“Jules” uses the relative quiet to work through some nuanced, knotty ideas, the kind not easily heard through Euphoria’s typical sensory overload. “For me, being trans is spiritual,” she explains. “And somewhere along the way, I feel like femininity conquered me.” So she debates giving herself over to the “deepening” of puberty, distancing herself from a version of womanhood she sees as too responsive to men while retaining her own sense of self. “My entire life I’ve been trying to conquer femininity,” she tells the therapist. Jules’s identity certainly influences her experience with hookup apps and romantic fantasies, but it’s also gone largely unstated, at least until now. Her social outsider status, which she shares with Rue, comes instead from her own quirks and passions. By the time she and Rue meet as teenagers, Jules has already come to terms with who she is-and pointedly, none of her new classmates make an issue of it.

(We know exactly how Rue feels, because she tells us Jules is more opaque, often portrayed as the object of Rue’s obsession.) Once she does, she gives voice to feelings and experiences that are genuinely unprecedented for a high school drama, a genre otherwise ridden with clichés.įor starters, Jules is a trans character whose story line centers neither on her transition nor her gender.

For all the traumas we’ve seen Jules endure, from her ups and downs with Rue to getting catfished by a violent sociopath, we’ve never really seen her stop to process them. Hearing Jules speak at length about what she generously calls “a really hard six months”-her accurate synopsis of Euphoria Season 1 is that “a bunch of shit all happened at once”-highlights how novel her vantage is, both within Euphoria and entertainment at large. Like “Rue” and its exploration of recovery, “Jules” expands Euphoria’s purview-but unlike “Rue,” “Jules” builds up a viable contender for co-protagonist of the show going forward. But there are still scenes with partners other than the therapist, set in locations other than her tastefully appointed office. (A cold open showed Rue and Jules together in a city apartment living out a fantasy of connubial bliss.) Produced under coronavirus protocols, “Jules” is still claustrophobic by Euphoria standards, a constraint Levinson leans into it’s a full seven minutes before his camera cuts away from a tight close-up on Schafer’s bare face, a stark departure from the elaborate eye designs that were Jules’s signature in Season 1. Partly as a result of its scope, “Jules” is less formally ostentatious than “Rue,” which was largely an old-fashioned bottle episode set at a single, sparse location. Subtitled “F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob”-“Rue” was captioned “Trouble Don’t Last Always”-“Jules” is framed around the title character’s first session with a new therapist ( Looking’s Lauren Weedman), when she discusses the events of last season, her relationships with Rue and her mother, and whether to stop the puberty blockers she takes via implant as part of her medical transition. Following the season finale’s cliffhanger, when Jules runs away from home and Rue declines the chance to join her, we learn that Jules has returned to Euphoria’s dreary suburb. (Levinson wrote each of Season 1’s eight episodes.) And where its companion was carefully calibrated to feel substantive without advancing the plot, “Jules” does some real scene-setting for a pandemic-postponed Season 2. “Jules” is directed by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson but cowritten and co-executive produced by star Hunter Schafer, another first for the show. The ‘Euphoria’ Special Barely Resembled the Show.

Euphoria special jules