The truth about Jules and Rue’s relationship on Euphoria

The conclusion to HBO’s Euphoria Christmas/winter special, “F**k Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” brought the events of the season 1 finale between Rue and Jules full circle.

The two had ended the season tragically parted by disparate decisions: Jules’ choice to runaway as planned and Rue’s choice to stay. But true to Euphoria‘s style, the situation was more complicated than we were led to believe, which is saying something because the circumstances of Jules’ departure were already fraught.

Part two of the special recapped season 1 via Jules’ eye in an opening sequence meant to remind the audience of all she’d been through. While artistic, the choice to start the episode this way also forces the viewer to immediately contend with Jules’ perspective. If you were of the mind that she thought less of Rue than Rue thought of her then this episode, out of the gate, was intent on proving you wrong.

The next near-hour of “F**ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob” is spent not only unpacking Jules’ feelings on Rue but also on how she performs gender, the male gaze, her mother’s addiction, love, the power, and impact of online fantasy, and most importantly, herself.

Euphoria: Jules is complicated and so is her relationship with Rue

Written by Sam Levinson and Hunter Schafer (Jules Vaughn), part two of the Euphoria special is an exploration of the events we didn’t see unfold in season 1. More of a world opening than a retcon, it’s revealed to the audience that it wasn’t only Nate’s catfishing and harassment that had been pushing Jules further and further toward the edge.

She was also dealing with her mother’s brief attempt at reuniting with her to apologize, an action that carried her father’s blessing without him consulting Jules’ feelings on the situation. Regardless of intent, Jules was ambushed and put in a position that prioritized her mother’s progress with battling her addiction over Jules’ own mental well-being.

As such, when she overheard her father on the phone discussing her mother’s latest relapse on Halloween night, she drank as a means of escapism and in doing so hurt Rue. While the emotional pain and threats Jules had endured from Nate were enough to explain the situation, this added layer emphasized that we, and Rue, don’t always know what’s going on with Jules.

If part one of the special, “Trouble Don’t Last Always,” revealed that Rue isn’t always a reliable narrator then part two revealed that Jules doesn’t share as much of herself as we thought. In fact, like most people, she shares versions of herself. Perhaps just the bits of her life that she’s already dealt with, has found peace in, or is comfortable discussing. Which is why the choice of her part of the special taking place in a therapy session makes sense. She is unburdening herself and in doing so welcoming us deeper into her world.

Jules and Rue are two sides of the same coin. They’re both romantic, chaotic, reckless, and destructive. But while Rue is dealing with the way she’d built-up her relationship with Jules in her head, Jules is still working through the reality of what Rue means to her and what that means for her life. She’s not a manic pixie dream girl and Rue isn’t her prince of a love interest who’s going to whisk her away from the pain in her life.

From Jules’ perspective, she had two choices: get out and save herself in the process even if it meant leaving Rue behind or stay and potentially lose her life by her own hand. Nate pushed Jules to that point. The mother who put her in an institute and through conversion therapy, pushed her to that point. And no matter how much Jules loves Rue, the weight of being the person keeping her sober was not helping. So she ran.

Euphoria: Where does that leave Jules and Rue?

“F**ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob” ends with Jules and Rue reuniting briefly. It’s a tentative, awkward moment fueled by the fragile state of their relationship and the uncertainty of their future made plain by Rue running away from Jules minutes after coming to see her. In the context of the episode, it makes sense for the two as Rue alternates between being in Jules’ orbit and being just out of her reach.

Jules has a genuine fear concerning the risk of being in love with a girl she could lose to addiction. But she loves her anyway. While her feelings for Rue are romantic, they’re not fantastical. Unlike the unreality of her connection to Tyler which allowed Jules to project, fantasize, and dream up a life with him that wasn’t grounded in anything but what she could perceive through texts and photos , Jules’ connection with Rue is real.

Her remembrance of their time together is touched by warmth and emotion heightened by getting to know Rue and Rue getting to know her. Jules told the therapist that Rue saw her without pretense, without expectations of what her definition of a girl should be. She saw her outside the lens of the male gaze that some girls view each other through, measuring how another girl embodies what’s considered feminine.

As the audience, we can infer that Jules didn’t construct a version of herself for Rue. She didn’t tell her everything going on with her for fear that Rue would personalize it and assume Jules’ feelings on her mother were her feelings on her. But she didn’t try to be a fantasy, and she certainly wasn’t perfect.

She’s aware that she messed up by leaving Rue the way that she did just as she’s aware that she may not be able to fix what broke between them. But if we’re to take Jules’ definition of puberty being a “broadening, a deepening, [and] a deepening” as a sign of her entering into maturation on her own terms then perhaps we’ll see that reflected in her relationship with Rue. However, it takes two people to work on a relationship and if these two are going to be in each other’s lives then the Euphoria special laid out how that has to work.

Rue has to take the burden of maintaining her sobriety off of Jules’ shoulders because no one can carry that but her and she shouldn’t have put that on Jules. She also has to communicate with Jules about how she’s feeling instead of trying to hide or explain it away. Jules needs to communicate to Rue about how she’s feeling, too, instead of staying silent about her own pain and own difficulties at home.

We’ll have to wait until Euphoria season 2 to see if that happens, but these two are in no way done as shown by an entire special built around them and the emphasis on their importance to each other.

What did you think of part 2 of the Euphoria Christmas/winter special? Serve up your thoughts in the comments below!