Jules’ thinking out loud throws certain moments from the past season into sharp relief - most importantly, the night she boarded a train without Rue after drunkenly fantasizing about them running away together. The camera doesn’t linger on them for long before cutting back to Jules, often with tight shots that force us to pay attention to every facial change and to ruminate on the thought that caused it. It’s not until we are six minutes in that the camera reveals to us the source of the gentle yet prying questions: a therapist seated in a plush chair a few feet away from her. Tears well in her eye just as it cuts back to her face. A simple prompt from an off-screen voice leads to a gorgeous sequence where the frame is just Jules’ eye, her iris superimposed with a montage of images from the past six months since her move. The piece starts with a close-up, a painful expression painted on her face. The cinematography asserts an exclusive focus on Jules and her inner world. The give-and-take between the heavy and light helps build up and mediate tension, throwing the viewer out of balance and bringing everything back to center again. Whenever things get too heavy, she slips a joke or curse in. For example, when Jules is discussing the proclivity of girls to take down other girls and the constant lingering, analytical female gaze, she follows with “it would be a kind of sensual experience if it weren’t so fucking terrifying.” In true Jules fashion, notions of gender identity, self-criticism, and motherhood are all explored through the lens of her experiences with her transition, lack of female friendship, soul connection with Rue, and fraught family relationships. The writing smoothly integrates Jules’ hyper-casual speaking style with subject matter she hasn’t broached before, making for a natural delivery.
Over the course of 45 minutes, she reveals parts of herself a bit at a time - peeling away, as she would say, “the million layers of not me.” In this episode, we drop into deep water and are given a window into Jules’ mind. As this episode shows, the last season was only skimming the surface of her character. Up until this episode, Jules is the new girl in town, carrying herself well as she navigates the suburbs with optimism and strength. Still, the episode centers around too much sitting around and talking to be engaging for an audience used to swirling pans and frenetic visual collages. This episode markedly improves on the first special episode, which was almost exclusively conversation, opting for flashbacks and imaginative dream sequences to provide closure and set up the forthcoming second season. It’s a radical change from the dynamic, ever-changing, phantasmagoric style that makes “Euphoria,” well, “Euphoria.” Whereas Part One features Rue and Ali’s back and forth after the incident with Jules at the train station and Rue’s relapse, the second and most recent release spotlights Jules as she uses the Christmas holiday to reflect on the past year - thus, for the first time in the show’s short history, telling the story from a perspective other than Rue’s. Since both pieces are grounded in a specific space - a diner for part one and a therapist’s office for part two - their cinematography is quite stationary and, at times, incredibly claustrophobic.
In a sharp departure from its kaleidoscopic and sensual first season, the “Euphoria” special episodes, released over the past two months, focus on the show’s two central characters Rue (Zendaya) and Jules (Hunter Schafer).
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