‘Euphoria’s’ Riveting Season 2 Finale Soars With Peak Work by Its Female Ensemble
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: Do not read this review if you haven’t watched “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name,” the Season 2 finale of “Euphoria.”When Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie Howard charged the stage during her sister’s self-produced theater work in the season finale of “Euphoria,” the audience at the show’s hypercharged high school was left uncertain as to whether her outburst was part of the play.In the most clever moment of a tricky, meta, exceptional season of television, the answer, of course, was both that it was and was not.
The play, on which the action of the season hinged, was designed to elicit an angry reaction from Cassie, and it achieved its goal; Cassie’s freaking out at playwright Lexi (Maude Apatow) was an inherent plot point, though Lexi couldn’t have predicted the specifics.
What’s more, the play’s intent was to so closely mirror life among the students of Euphoria High as to achieve a sort of seamlessness: Life, for this group of teenagers living through the most outsized emotions imaginable, is lived as publicly as can be imagined, and wild dramatics pass through like weather patterns, as predictably cyclical as they are destructive.
When an entire social cohort is performing, is it really such a stretch to transpose their lives to the stage? I’ve written, previously, about this season of “Euphoria,” choosing to focus in the past on the stories of the men in the Jacobs family.
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