EUPHORIA 207 is one of those moments in television that is going to be remembered: a series regular who has been mostly operating in the background, who suddenly steps forward and takes over the show by recreating it onstage for everyone to see. It's just a wild idea, and brilliantly executed. The show does such a great job of weaving back and forth between the events of the play and the "real" events, also switching back and forth on stage between the characters and the actors playing them. It's a dense and yet completely enthralling piece of work.
The thing that most stood out to me was how the episode highlights the concept of narration. Just as Rue narrates most of the events of the series, so in this play within the play episode, Lexie is our narrator, telling the story of life as she sees it. And it's a remarkably different story than Rue's. While she touches on some of the same moments or topics, Lexie is far more interested in family and the relationships amongst her friends than Rue. We barely saw Rue's sister Gia and mother this season before she went nuts on them in 205. One scene, and I'm not sure Gia was even it.
Meanwhile Lexie's story features her relationship with her sister and their father, a character I'm pretty sure we've not heard from before. It also shows us a lot of moments of Rue in the early days of her drug use that we haven't gotten before, and an innocence that we haven't seen.
We learn a lot more about Maddy leaving her parents' home, what that was like for her and the bond it forged between her and Cassie. Cassie sleeping with Nate means a whole different level of bad with that information.
It's all very much like the guy holding an apple in the middle of a room and saying Tell me what you see. The people in front of the apple say, it's an apple. It's red. It's shiny. It's brand new. Meanwhile the people on the other side say who took a bite out of that apple? We've been seeing everything through Rue's eyes, and that's been great. As I've written about here before, it's been a brilliant way of keeping us from really dealing with what is going on in front of us; Rue is the absolute definition of "disarming."
But there's also so much we've missed.
And that insight goes two ways. Consider the ending, that insanely sexualized scene of the football team with her fake-Nate the center. Does Lexie really think she's not being mean when she calls out Nate like that? Or when she's painting Rue wide-eyed with bobtails, just chatting about life up on the roof—is that really how Rue was? Because that Rue seems a lot more like Lexie would want her, and like Lexie sees herself. Or consider Kat, who basically gets nothing to do in the entire play except one moment where she's wearing her kitty-cat outfit. Why isn't there more of her? Maybe because that is literally the only moment she's made any real impression on Lexie.
In a sense the whole episode is about the act of narration. It highlights that every narrator, whether they're a heavily-using drug addict or the sweetest kid in school, is both revealing some things and hiding/ignoring others. Every narrator ultimately is an untrustworthy one, even if they're also in some ways a worthy one.
And for us as writers, 207 is a great example of how narration works, how it should always be illuminating things about characters (versus simply telling the story) and at the same time obscuring other things (whether intentionally on the part of the narrator or unintentionally so).
