Your quick Euphoria rundown

KARACHI: Euphoria season 1 was released at a time, in 2019 during the height of the pandemic  when everyone was looking for an alternate world to get lost within and Euphoria delivered just that and had the world freaking out. It transported everyone to a dimension of everything glitter and flashy lights with a heavy dose of tragic plotlines and graphic content becoming one of the best TV shows to hit screens in a long time. The highschool teen drama is beautifully filmed with cinematic shots that engulf you within itself and walk you through the eyes of the teenagers as if you were to experience it first hand, forcing you into their realities, troubles and explosive fights.  After the show’s 2 year long hiatus, it finally put fans to rest with a second season still in the process of slowly being released.

All throughout the show we follow our main character Rue, played by the Emmy Award winning Zendaya struggling with a terrible drug addiction. Rue’s addiction is fueled by past experiences, especially her father, while also being diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, Bipolar Disorder,Anxiety and she is also struggling with depression but finds solace in the new girl in town, Jules. Jules is a trans woman who is introduced when she hooks up with an older man before attending a party, where she’s harassed by Nate, a bully who goes on to harass and blackmail multiple people throughout the story line. We eventually realise the root of Nate’s problems too, his father and Nate’s discovery of his father’s sex tapes, when he was a young boy,  that he had shot of himself with multiple transwomen and gay men, that threw him into a whirlwind of questioning his identity and his relationship with his father turned very abusive, verbally but sometimes physically too.

After Jules’ entanglement with Nate’s father, oblivious to the fact that he was Nate’s father, she meets an online love interest that happens to be Nate behind his fake profile, cat fishing Jules into sending him nudes that he uses to blackmail her into not revealing his father, something she never had an intention of doing in the first place. Unfortunately this is not where trouble with Nate ends as he lands into a domestic abuse charge when the mother of his on-again off-again girlfriend, Maddy, discovers bruises around her neck and decides to get the police involved. Nate, being good at what he does, concocts a lie while continuing to blackmail Jules into lying for him and worms his way out of these charges.

Rue’s best friend and another person that happens to find themselves on Nate’s “hit”  list is Fez, a drug dealer, who treats Rue as his little sister and always feels guilty for enabling Rue’s addiction. When Fez threatens Nate for Rue, he finds the police on his doorstep forcing Fez to flush his stash down the toilet in a hurry. And this flushing open forces him to resort to robbery to pay off his boss “Mouse”.

Then comes Kat who struggles with her self-image wants to take agency of her own body and sexuality. When a video of her gets leaked after a party, she decides to explore her opportunities with web-camming and after a turbulent journey with love she finds her happy ending with a wonderful guy named Nate.

During the 2 year long break between the first and second season due to the pandemic related delays, 2 bridge episodes were released during December 2020 and January 2021, respectively. The first episode is a raw conversation between Rue and her sponsor, Ali, while also being an affirmation that Rue had survived her relapse at the end of season 1 that had left viewers on a major cliff hanger, Rue admits to having suicidal thoughts while Ali tries to convince her that she still has time to turn over a new leaf. The second bridge episode follows Jules as she attends a therapy session, where she reveals that her mother was recovering from addiction during the course of the first season and that she was still in love with the online persona Nate had created.

With the long awaited release of season 2 we couldn’t have anticipated it to be any more Euphoric than season 1 but we have not been disappointed.

The second season starts off with introducing drug dealing grandmother Fez who had taken in Fezco as a child to save him from his abusive parents and then later taking in Ashtray too, and introducing them to the world of drugs at a young age, the two boys forming a very strong bond that got them through.

Following their separation at the train station, Jules and Rue reunite and Rue reveals that she relapsed the moment Jules left her, the two then share a kiss, bathed in a soft, golden light hanging at the brink of a hallucination. Rue finds new friends that undo all the progress that she had made with her sobriety when she was around Jules, Cassie finds herself in the middle of a weird love triangle and can’t decide what to do despite the guilt that surrounds her, Fez and Nate continue having a rocky association that has its explosive moments, all with a few episodes yet to be released.

If you are yet to embark on the whirlwind that is Euphoria, be warned, everything is more  amplified than what is real, you might come out of it  feeling like you are in a haze but that is definitely part of the experience here.