This episode’s cold open belongs to Alamo, and it does what Euphoria used to do best: a flashback sequence introducing the backstory that makes a character tick. In this case, we meet young Alamo (Ca’Ron Jaden Coleman) as a child of the ’70s, whose glamorous mother with beaded braids (Danielle Deadwyler) is “the coldest female Alamo ever knew,” Rue narrates. Alamo’s mother introduces him to Preston (Kwame Patterson), a kind man with terrible burn scars on his face. At first, we might assume the story is going to go one way: with Alamo’s mom doing whatever it takes to please a terrible man, if only so he’ll provide “hot meals and shoes that fit.”

But we quickly see Preston is a good person. He wins over young Alamo’s trust, buying him candies and taking him to church, where the choir sings “Let My People Go.” When he finally gets a big settlement from the chemical plant where he got disfigured on the job, the family celebrates with a newly furnished apartment, plenty of Cartier jewels for mom, and a promise of a bright future. When they return from a beach vacation—the happiest time in Alamo’s life, Rue tells us—they find the apartment has been robbed blind. Immediately, Alamo’s mom takes off, leaving Preston sobbing on his knees, begging her to let him fix it. She takes young Alamo to a different man’s home, where Alamo sees all of their stolen belongings. This man is his mom’s real boyfriend, and Alamo realizes the whole thing was a setup. “It was just one long con, and the real mark wasn’t even Preston; it was Alamo,” Rue narrates. A young Alamo pulls a gun out of a holster while lying back on his new bed as he promises himself: “For as long as he lived, never again would a bitch outsmart him.”

It’s the setup for an episode that’s mostly foreshadowing for what’s to come. Back in the present tense, we’re right where we left off, with Rue buried up to her neck and Alamo threatening to pummel her head. To earn back his trust, she gives up Faye, telling Alamo that she was the driver of the getaway car, and that Rue can get Alamo’s money back. She calls Faye and uses the memory of Fez to guilt-trip her into going along with Rue’s plan: to take a picture of Faye’s white supremacist boyfriend Wayne’s key to the safe, which Alamo’s crew can then make a 3D-printed copy of. Faye hesitates, telling Rue that Wayne (Toby Wallace) has been trying to get her pregnant and even gave her a swastika tattoo; like every scene with Faye, even her falling in love is played grotesquely and for laughs. But eventually, Faye agrees as long as she gets to keep some of the money.

Laurie and her inbred crew pull up to Alamo’s house for a meeting. Rue quietly pulls out her phone so the DEA can listen as Laurie presents Alamo her plan. Alamo runs a sham company, Gold Rush Medical Services, for which he uses ambulances to take his girls across the Mexican border to get plastic surgery. Laurie wants him to transport 80 kilos of fentanyl for one last big job before the border closes. Alamo surprisingly agrees, because Laurie threatens to blackmail him by sending whatever was in that safe to the FBI (at this point, it must’ve been more than just guns, drugs, or money).

The season circles back to the fentanyl of it all. Alamo asks Laurie why she wants to kill her customers. “The real question is, why does the customer want to buy something that can kill them?” Laurie retorts. “It’s supply and demand, don’t blame me.”

Rue meets up with the DEA guys under the bridge again, and they’re very pleased with her. They say if “everything goes to plan these people will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.” As for Rue? She’s done her job and kept her word, so the US attorney should look favorably at her case. For the time being, she just has to sit tight. “You did good, kid,” they say, and it’s the first real win for Rue in a long, long time. She closes her eyes and thanks God.

Then, Rue tells us she tried to warn Maddy about Alamo, but Maddy says she’s not afraid of him. Maddy’s goal, Rue says, “was to milk these girls for every penny, and get Alamo to back her business, one where she didn’t have to answer to anyone.” Maddy brings Cassie to the Silver Slipper and directs her, Kitty, and Magick in a raunchy photoshoot. Maddy tells Alamo that it would be good to give the girls some time off so she can take them out, introduce them to people, and start building their profiles. They work six days a week, after all. But Alamo scoffs and accuses Maddy of trying to steal his girls. Maddy’s safe for now, but she’s already treading on thin ice, and doesn’t even seem to know it.

We cut suddenly to Jules’s loft. “Against all odds, life was looking okay. Maybe every mistake I made had led me to the right place after all,” Rue narrates as she watches Jules paint another large canvas. The two start getting into it, again, over the nature of their relationship. Rue tells Jules that she thinks her problem is having no responsibilities to anyone but herself. “I think that’s why I have so much anxiety and depression,” Rue says. “If I had kids, I think it’d be different.” Rue says she wants to start a life—get married, have a family. Jules tells her that Rue isn’t ready for kids, but Rue says no one’s ready for kids, they just do it. “I just want good old-fashioned American problems,” Rue says.

Jules points out that Rue is barely sober, and what she’s talking about “is a fantasy.” Rue snaps back that Jules is the one living a fantasy—being in a relationship with a married man. Rue says she wants to wake up to someone she loves, who depends on her, and expects her to be the best version of herself. “I have to live for something greater than myself,” Rue says. Jules isn’t impressed. She says that the last time they slept together, it was a mistake, because it almost cost Jules her relationship and, therefore, her apartment and “everything she’s been working towards.”

Rue tells Jules that she’s “just a little toy that he keeps locked in a little room,” and that Ellis will never leave his wife for Jules—a fact that Ellis, in fact, has also made clear. Rue says Ellis wants Jules not to talk to anyone or do anything, to stay at home and paint until he comes home and fucks her, and Jules slaps Rue across the face, knocking her canvas over. “Ellis is going to be here in 45 minutes, so I suggest you get the fuck out of my painting,” she tells Rue. She’s not ready to leave her fantasy yet, but the last episode hints it’ll be taken from her whether she likes it or not.

Cassie, meanwhile, is fully living hers. It’s her first day on the set of LA Nights. She only has a few lines, “but she studied them religiously,” Rue narrates. Cassie walks into her scene with Dylan Reid, whose character says a line to the effect of: “You’re not the first girl to come running once the honeymoon is over.” Cassie is viscerally triggered, recalling Nas making the same honeymoon remark to her the day of her wedding when she found out Nate was a fraud, the day her fairy tale died. She gets thrown and starts muttering, “I’m only trying to survive. You think you’ve known someone after five years…” And everyone on set starts flipping through their scripts, trying to figure out what’s happening. “He just lied, and lied, and lied,” Cassie says through tears. “I did everything for him, and what did I get in return? A bloody nose on my wedding night.”

But suddenly, Dylan starts riffing and improvising with her. “I find it rather compelling,” Patty Lance says from behind the monitor. “Let’s just let it roll.” Cassie keeps going, telling Dylan—while both are in character—that she deserved what happened to her because she stole him (Nate, but on LA Nights, Jagar) from her best friend. Patty says the scene doesn’t fit with the whole script, but “it’s giving me the feels. I think she’s got something.” Lexi is watching her sister become a star in real time, in disbelief.

Everyone on set is both disturbed and impressed. Patty and her producer meet with Cassie after the scene, and Lexi immediately blows up her sister’s spot, telling them Cassie is on OnlyFans, posing nude and making fetish content. “So you’re a sex worker,” Patty says, but Cassie demurs. “I’m a performer that uses my body to tell stories,” she says. “The hardest part is how people treat me, even my own family. But it’s also very empowering.” Patty is fascinated and says it sounds like a new form of feminism. “There’s a whole wave of people like me,” Cassie says. Patty is entranced, and smells a story: “That’s a very interesting character arc,” she says. She and the producer are lighting up, comparing Cassie to Jane Fonda in Klute, a “young hustler with a secret other life,” much to Lexi’s chagrin.

Patty says she wants to write Cassie into the show, but only if Cassie is willing to “leave that world behind.” Cassie is over the moon, and screams, “Thank you God! I’m gonna be famous!” on the Warner lot.

But first, she has to delete her highly lucrative OnlyFans. Back in her apartment, she wills herself to open her laptop and delete her account. If only she could just temporarily deactivate? She calls Nate, who isn’t picking up. Probably being beaten up again. She returns to the laptop and hits delete. It seems a shame she has to give up everything she’s built and her financial freedom, but she’s betting on a different future. Patty then gives Lexi the opportunity to write Cassie’s storyline, so maybe it’ll work out for her in the end, too.

As Rue waits for the 3D key to be made, she stops into a church to pray. Out of nowhere, her mom calls. Finally! Rue has an emotional conversation with her, one that will be familiar to anyone who has been or loved an addict. Rue tells her mom that she believes in God. “I just figured if he exists, then so does redemption. If there’s redemption, then there’s salvation. And I kinda need that.” Rue goes on to explain that she doesn’t want to be stuck with all the mistakes she’s made. “It’s hard to change when all you can think about is all the bad things you’ve done. I just want to be free to start over. And I want to be forgiven.” She’s crying, looking up at the stained glass windows of the church. She tells her mom that she misses her, that she’ll come home soon, and that she’s sorry. “I didn’t really realize how tough it is to be out here by yourself,” she says. Her mom tells her she’s not alone. There’s a 30-second shot of Rue’s mom, Nikita King, hanging up the phone and looking sad. Alone in the church, Rue prays and cries.

Back at her apartment, Lexi is talking to her friend (played by Gideon Adlon) about what she should do with Cassie’s character. Her friend suggests that Lexi kill her off. “If someone doesn’t die periodically, people get bored. Otherwise, it’s just talking and talking.” It certainly feels like foreshadowing. Cassie, meanwhile, is in her apartment upstairs when she receives a delivery. She opens the box, and it’s Nate’s finger and toe, with a note that reads, “ANSWER THE PHONE.”

We see Nate at his stalled jobsite, where he is crushing the endangered flowers that have kept him from being able to build Sun Settlers, which is surely only going to make his life worse. Although really, how could it be worse? One of Nas’s goons approaches, of course, and starts beating Nate again. At this point, it’s the only kind of scene Jacob Elordi filmed for this show, aside from the wedding.

At the club, Rue hands Alamo the key, but he tells her he wants her to be the one to rob Laurie’s. G hands her a dead rat that she feeds to Alamo’s snake. The snake used to belong to a dancer named Sweet, Bishop tells her. She would take the snake home at night after doing her act with it and sleep cuddled with it. One day, the snake stopped eating. She took it to the vet, but the vet said it was a perfectly healthy python. “The reason it wraps itself around you at night, is because it’s sizing you up, and the reason it’s not eating, is because it’s preparing for a much larger meal.”

Alamo loved that story so much, Bishop says, that he bought the snake from the dancer, because “it’s a reminder that you never know a motherfucker’s true intentions.” Bishop also admits that he talked to Rue’s mother, telling her how well Rue is doing. A threat. Is that why she called?

Rue drives away later that night, listening to her Bible tapes again. The cassettes start unraveling, and as Rue fiddles with the radio, she nearly drives headfirst into a truck, running herself off the road into the desert. As she takes a moment to calm down, her life having just flashed before her eyes, she looks up to suddenly see a tree burst into flames in front of her. It’s her burning bush, and Rue stumbles out of the car and closes her eyes as the flames dance in front of her.

​The gang runs out the clock.  Read More