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.
