Euphoria’s Lexi Gets Her Revenge With Tea-Spilling School Play—But Fexi Is in Deep Trouble
Much of Euphoria Season 2 has been undermined by a lack of structure and general uncertainty about what story it wants to tell. With only one episode left, it’s hard to guess any one conclusion or whether certain plot points will even be addressed in the finale. One thing viewers have been able to look forward to, however, is Lexi’s autobiographical school play and what it will supposedly reveal about who she is beyond an observer of everyone else’s drama.
Unfortunately, her production, which takes up the majority of “The Theater And Its Double,” only exposes the overarching defects in Sam Levinson’s storytelling this season, primarily his inability to look beyond the tragic pasts he’s sketched out for his characters and imagine a compelling present and future.
Last December, The New Yorker published an essay by Parul Sehgal called “The Case Against The Trauma Plot” that went viral. It analyzed how the invocation of trauma in works of art can reduce a character to a set of symptoms, limiting the possibilities of their development and an entire story. This article came to mind several times watching this episode, which is mostly background that we’ve witnessed before and even some repeated moments from the past two episodes.