How Kat & Jules Got Lost in Season 2
Euphoria’s second season has been met with divisive reactions from audiences and critics alike. While it delivered a strong premiere and a few highlight episodes, there was a great deal of narrative faltering from that point on. Too much was devoted to Cassie’s choice to start hooking up with her best friend’s boyfriend, and as a result the character grew increasingly unlikable, which was a shame after all the work done with her journey in Season 1. The love triangle between Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), Nate (Jacob Elordi), and Maddy (Alexa Demie) took up a lot of screentime, but didn’t accomplish much outside of villainizing Cassie and reaffirming the fans’ love for Maddy (well-deservedly as far as the latter is concerned).
The other side of Season 2’s narrative focused heavily on Rue’s ongoing struggle with addiction, and provided the high points of the season overall. Zendaya gave a performance that has many sure she’ll be picking up another Emmy for her work this season. Even Lexi (Maude Apatow) finally got a chance to shine, as her bystander status was utilized in her writing a play about her experience of high school. Her relationship with Fezco (Angus Cloud), as well as a glimpse into his backstory, were both some of the more compelling parts of the season as well.
While the narrative often focused on the messy love triangle, or the more compelling aspects of Lexi and Rue’s personal journeys, characters like Jules (Hunter Schafer) and Kat (Barbie Ferreira) unfortunately got more or less pushed to the side. Scenes featuring either of the two often came across as afterthoughts, and many felt that more could have been done with their journeys of figuring out for themselves things like: gender expression, romance, body image, and sexuality.
Rue and Jules left their relationship in Season 1 on uncertain terms: after deciding to run away together, Rue backed out at the last second, so Jules went through with the plan on her own, leaving Rue feeling betrayed and heartbroken. Rue was really the only friend Jules made initially after coming to town; the other friend was Kat. The two get to reconnect in the Season 2 premiere, and Jules apologizes for how wrapped up she’d become in her love life, regretting missing out on her developing friendship with Kat. It’s a nice moment of female friendship, something still relatively rare enough in its positive depiction to warrant a cathartic reaction upon viewing.
Right after their pledge to give more effort to their friendship, Kat and Jules go off to spend time with their respective significant others; Kat is happy in her new relationship with Ethan (Austin Abrams) after all the buildup in Season 1, and Rue and Jules have reconciled and decide to give a proper romantic relationship a shot. And yet, despite all the promise of the first episode, Season 2 doesn’t deliver much where Jules and Kat are concerned.
Instead, Jules becomes part of a storyline that gives more time to Elliott (Dominic Fike) and his SoundCloud advertisement than Jules herself, a character fans had come to know and love. Elliott exists to do everything he can to get between Rue and Jules. His flippant and reductive attitude towards Jules’s gender expression are played for laughs, and the promise of Jules actually getting to continue to reflect on her expression of femininity is squandered in favor of more relationship drama within the love triangle.
Both Rue and Jules are compelling characters on their own, with storylines that deserve individual exploration, which Season 2 definitely delivers where Rue is concerned. In addition to that, the show had the chance to explore a relationship between two young women nowhere near ready for anything resembling a healthy dynamic; instead, we have a love triangle with a new male character inserted who cares little for Rue’s struggle with addiction or Jules’s gender identity, and really never justifies his own introduction.
All the strongest elements of the writing this season where it pertains to Jules is in her relationship to Rue, which sheds light on how addiction can come between a couple. Jules’s choice to sleep with Elliott appears to be in response to finding out Rue relapsed and lied about it. However, this chance to talk about Jules’s self-destructive tendencies, or how she feels that sleeping with men reinforces her femininity more than a relationship with a woman is completely ignored. Even Jules’s handling of Nate giving her the tape of her and Cal (Eric Dane) isn’t given much more than a scene hinting at the connection Jules and Nate shared last season.
The last scene between Rue and Jules caps off their relationship perfectly, despite the missteps along the way. Rue’s struggle with addiction was as powerful as ever, but unfortunately Jules seemed to only exist tangentially to Rue this season. While many rooted for Rue and Jules to make it together, Rue’s observations about herself, which echo Ali’s observations about Rue’s transference of her addiction onto Jules, show a hard-won insight and maturity for the character. And yet, as Rue sweetly kisses Jules’s forehead, one can’t help but wonder what Jules has been up to all this time, as it feels like we’ve hardly seen her in the last few episodes.
Meanwhile, Kat is having some relationship problems with the potential to say a lot about her character’s struggle to find herself. She’s intensely bored with Ethan, who appears to be the only nice guy at their high school. Kat’s issues with her tendency to use fiction as a form of escape to the point where it’s impacting her expectations of her real life are interesting, as are her struggles with the internet’s obsession with body positivity. One of the best scenes of the season takes place in Kat’s mind, as she argues with imaginary Instagram models over how she should feel about her body and her sexuality.
The show starts to dive into Kat’s issues with intimacy, but her eventual breakup with Ethan feels like there are many scenes that were cut that could have detailed just how Kat got to the point where she was pretending to have a brain tumor to break up with her boyfriend. Instead, the scene comes across as flippant and cruel, when Kat’s journey should have been a lot more nuanced than that. The fact that she can’t accept the simple, steadfast love and affection Ethan offers her is interesting, but the show doesn’t ever give the reasoning its due.
Hopefully, Season 3 will strike a better balance amongst the characters, and remember that Jules and Kat have a lot to offer in their respective journeys of self-discovery.
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