‘Euphoria’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: You Did Good, Kid

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 one way: with Alamo’s mom doing whatever it takes to please an awful man, if only so he’ll provide “hot meals and shoes that fit.” But we soon learn Preston is a good person. He wins over young Alamo’s trust, buying him ice cream and taking him to church, where the choir sings “Let My People Go.” When Preston finally gets a big settlement from his old employer—a chemical plant where he was 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 they’ve 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 another man’s home, which is filled with all their stolen belongings. This man is his mom’s real boyfriend, and Alamo realizes the whole relationship was a setup. “It was just one long con, and the real mark wasn’t even Preston,” Rue narrates. “It was Alamo. He believed her.” 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 in the season’s final two episodes. Back in the present tense, we’re right where we left off, with Rue buried up to her neck in the dirt and Alamo threatening to pummel her head off. To earn back his trust, Rue 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 Laurie’s 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 to do it 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 with her plan. Alamo runs a sham company, Gold Rush Medical Services, which he uses to take his girls to Mexico for cheap plastic surgery. Laurie wants him to transport 80 kilos of fentanyl for one last big job before the border is set to close, according to the news. 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 by selling them such a deadly drug. “The real question is, why does the customer want to buy something that can kill them?” Laurie says. “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, is “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. Bishop seems to vouch for Maddy, keeping her safe—for now.

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 responsibility 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.” 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 (last episode) was a mistake, because it almost cost Jules her relationship and, therefore, her apartment and “everything she’s been working towards.”

This setup makes Jules “a little toy that Ellis keeps locked in a little room,” Rue says, adding that he will never leave his family—a fact that Ellis has also made quite clear. When Rue says Jules’s role is to sit at home and paint until Ellis comes home and fucks her, Jules slaps Rue across the face, knocking her canvas on top of her. “Ellis is going to be here in 45 minutes, so I suggest you get the fuck out of my painting,” she tells Rue. Jules isn’t ready to leave her fantasy yet, but the evidence is building that it’ll be taken from her soon, whether she likes it or not.

Cassie, meanwhile, is fully living hers. It’s her first day on the set of LA Nights, and though she only has a few lines, “she studied them religiously,” Rue tells us. Cassie walks into her scene with Dylan Reid (Homer Gere), 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 first found out that Nate was a fraud. 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 improvising with her. “I find it rather compelling,” Patty Lance (Sharon Stone) says from behind the monitor. “Let’s just let it roll.” Cassie keeps going, telling Dylan—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 that 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. 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 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.