Euphoria Gets Its Own Version Of Game Of Thrones’ Red Wedding In Season 3 – SlashFilm

Hold off on writing your vows if you haven’t watched “The Ballad of Palladin,” Episode 2 of Season 3 of “Euphoria.” Spoilers ahead!

Weddings on HBO dramas don’t usually go well — which means it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that “Euphoria” Season 3 gets its own version of the Red Wedding from “Game of Thrones.”

To be fair, there’s not a mass murder like there is at that Red Wedding — where Robb Stark (Richard Madden) and his allies are violently killed by enemy forces while celebrating a marriage — on “Euphoria” Season 3. With that said, the nuptials between Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) and Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) definitely don’t go completely as planned, thanks entirely to the fact that Nate has been keeping secrets about his business plans and their financial viability from his new wife and several investors.

The third season of Sam Levinson’s buzzy and controversial series reintroduces us to the cast of characters after a five-year time jump — so after Cassie “stole” Nate from his ex-girlfriend and Cassie’s best friend Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), we find out during the premiere, “Ándale,” that Cassie and Nate are tying the knot. As Cassie decides to take matters into her own hands and make money as an adult content creator to pay for exorbitantly expensive flowers that Nate mocks, Nate, who’s taken over his father’s construction business, is facing challenges of his own. Not only is the project quite clearly delayed, but he also intends to relaunch the company as a whole, and he’s hemorrhaging funds in the process. 

To make matters worse, Nate borrowed money for this project from a pretty dangerous guy named Naz (Jack Topalian), whom we met in Episode 2 … and at his wedding, this comes back to haunt him.

The first time we see Nate on his wedding day in “Euphoria” Season 3, he’s stress-vomiting in a bathroom at the venue while his groomsmen wait for him to finish up. This isn’t a good sign, and things don’t really improve from there. Even though the ceremony goes without a hitch, Naz shows up at the head table to “congratulate” Nate and Cassie on their newlywed bliss and lets it “slip,” obviously on purpose, that Nate owes him quite a bit of money. Cassie, who’s rarely emotionally stable even under normal circumstances, completely freaks out — although this time it’s, admittedly, understandable.

After their highly choreographed and weirdly risqué first dance, Cassie tearfully confronts Nate and ends up popping a champagne cork directly into his eye while she screams about the fact that he’s a “liar.” (Elsewhere at the wedding, Nate and Cassie’s friends and neighbors Heather and Fred, played by Jessica Blair Herman and Justin Sintic, confront the couple separately; turns out they’ve invested their kid’s college fund in Nate’s new construction.) 

It’s not surprising, based on their entire dynamic, that Nate hasn’t shared any of his professional or financial troubles with Cassie — and it’s also unsurprising that he owes Naz half a million dollars that he borrowed and burned, making Cassie go off the rails during her own wedding ceremony. Still, in the limo home, the two make up … only for things to get even worse.

Nate carries a happy Cassie across the threshold of their enormous, tacky mansion (there’s no confirmation that Nate used “investor” money to buy this property, but it seems pretty likely), and everything seems perfectly fine until Naz stops by with a few henchmen and interrupts their first night as man and wife. On Naz’s orders, Nate gets beaten within an inch of his life, and Cassie also gets pushed into their massive staircase and ends up with a bloody nose of her own. As a final message to Nate that he’s crossed the wrong guy, Naz’s henchmen take out some wire cutters and chop off both of his pinky toes.

I’m not usually a big fan of Sydney Sweeney as an actor, and I think that Cassie is an underwritten character whose storyline in Season 3 of “Euphoria” is simply being done better on an entirely different show called “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.” Cassie’s reaction to Nate’s beating and disfigurement, though, is incredibly funny. As she avoids looking at or engaging with the situation and sobs about her bloody nose and her ruined wedding night, a pair of discarded Jimmy Choo bridal shoes in hand and blood running down her face, I couldn’t help but laugh. Plus, it’s not like Nate is some upstanding guy — he pulled a gun on Maddy in Season 2 — so seeing him get this treatment feels pretty good on some level.

The Red Wedding on “Game of Thrones” is bloodier, but Nate and Cassie’s wedding is pretty bad, all things considered — and it certainly seems like things will only get worse for them. “Euphoria” airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and HBO Max.