashback last season. Eric Dane’s excellent performance of drunken candor here is all the more poignant for his passing. 

Cal’s son Nate, meanwhile, also approaches Jules to patch things up and thank her for coming. “You love who you love,” he tells her, regarding Maddy’s heartbreak — again, a surprisingly sensitive statement for a Jacobs man. Of course, Nate is an expert sweet-talker, which is another way of saying a master manipulator. In the limo home, he even melts the ice wall Cassie has erected after discovering he owes money to some dude with an accent. She adamantly refuses to believe that her husband is broke. I mean, look at all their stuff!

Well, Naz gets a good look at it, that’s for sure. He and a legbreaker are waiting in the happy couple’s home, and surprise them the moment Nate carries Cassie over the threshold. A struggle ensues in which Cassie clocks her nose on the floor, which makes it bleed, which makes her cry even harder than before. “I’m bleeding!” she moans in sorrow. “This is my wedding night!” Meanwhile, Nate’s getting his ass kicked up and down the stairs behind her. Clearly, he’s got a lot more to worry about than a bloody nose. 

Just as clearly, Cassie is meant to be almost psychotically self-absorbed as a character; that’s the joke Sam Levinson and Sydney Sweeney are making, in part at Sweeney’s own expense. (You may not care for her in real life, but she’s a smart person, and she’s not somehow unaware of what she’s doing on this show.) But in this case, Cassie still comes across as sympathetic, because Nate frankly deserves what he’s getting. I wouldn’t really care either!

Of course, by the time they take off his shoe and sock and cut off his toe, the severity of her situation is a bit clearer to Cassie. She may have struck up an unlikely rapport with Naz — they both agree that Nate’s problem is he just doesn’t listen — but he’s not going to let them off the hook. Cassie has inherited Nate’s debt, Naz tells her before she leaves. That means she’s fair game next time he comes to collect.

Whatever reservations I had about Euphoria 2.0 — the version with the Hans Zimmer score and the California crime-thriller aesthetic — are long gone now, I can tell you that much. This is a bitchin’ episode of television. The violence is alternately funny and gruesome, often both at once. Marcell Rév’s cinematography, particularly for night scenes or for scenes involving the garish colors of Nate and Cassie’s wedding and home, is as genuinely cinematic as anything on TV. 

All the characters are colorful or memorable, from Cassie’s dorky sister Lexi (she’s a virgin because it beats catching herpes!) to the group’s old friend BB (Sophia Rose Wilson), who shows up extremely pregnant and just as scantily clad as Jules and Maddy. (As Lucille Bluth would put it, good for her.) Ellis, Laurie, and Alamo are all convincing mixtures of manners and menace. The show’s fetishistic sexuality is simply not done on television; its eroticism is more suited for art-house audiences, yet it’s been unleashed on the HBO Max masses. I think that rules, personally. It’s hard to say exactly where Euphoria will go from here, but it’s safe to say that it will go there, wherever and whatever there happens to be.

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.