‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: Did Rue Survive?

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Stand Still and See,” Season 3 Episode 6 of “Euphoria,” now streaming on HBO Max.

The great cliffhanger of last week’s “Euphoria” was what was to become of Rue (Zendaya) as Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) charged her with a polo mallet. We learn near the start of the latest episode that Alamo narrowly spares her — but that revelation comes only after we learn in a Zendaya-narrated series of flashbacks (shades of “Euphoria” Season 1!) about what Alamo’s early life was like. “The coldest female Alamo ever knew was his mama,” we’re told, and that mama (played by Danielle Deadwyler) is attempting to raise young Alamo on her own, all while taking on a series of unworthy men as some combination of lover and mark. She cycled through beaus, leaving young Alamo with trust issues toward women and a hazy-at-best idea of how a man ought to act.

After that, the plot thickened. Here’s what else happened this week:

Rue’s Got Spirituality Troubles

Rue finally seems to be out of the woods in at least one sense — her having surreptitiously recorded an exchange between Laurie (Martha Kelly) and Alamo has gotten the feds on her side and seems to clear the way for her to be out of legal trouble. And yet she cannot, still, get out of her own way. An at-first-flirtatious conversation with Jules as the latter paints on an easel (while Rue muses to herself, in voiceover, “Against all odds, life was looking okay. Maybe every mistake i made led me to the right place after all”), ends in acrimony after Rue questions Jules’ relationship with her sugar daddy. Jules slaps Rue across the face, and she collides with the canvas, then collapses under it.

But Rue has still bigger fish to fry as the episode proceeds. Seeking some kind of inner peace, she sits down in a church pew and calls her estranged mother, saying, “I guess I just figured if He exists, then so does redemption. If there’s redemption, then there’s salvation. I kind of need that. It’s just – I don’t really want to be stuck with all the mistakes I’ve made.” They part peacefully, if not reconciled.

Something higher seems to be on the show’s mind throughout the episode, too: In the final minutes, Rue is nearly run off the road by an unknown vehicle seeming to have her in its sights, but — once safe from a potentially fatal collision — she walks out of her car and sees a burning bush.

A Star Is Born

Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) gets her star turn on “L.A. Nights,” and it goes better than she might have expected; when she unexpectedly flashes back to the nightmare of her wedding night, her scene partner riffs with her and turns Cassie’s raw emotion into a real performance. Asked by the show’s producer (Sharon Stone) about her background, Cassie declares “I’m a performer that uses my body to tell stories.”

No kidding. It emerges — of course — that Cassie performs on OnlyFans — and the studio demands that Cassie shut her (lucrative) channel down there if she is to have a future in the new plotline she’s generated for herself on “L.A. Nights.” (She’s done so, by the way, over the subtly voiced but strongly felt objections of her sister, Maude Apatow’s Lexi, who works on the show.) Cassie prays on it, calls estranged husband Nate (Jacob Elordi) and finally hits delete, some short time before she gets a delivery in the mail — Nate’s finger, sent to her by his unpaid and unsavory lenders.

Alamo Meets His Match…?

Among the most intriguing aspects of this episode was the continued flirtation between Alamo and Maddy (Alexa Demie). Before Cassie scampered off to “L.A. Nights,” she was Maddy’s management client, and Maddy now also manages Alamo’s dancers (Rosalía and Anna Van Patten), posing those two together with Cassie for photos that prove Maddy’s instinct for provocation. Maddy also seems utterly unfazed by Alamo’s atmosphere of threat, even as, as Rue tells us in the episode-opening narration, Alamo had promised himself in childhood that “for as long as he lived, never again would a bitch outsmart him.” It’s not quite as big as a burning bush or a finger in a box, but it’s one for us to keep an eye on as the season narrows in on its endgame.