Euphoria Season 2 Yearbook: The Play’s The Thing

Unfortunately, not all of Lexi’s insights hit the way they were intended. Early in the episode, we see her fret to Fez about making people mad with the play. “You’re really strokin’ the bee’s nest with that one,” he says, before deciding that her good intentions make a difference. This may be true, but Lexi does lay out some extremely personal stuff about Cassie and her friends under only the thinnest guise of fiction.

Much of Lexi’s story isn’t about her so much as her relationship to Cassie. She describes the day Cassie hit puberty as the “defining moment of my adolescence,” and dreams that she’ll look the same as her sister once she’s her age. She counts the days, but 433 days later, she’s still underdeveloped and Cassie is still casually cruel to her. In one of her most casually profound moments of insight, Cassie notes that she doesn’t want to be known for her body, because she’s seen the problems womanhood can bring.

Here we get the story of Nate, Maddy, and Cassie laid out clearly for the first time. Lexi explains that Nate and Maddy were the group’s first and most formative example of love — which explains why they’re all pretty romantically maladjusted now. In a section that compresses years into moments, we see Lexi witnessing pivotal scenes — Cassie on the phone with jealous Nate, Maddy and Nate falling in love, and before all that, Cassie and Maddy falling in love.

Granted, Lexi doesn’t call the pair’s relationship romantic, but she highlights their strong bond in a way that’s more queer-coded than the it ever has been before. Over shots of the pair nearly touching tongues during a cheer routine, Lexi explains that she was afraid of Maddy when she came into Cassie’s life. She explains that Maddy basically moved in with the family when her parents started fighting, and we see her crying in Cassie’s bed in the middle of the night. It’s a level of intimacy that clearly makes the girls in the audience uneasy.

Despite its penchant for backstory-heavy cold opens, “Euphoria” is surprisingly slow to unpack its own central dynamics. Here, from Lexi’s perspective, we finally see the dynamic between Nate, Cassie, and Maddy clearly for the first time. These girls were the world to each other, and he turned them against each other. In a brief cutaway to the aftermath of Cassie’s confession, we hear Maddy say as much. For all the talk about her dangerous rage, here Maddy is heartbroken first and foremost. “He put me through hell and now he’s with my f***ing best friend? What the f***? When is it going to end?” she cries.