54 Thoughts I Had About Season 3, Episode 4 of ‘Euphoria’

Reported by Vogue.

Episode 4 of Euphoria Season 3 doesn't hit the operatic highs of last week's wedding chaos — and it knows it. "Kitty Likes to Dance" is a quieter, stranger hour: part character study, part workplace comedy, part slow-burn dread. But according to Vogue, what it lacks in spectacle it makes up for in the details, and this season's details are genuinely doing something.

The Rue-and-cops cold open picks up exactly where we left off — her getting pulled over, fanny pack and all, radiating a very specific Miami Vice energy that should not work as well as it does. Alamo telling her she looks like shit is both brutal and correct. Meanwhile, Nate surfaces post-beating, apparently owing someone a million dollars, and somehow still managing to be the least interesting person in any scene he's in. The show seems to know this. So does Cassie, who has officially stopped caring what happens to him — a character development that deserves a standing ovation.

The Makeover Industrial Complex

The episode's real pulse lives in the Jules storyline, which has taken a genuinely unhinged turn: she's accidentally tanked a TV production by painting a phallus-heavy George Seurat knockoff for a set, costing the show $191,000 after an hour-and-a-half shoot ran $56,000 alone. It's absurd, it's very Los Angeles, and Din Tai Fung boxes are involved. Lexi's role in all of this remains unclear, but her delivery of the word "trans" in a whisper is a whole separate conversation. Elsewhere, Maddy is shepherding Cassie out of that piss-yellow mansion and into something resembling a personality again — the driving scarf alone justifies the episode's runtime.

The Maddy-Cassie reunion is exactly what it needed to be: chaotic, a little cruel, deeply familiar. Maddy ditching Cassie for approximately twenty minutes only to circle back is the most accurate depiction of female friendship this show has ever produced. Cassie announcing "Oh my God, I love coke!" with genuine joy is, against all odds, a bar. And Rosalía — bejeweled neck brace, random cutaways, finally getting some actual plot — closes things out with a strip club robbery that arrives just when the episode needs a jolt of adrenaline.

This is Euphoria operating at a lower temperature than usual, but its instincts for texture — the wrong outfits, the right one-liners, the sympathy you somehow feel at a parrot funeral — are sharper than ever. Fashion, chaos, and moral ambiguity remain the show's native language, and Season 3 is still fluent.

Read the original at Vogue.