Review: Euphoria, "Rain or Shine" | Season 3, Episode 7

As the third season of Euphoria finally begins to draw to a close, it's frustrating that its overlapping, overstuffed storylines still feel so underwritten. Every week, it's felt as though the dramatic and emotional stakes in each character's individual conflicts escalate only marginally, and it stems from the show's really inefficient pacing, muddled plotting, and Sam Levinson's annoyingly dogged effort to wrap everything in a glossy, mean-spirited bow. These issues are nothing new for Euphoria, which has always been plagued by a messy, scrappy vision, but season three's new tonal conceit has been more stifling than expansive when it comes to illuminating who the characters are now and where they're headed. The weaknesses of this genre-forward approach is particularly apparent in the penultimate episode "Rain or Shine," which once again finds its ensemble suffering the consequences of their actions to miserable, interminable ends.

Like last week, this episode opens with another flashback, this time centered on Rue's longtime sponsor Ali. The sequence follows his trajectory from his days as a crack addict with two little girls and a marriage on the rocks to his work as a mentor for other struggling addicts. Although Colman Domingo continues to bring a palpable warmth and lived-in humanity to his character, Levinson's writing continues to be laughable in its fetishistic display of Black pain, grief, death, and tragedy. His fixation on Black people and Black culture isn't surprising, as evidenced by his cartoonish characterizations of Alamo and his crew, but it's really galling in this opening sequence, what with Ali's melodramatic marital strife and the images of his young Black male protégés killing themselves during the pandemic.