Season Three of Euphoria: A Trainwreck of Tragedy Made Fetish
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
A man sits Rue down under the guise of congratulations, calls her his employee of the year, and with a glimmer of malevolence in his eye hands her Percocet he laced himself. "Just a little token of my appreciation. Rest up." He knows her history. He knows this is her drug of choice. She takes them, just like he knew she would in her exhaustion and desperation. This was premeditated murder. A man decided a woman was no longer of use to him and ended her life, and all of it turned needlessly into a Christian cautionary tale. Euphoria chose the show and none of the compassion. Trauma turned into spectacle. An emotional bloodbath for sport and views.
I am a viewer this season failed, one of many. I have been a victim of the systems season three of Euphoria made light of, made spectacle of. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has the United States in the early stages of a genocidal process against trans people, and I am one of them. I have lost people to addiction. I have survived sexual violence. I had an OnlyFans for a few weeks. The first two seasons made me cry. Snot dripping, the kind where I had to turn off the show and seek refuge in my partner’s arms. Whole-body sobbing, the kind you feel for a person, not a character. Season three made me sick.
Levinson has been reaching past his grip and range for years. The Idol was his way of showing us how he sexualizes horror and trauma for sport and viewership. Hand him something devastatingly horrific and he will dress it up in lingerie and a ball gag, turn something that should make our skin crawl into an addiction for more and worse. Levinson uses art to perpetuate harm, and that is more sickening than this season and his entire body of work.
This season’s poor writing is a dogwhistle for conservatives, who got to watch Nazis take a position of power over a queer woman of color, and the bimbofication of the girl they locked away. Women are either conniving or objects of sex. Men are objects of violence, cowardice, and manipulation. All of it in the name of God. All of it more transparent than the air in front of my eyes.
The season tells on itself. A writer asks how to kill a character and the answer is to build her up first, because if someone does not die periodically people get bored. The snake stops eating because it is preparing for a much larger meal. Cruelty is not a side effect here. It is the product. All of the characters make very real human choices while trudging through impossible situations. The show chose how those situations ended, and it chose with purpose, over a five-year break. We should expect better. Did ChatGPT or Grok write this season?
Pay attention to all of the elements of her death. The lighting. The music. The space. The words being spoken and everything around it. Beautifully presenting manipulation and oppression as the will of God. As the show buries her with zero respect to her personhood, the production team chose to score this tragedy, the loss of a beloved character, with a ballad about an outlaw finding Jesus. With an almost infinite library of songs to choose from, this was sloppy and nauseating. Here is the lesson it buys: find Christ, drop the queerness, swallow the bullshit, and you get peace. Rue loved Jules for two seasons. Season three ends that and seats her at the table of white Jesus instead. Rue, who bared her sharp teeth the first two seasons while retaining her rough edges and humanity, is made into a sheep.
Jules had depth once. She was Rue’s compass, flawed and real and becoming someone. Season three keeps her sex and throws out her self. The show explicitly names how trans women are viewed, with little mention of her value as an artist, and has the person who loves her most refer to her as "a little toy that he keeps locked up in a little room." One of the last things spoken between two lovers, queerbaiting and transphobia in the same sentence. It did not need to be clean. It just needed to lack injury. Rue is naming the cage, which did not need to be done. No apology from a Rue who had put in the work to heal and be better. They refused to give us evidence where it mattered.
Cassie I never liked. I felt for her anyway, and I watched them break her. The first few episodes are softcore riding pedophilic kink. A fart in a jar for seven hundred dollars. Men paying extra to hear their names. It films these fetishes, in their entirety and detail, then pretends to mourn the affected and victimized while it profits from the very people it is supposedly critiquing. The entire show was fanservice to MAGA bigots.
Nate was an apex predator for two seasons. The kind of man that made my body remember traumas I would rather forget. Built like a truck of muscle and masculinity. Season three turned him into a prop with biceps, dragged around by older men, a dozen exits and the survival instinct of a blueberry. The collapse is not earned, it is abrupt and convenient. A predator can break, but this break was written to be watched, not believed. The men I have survived do not dissolve. We watch what the show presented as strength and aggression and alpha fade into childlike cowardice when it mattered most. He did not lack the skill or the strength. He lacked good writing.
Shameless told the poverty and the addiction with truth someone inside that life would recognize. Season three of Euphoria took those same lives and put them behind glass for people to flinch at. Smut and spiritual torture porn for anyone actually living any of it. You can hold the chaos and respect the people at the same time. Euphoria stopped wanting to.
This was not a misstep. The current administration showed us where people’s morals actually sit, and the show read the room and leaned toward those sitting in positions of power. The image they leave us with is the confession of bootlicking by the production team.
The line was drawn clearly, and Euphoria crossed it with reckless intention and purposeful disregard for everyone it stepped on. The last image is Rue’s ghost, lit like a savior at the head of a cult’s dinner table, where the women have little freedom and call it peace. An endorsement of Christian nationalist bullshit wrapped in a Zendaya-shaped bow of beautiful melanin and charm. The film industry does this intentionally. I have noticed every instance of it since childhood. I hope they remember whose bones the table where they feast was built upon.
