Of all the shows that could have released a Christmas special this year, perhaps the least likely candidate was HBO’s “Euphoria.” For all its glitter, Sam Levinson’s decidedly nihilistic Gen Z drama is hardly the pinnacle of cheer. In the show’s hypnotic, chaotic first season, its teenage ensemble grappled with substance abuse, violence, codependency, and rape culture. Now it’s back – temporarily – for a two-part special meant to bridge the gap between seasons one and two. Part one, “Trouble Don’t Last Always,” introduces a more subdued and contemplative chapter in this already accomplished narrative.
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Fans last saw lead Rue (Zendaya) give into her addictive urges again after the departure of her best friend, Jules (Hunter Schafer). Season one closed on a delirious musical celebration of self-destruction, and “Trouble Don’t Last Always” opens on a delusion of another kind. Jules and Rue wake up together on a gauzy morning, blissful and affectionate as Jules prepares for an important day in her life as a budding fashion designer. Bleak realization settles in as we realize that this is not reality – it is the lovesick fantasy Rue imagined when she first fell in love with Jules. Rue spent season one building a life around their tenuous romance, and now Jules is gone. So what will Rue live for now?
Not much. Even in her fantasy, Rue easily gives in to the pull of drugs, and we are jolted into her reality, where she’s just snorted pills in the bathroom of a diner. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s meeting with her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, Ali (Colman Domingo).
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The rest of this bottle episode occurs entirely in and around the diner, as Rue and Ali engage in the unique sponsor/sponsee ritual of debating God, morality, and human existence over cold coffee and half-eaten pancakes. The gist is this: Rue wants to die. Ali hopes to convince her to stay alive.
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There are few dramatic premises heavier than this. And yet writer-director Levinson, aided hugely by his performers and cinematographer Marcell Rév, extracts a painfully human exchange without lapsing into melodramatics. Ali, who receives a welcome helping of character development, refuses to treat Rue with kid gloves – yet Domingo plays this role with an underpinning of warmth, ably challenging the stormy Rue. As Rue, Zendaya is essentially here to remind everyone why she won her Emmy. She expertly balances emotion and stoicism, wearing this character like a second skin.
The episode’s most heartbreaking moment occurs when Ali asks Rue how she wants her family to remember her after she dies. Rév’s camera trains on Zendaya for a shattering thirty seconds as Rue incrementally breaks, her quivering lip and runny nose slowly belying her headstrong façade.
Grimacing through tears, she answers, “As someone who tried really hard to be someone I couldn’t.”
There is minimal plot here, an almost whiplash-inducing change from the regular series, where high-stakes drama constantly crescendos. But this is a perfect departure, a welcome pause in the shimmering chaos. “Trouble Don’t Last Always” is uniquely suited to this moment, as the world finds itself at a standstill, paralytically powerless over disease and mortality. So many of us don’t know where we will spend our holidays, or who will still be here to spend them with us next year. So we sit, unbearably human. And though we may be separated from Ali and Rue by fiction and celluloid and screens, for an hour, it feels as though we are just one booth across, eavesdroppers on a conversation between two vulnerable, beautiful, sick people. [A]