Euphoria season 2, episode 5 spoilers follow.
Euphoria‘s latest episode comes with a strange sort of relief. Yes, enduring those first 15 minutes is like surviving a full-blown “war zone” — to paraphrase Zendaya herself — but that’s not all.
As odd as it might sound, a surprising number of fans genuinely feared for Rue’s life at the end of episode four last week. Sure, she’s the main character, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Euphoria without her, but the last few minutes of that episode certainly seemed to suggest Zendaya could soon be on her way out.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for Rue, they did, every goddamn week, until this downward spiral finally culminated with a vision of what might have been her own funeral — complete with a visit from Rue’s dear, departed father. Combine all that with a surprising switch in narration, and suddenly, the idea that Rue could be narrating this show from beyond the grave felt frighteningly real.
HBO
So that’s why episode five, ‘Stand Still Like the Hummingbird’, actually brought us some relief during that opening fight, the very kind that Rue so desperately seeks for herself via various narcotics. Yet that relief was short-lived.
Yes, Rue’s alive, but without that cold open buffer we’re used to, the hellscape created by her secret coming out was horrifying to endure, and that was true for everyone involved, be it Gia or her poor mother or even us watching back home.
Lines you like “You’re not a good person, Rue,” and “Looking at you makes me physically f**king ill,” are almost too painful to bear. Our only solace is that this all but guarantees an Emmy nom for Zendaya, and perhaps even another win. When Rue smashes her head through the door, you can almost hear the inevitable applause that will crash around her at the ceremony.
That’s nothing though compared to the physical hardships yet to come her way. In the car ride to rehab, Rue explains that she was just a month away from killing herself: “I have this image in my head of me just, you know, laying in the sand and letting the waves just take me out to sea.” And then a month potentially turns to seconds as Rue runs out into the extremely busy junction and starts flailing around in traffic.
If you watched this scene in horror through your fingers, you won’t be the only one. And if you thought this really might be it for Rue, you weren’t alone in that, either. Her making it out of that road alive might be the most unrealistic thing we’ve seen on this show since we actually saw the kids go to school that one time.
But that’s not all. Across the next 12 hours or so, Rue survives everything from Fez’s rejection and angry dogs to a failed break-in, a smashed glass table, a giant fall, the police, and a f**ked up sex trafficker — not to mention the crossfire created after Rue used Cassie’s entire season-two arc as a mere diversion tactic. “Hey Cass! I have a quick question for you…”
HBO
In short, Rue is a survivor, but realistically, how long can she keep this up? While Zendaya’s character didn’t die at the end of episode four, like many fans suspected, there’s a lot of foreshadowing here which suggests that her time could soon come to an end. After all, is it just a coincidence that Rue mostly played the dead characters in last week’s lovers montage?
As season two progresses, theories that suggest Rue might already be dead continue to pick up steam. The idea is that Euphoria actually explores the events that lead up to her death, rather than her present-day life. And some even argue that the initial overdose she’s recovering from in the pilot was where she actually died, which suggests that the show has just been tricking us ever since.
If this is all true, it means that everyone’s favorite drug addict could be destined to die whenever this show does finally come to an end. But with season three now officially confirmed, we suspect this means Rue won’t die for quite some time still — and that’s all assuming of course that this theory is even true.
While her being dead does help explain Rue’s seemingly omniscient narration — think Mary Alice in Desperate Housewives — it’s still hard to believe that HBO would actually go through with such a gag-worthy twist.
Despite complaints that Rue’s been sidelined this season, Euphoria is still built primarily around Zendaya’s (soon to be double) Emmy-winning performance. Yes, revealing she’s dead at the very end could be a clever way of keeping her involved throughout still, but regardless, this just wouldn’t gel with the show’s overall message.
While some detractors still argue that this show glamorizes addiction, anyone who actually managed to sit through this week’s episode will know that this is clearly not the case.
HBO
As Euphoria creator Sam Levinson pointed out to Vulture back when season one was still airing: “I think it’s crucial that film and television portray addiction in an honest way. That we allow for its complexities to play out. That we show the allure of drugs, the relief they can bring, because that’s ultimately what makes them so destructive.”
Zendaya echoed this more recently during a chat with Esquire where she explained that “one of the biggest themes of the [new] season, other than redemption… it’s also hope”.
Hope might seem hard to come by given this “rock bottom” Rue’s just hit, not to mention all of the heavy death symbolism coming her way, but Zendaya’s not worried.
“I always felt that Rue would be okay, because if Rue was a version of Sam, and Sam is who he is, and he was able to take all that pain and turn it into this beautiful television show many years later and was able to do something with it, then I feel that Rue was going to be okay,” she said.
To kill Rue off, or to reveal that she’s actually been dead this whole time, would rob viewers of this message, and given the conversations that Zendaya has shared with Sam, it seems more and more likely now that Euphoria won’t go down this path.
As Zendaya puts it: “We deserve the good things in our life, no matter the mistakes we’ve made,” and that’s as true for Rue as it is for anyone else caught up in the war-zone that is Euphoria. But instead of making her this show’s biggest casualty, it’s time for Rue to finally find some relief in hope, and not of the narcotic kind either.
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