If our school days are the happiest of our lives, I’m worried for the Euphoria teens. In the season two opener, the kids of East Highland saw a drug dealer being murdered with a hammer by another drug dealer named “Ashtray” (because he ate discarded cigarettes as a child). One girl celebrates New Year’s Eve by hiding under a urine-soaked towel in a bath, and the school’s toxic jock is beaten up so brutally his face has to be stitched back together. As Rue – Euphoria’s enigmatic lynchpin played by Emmy-winner Zendaya – says in the closing seconds: “Damn.”
We had been warned. Before this adolescent journey through drugs, sex and social media resumed, Zendaya told her followers on social media that the second season may be even more “triggering and difficult to watch” than the first. She wasn’t wrong. There’s a torturous drug relapse that ends in a bathtime morphine session, a manipulative love triangle and a battle for an underage sex tape that leads to a game of Russian roulette. Euphoria often feels less high school, more horror film.
