‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: The Burning Tree

Is everything gonna be alright? This question, more than any other, dominates this episode of Euphoria. Indeed, it dominates the whole season, an eight-episode answer to the question of whether the Euphoria gang would get out of high school with their heads on straight. (Or on at all.) The answer, as it turns out, is no, they’re all varying degrees of mess. Is that what they’re all doomed to remain, or will it all work out for them in the end?

The question of who gets their happy ending comes up directly on several occasions throughout the episode. Things worked out alright for Alamo’s beautiful, doting, working-class mother (a mesmerizing Danielle Deadwyler) — but not for Alamo himself. As a kid (played by Ca’ron Jaden Coleman), Alamo adored Preston (Kwame Patterson), a friendly and religious man his mom began dating while he awaited a major cash settlement following a factory explosion that badly disfigured him. The settlement is apparently huge enough for a small fortune in jewelry and 1970s home furnishings, as well as private-school tuition for Alamo. The fact that his mom seems unaware whether he needs a uniform is our first sign that something is off.

It’s all a long con, Alamo discovers. While they’re away for a weekend at the shore, their place gets robbed down to the floorboards…only for all of it to show up in the home of his mom’s real boyfriend, who stole it as part of her longterm plan to seduce Preston and take him for everything he had. Alamo builds an empire on the hatred for women he develops as a result of his mother’s actions. His happy ending comes at women’s expense, or else it wouldn’t make him happy.

Cassie, meanwhile, is deeply…okay not deeply traumatized, since nothing about her is deep, but she’s messed up by witnessing the assault on her dipshit husband Nate by his loan shark’s minion Artur (Matthew Willig). Having already snipped off a toe and a finger (more on that in a moment), the goon tracks Nate down once again at his construction site, where he’s stomping all those endangered flowers to death while screaming the f-slur. Apparently the amputations will continue until his bottom line improves.

But Cassie doesn’t find out about any of that until the end of the episode, when she receives Nate’s severed, partially decomposed finger in the mail with a note to ANSWER YOUR PHONE. Until then, at least, PTSD pays. When a line in her L.A. Nights script, “the honeymoon is over,” triggers her memories of the incident, she goes off on a wild, tear-streaked monologue about it that the creative team — including her co-star, Dylan Reid (Homer Gere), who seamlessly rolls with it — think is improv.

Patti, Lexi’s boss, creates a whole new character for her based on the things she said and on her own backstory, which her increasingly insufferable sister Lexi spills to her boss in hopes of getting Cassie fired. She even gives Lexi the assignment of writing the new script. “Thank you, God!” Cassie yells on the Warner Bros. backlot. She believes the Almighty is on her side. At the time, though, she doesn’t know that Lexi may kill her character off on the show, or that Artur might kill Nate off for real — especially now that she’s been forced to shut down her lucrative OnlyFans to get the legit acting job.

Will any of this bother Madi, who helped make Cassie a star? Unclear. She’s already moving on to Magick and Kitty, her new business partner Alamo’s star dancers. Convinced she’s a big girl who can take care of herself, she ignores Rue’s warnings about the kind of guy she’s dealing with, and pisses him off when she innocently suggests giving the dancers a day off so she can get to know them better. Bishop the creepy enforcer, of all people, stands up for her. That’s quite a guardian angel to have looking out for you.

Jules is even less interested in hearing Rue’s lifestyle advice than Madi is. When the two women discuss the potential of a life together — kids, “old-fashioned American problems,” the dream — Jules dismisses this as a fantasy. (To be fair, she’s right to be concerned that Rue’s not ready to be a parent. ) 

Isn’t Jules’s own life a fantasy, though, Rue asks? She’s locked away in Ellis’s penthouse fuckpad like a princess in a tower, making her paintings and “waiting for him to fuck you,” as Rue coldly puts it. When she starts in on how the guy is never gonna leave his wife for Jules even if she does approve of the current arrangement, Jules straight up slaps her, sending her ass over teakettle into Jules’s latest blood-red work of art. “I suggest you get the fuck out of my painting,” Jules says, storming off. 

It’s a painfully funny moment, in which the slapstick comedy and wordplay doesn’t actually take any of the sting out of their falling out. Both women feel the other one believes in a happy ending that’s just an illusion, and that’s hard to reconcile.  

Reconciliation does not prove impossible, however. In a stunningly filmed scene inside a church, Rue gets a surprise call from Mom — not “Mom,” the number she’s got the DEA saved in her phone under, but her actual mother, Leslie (a returning Nina King). The two women seem sincere in their desire to start fresh, if realistic about how difficult this will be, and in Leslie’s case aware of how often Rue has relapsed and lied about it in the past. 

But there’s a catch — a Bishop-shaped catch. Rue managed to talk her way out of execution-by-croquet-mallet by talking her old friend Faye into helping her make a 3d-printed copy of the key to her awful Nazi boyfriend Wade’s safe, where they’re keeping Alamo’s money and drugs. The drugs are laxatives, as Faye finds out the hard way. (Actor Chloe Cherry is a good sport about all the audible and visible shitting she’s been doing this season.) The money, though, is real, and Alamo wants it back, even as he’s doing spit-swear handshakes with Laurie over their newly brokered truce and smuggling arrangement. 

By now, Rue is nearly home free, since she recorded the meeting for the DEA and thus got them more than enough intel to get herself off the hook. But Alamo insists that Rue be the one to carry out her own plan and rob the safe herself. Before she sets out, Bishop tells her the creepy story of Alamo’s pet python, which once belonged to a stripper it was preparing to eat before her vet tipped her off as to its plans. 

“You never really know a motherfucker’s true intentions” is the moral of the story, Bishop says…then mentions that Rue’s mother, Leslie, seemed nice when he told her how great Rue was doing over the phone the other day. If the rat he makes her feed to the snake wasn’t clue enough that he still thinks she’s betrayed them, the implicit threat to her family seals it. 

In church, Rue tells her mother that she believes in God, because God’s existence implies the existence of redemption and salvation, both of which she desperately wants. Earlier in the season she told Alamo that God brought her to him to save her from Laurie. Will He now intervene to save her from Alamo, too?

He does appear to have plans for her, that’s for sure. When her Bible CD starts skipping unaccountably, she nearly drives into the path of a massive truck lit to look like something from Neon Hell. She swerves off the road…and watches a tree catch fire, a modern-day burning bush communicating the will of the Divine.

Euphoria is, above all, an impressionistic show, in which sound and vision often shift to show us the world as not as it is, but as it feels to those living in it. In that sense, the burning tree is no different than Cassie the Topless Kaiju. An image like this, however, inspires awe of a totally different sort. In surviving the near-crash, Rue once again feels God looking out for her, and the burning tree symbolizes His presence as the burning bush once did to Moses.

Which is why the burning tree should worry Rue, not reassure her. God spoke to Moses, yes, and watched over him and his people for years. But Moses died before reaching the promised land. Everything was alright, for a while anyway, but not for the person God appeared to in flames.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.