Euphoria Season 3 arrived with a five year time jump as we saw the characters all grown up, and in different lives. Between a sugar baby, a drug mule, a punching bag and a Hollywood assistant, one arc got everyone’s attention. We’re talking about Cassie Jacobs nee Howard.
From the very first season, Cassie has kind of been a mess and this season, we see her given more authority than before but there’s a thin line between exploitation and empowerment and her arc is slowly blurring thise lines.
Cassie is now engaged to Nate Jacobs, living in the suburbs, and completely addicted to social media and the fame that comes with it. Fame that comes with a cost.
How Euphoria Season 3 has given Cassie a complicated arc
Here is the thing about Cassie that the show has always understood even when the audience does not want to: she has never once made a decision from a stable, grounded place. Every choice she has ever made has come from fear. Fear of being left, fear of being invisible, fear of waking up one day and realizing that nobody finds her interesting anymore.
This season, Cassie is living in a gaudy mansion with Nate, planning a wedding that already looks shaky, and when Nate pushes back on spending fifty thousand dollars on flowers, she reacts by stepping into erotic content creation. Some people read that as growth as she is not waiting around for a man to validate her anymore. She is building something, she is chasing followers, hitting milestones, getting her name out there without anyone’s permission.
But then you look closer, and the cracks are everywhere. Maddy discovers that Cassie wired Nate thirty five thousand dollars out of the money she was supposedly earning for herself. So even when she appears to be building independence, she is still financially propping up the man who makes her feel small. Nate is actively against the OnlyFans idea, and yet Cassie presses forward anyway, framing it as her finally chasing her own dreams and paying for the wedding she has always wanted. That part is real that she is not doing this for him, but she is still doing it to fund a life that revolves entirely around keeping him.
Euphoria Season 3 has made sure that the audience knows that Cassie Howard is not healing but she is not self-destructing in a clean, cinematic way either. The characters in Euphoria Season 3 have not necessarily healed so much as found new, more professionalized ways to channel their dysfunction and that is Cassie in a single sentence.
She is louder now, has more followers, and a ring on her finger, but the girl who cried in a bathtub over a boy who was never going to choose her is still in there, just with better lighting. Whether Euphoria Season 3 will finally give her more healing is still unknown, but if the writers have any desire to, maybe we will see Cassie for the girl she is, and not the spectacle she puts up.
Euphoria Season 3 is streaming on HBO Max.
Edited by Nibir Konwar