SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “The Ballad of the Paladin” “Euphoria” Season 3, Episode 3, now available on HBO Max.
One of the loose threads that define “Euphoria” has been settled, movingly and convincingly.
The action of the first season of “Euphoria” back in 2019 starts with a crime. Jules Vaughn, the new girl at her high school, solicits older men for sex; Cal Jacobs, a seemingly upstanding member of the community, commits an act of statutory rape. The act is captured on tape that haunted the show for its first two seasons, as evidence of Cal’s infidelity and a queer identity he can barely admit to himself, and as a potential catalyst for his fall from grace.
All of this has been played convincingly, throughout the show, by Eric Dane and Hunter Schafer. In the second season, this last actor seemed to disappear from view, and his return, this season, has been welcomed; the former seemed an unlikely addition to this season. Dane, who died in February, announced his ALS diagnosis in 2025.
The third episode of the season, “The Ballad of Paladin”, is not Dane’s first appearance in the season; had appeared briefly the previous week. But it’s a surprisingly solid piece of work from an actor working in unimaginable circumstances, and more importantly, the role as written is never condescending to Dane. Cal, here, attends the wedding of a son he detests and who detests him; he does so under a cloud of shame, as his depredations (though not his relationship with Jules) have been exposed. “Most of you know me,” he says in his toast. “Some of you have probably heard of me. That’s the past.” Throughout the series, and particularly in one spectacular season 2 episode, Cal has lived a kind of fantasy double life, believing he can overcome his desire if he just tries hard enough. Dane imbues his declaration that he has left nonsense behind with a much more evident emotion than his tribute to his son, a painful check on a relationship played by actors committed to honesty.
And when he meets Jules at the wedding’s open bar, Cal is free and unencumbered. “How could I forget?” he declares to Jules. “It’s not every day you get to fuck one of your son’s high school classmates.” (Jules, with some annoyance, reminds Cal that he also recorded her, for which he offers a feeble apology, before making a lewd statement about what he had used the tape for.) In conversation it emerges that Cal was eventually arrested for a different statutory rape case and is a registered sex offender, to which Jules, in a moment of biting humor, declares, “So, you’re one of those red dots?”
The whole conversation goes in this direction. As a low-key oasis in the middle of a very dramatic wedding (featuring some of the most potentially viral performances of Sydney Sweeney’s season so far), it’s written with a clear eye on the person Cal is, but with a refreshing lack of judgment. If anything, both Jules and “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson seem to understand Cal’s inability to understand himself and his need to constantly make excuses. “I wish people wouldn’t think I’m a pedophile,” Cal tells Jules, who reminds him that he likes young people. “But legal!” declares. Until his final moments on the show, it seems, Cal will exist in a state of detachment from whatever he wants and in a haze of fading charm. (He flirts with Jules, and it seems that the intention is not to flirt with her, but simply to exercise a muscle that he uses very little; flirting is what Cal did and does.)
A show that takes gaps of years between seasons provides even more opportunities to evaluate the passage of time, and this season, “Euphoria” has made that passage its explicit theme: All of the characters, five years after where we last saw them, are older, though not all of them have grown up. Fortunately, Jules has, and it’s an act of generosity of Levinson’s writing and Dane’s performance that this conversation shows us how. When Cal informs her that high school represents the best part of one’s life, a period of freedom and possibility for Cal’s entire psychic life to be built around the chase, Jules responds, with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, “I couldn’t disagree more.” She went through hell at Euphoria High in large part because of Cal’s tape, and while her adult life as a “sugar baby” sex worker may not look like what Jules fans would have wanted for her, at least she’s in control of her sexuality, confident in herself, and existing in a surprising state of forgiveness. What a contrast to Cal’s desire for a lost young man who he misremembers as happy; What a place to have arrived at, as Schafer strides across the frame with a confidence that old Jules could only have imagined.
Dane’s work here is moving not only for the candor with which he confronts Cal’s flaws, but also for his own drama-free approach to work, which he demonstrated when I spoke with him a few months after he went public with his diagnosis. Dane then respectfully declined to discuss his health; Noting that he was in the middle of filming “Euphoria,” Dane said, “I’m ready and willing to do almost anything.” His voice, during the show’s third season, is tremulous, but his bearing is firm. And his rant about how youth is beautiful and age is repulsive has real comedic insight behind it and a crystal-clear sense of a character who can’t be forced to change. Jules’ response to that rant, that age brings “perspective,” falls on unlistening ears. But the perspective that the real Dane brought to one of “Euphoria’s” most complicated characters was one of the show’s secret weapons, and his appearance made it clear how much he will be missed.