12/15/2023 0 Comments Lexi euphoria finale![]() Similarly, the theatrical device grants us real access into Rue and Lexi, the characters whose friendship is notionally a key fact of “Euphoria.” Zendaya’s Rue had, at times, generously receded from the action in recent episodes in order to grant grander spotlights to those around her. Cassie, who has spent the season seething with rage she can only barely suppress, is finally living in her complicated truth later in the episode, having gotten the worse end of a physical fight with Alexa Demie’s character, she is chastened and facing social opprobrium, but she faces the world as herself, as she learns who that is. ![]() Storming the stage, she snaps, telling the audience “I can play the fucking villain” - it’s a thrilling moment, one in which Cassie finally steps into the role she’s been ducking all season. But the actor, later, allows herself to crack open, exposing Cassie’s depths of contempt for her peers, and for herself. ![]() Sweeney reacted to watching a play about her life at home and at school with a focused intensity reminiscent of Nicole Kidman processing her emotions at the opera in the film “Birth.” In both cases, the character’s care for wanting to maintain social position through composure is evident Sweeney is an ace at showing what lies underneath the desire to keep it together. Let’s begin with the season’s MVP, Sweeney - from whom I wanted more in the finale. This show’s female ensemble - working in different styles and across various plotlines - is as strong as any on TV. But this episode of television’s use of the device of a play made clear what’s most urgently on the show’s mind, and what it does best: The ways in which performance of self punishes and hems in teen girls and women, and the power of writing for oneself a new storyline. I remain convinced that their stories are intriguing - especially after a tense scene between father and son in this finale. I’ve written, previously, about this season of “Euphoria,” choosing to focus in the past on the stories of the men in the Jacobs family. When an entire social cohort is performing, is it really such a stretch to transpose their lives to the stage? What’s more, the play’s intent was to so closely mirror life among the students of Euphoria High as to achieve a sort of seamlessness: Life, for this group of teenagers living through the most outsized emotions imaginable, is lived as publicly as can be imagined, and wild dramatics pass through like weather patterns, as predictably cyclical as they are destructive. The play, on which the action of the season hinged, was designed to elicit an angry reaction from Cassie, and it achieved its goal Cassie’s freaking out at playwright Lexi (Maude Apatow) was an inherent plot point, though Lexi couldn’t have predicted the specifics. ![]() In the most clever moment of a tricky, meta, exceptional season of television, the answer, of course, was both that it was and was not. When Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie Howard charged the stage during her sister’s self-produced theater work in the season finale of “Euphoria,” the audience at the show’s hypercharged high school was left uncertain as to whether her outburst was part of the play. SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this review if you haven’t watched “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name,” the Season 2 finale of “ Euphoria.”
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