[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Euphoria Special Episode Part 1: Rue.]

Euphoria's "Special Episode Part 1: Rue” is about… everything. One of two COVID-era-produced special episodes that take place between Seasons 1 and 2, this first slice of life zeroes in on Rue (Zendaya, more than proving her Emmy win) and Ali (Colman Domingo, just so splendid). When last we saw Rue, the love of her life Jules (Hunter Schafer, the focus of the upcoming "Special Episode Part 2") seemed to have abandoned her, and Rue relapsed into the tempting demons of her drug addiction. As such, Rue called up her sponsor Ali, and the two sit down here for a Christmas Eve diner check-in. What do the two talk about?

Again: Everything. For a little under an hour, the two characters simply sit at this diner table and talk to each other, with just a Jules-featuring overture, a phone call-featuring intermission, and an "Ave Maria"-featuring curtain call to break up this action and highlight the inherent theatricality of the piece. Yes, show creator/writer/director Sam Levinson’s script zeroes in on the seemingly bottomless pit of Rue’s addiction, despair, mental health struggles, and suicidal ideation, and these passages sing with focus, authenticity, genuine pain, and some of the best acting you’ll see on television this year.

But Levinson’s vision here isn’t just one of depth; it’s also of width. Just as you and your friends might conversate about any and everything on your mind during a late-night diner chat (god, remember late-night diner chats?), Ali guides his and Rue’s conversation through an eclectic litany of loaded topics, including the commodification of Black Lives Matter, the trickiness of fraught family dynamics, and the flawed limitations within our generation’s usage of “cancel culture” (this moment, by some small miracle, becoming one of the only compelling pop culture arguments I’ve ever seen that our usage of “cancel culture” might actually be flawed; probably because Levinson and Domingo approach it with honest empathy rather than self-victimizing finger-wagging).

Episodes in the "traditional" first season of Euphoria moved at a breakneck pace, with a staggering amount of setups flying fast and furiously, the camera swiveling and moving around, the editing rhythm non-traditional, stylized, performative. Not so with this special; this long, enveloping conversation is covered with skill and panache, yes, but with unending patience, stillness, comfort in the discomfort; it plays something like Paul Thomas Anderson shooting My Dinner with Andre.

All of this makes for an unorthodox, gripping, reflective, and supremely effective piece of television storytelling, another feather in the cap for the Euphoria team thus far. Until, briefly, the special tells us we’re supposed to feel this way. At this moment, I was suddenly thrown out of sync with the episode, ripped from my earnest engagement with what it was laying down, cynically rolling my eyes.

Rue is at her wit’s end, talking about the purposelessness of her life, the unforgivable nature of her actions, the intention to limit her time on Earth. Ali encourages her to find a “poetry” within these aggravating pieces of mystery, to engage with the inherently un-engageable crises of existence. This idea of “poetry” comes up twice in the episode, as a kind of episodic bookend. The first time, it is clearly tracked to Rue and their conversation, feeling enmeshed within the text itself beautifully. The second time, Levinson reaches just a little too far out to his audience, especially a kind of made-up audience who might not be into this experimentally quiet two-hander version of Euphoria. It’s a defensive, meta-textual plea, and it is quizzical. Here’s Ali’s line in question:

"Thinking about those questions, those ideas, they’re a large part of what makes this life worth living. Right? That’s what I was talking about earlier. You gotta believe in the poetry. The value of two people sitting in a diner on Christmas Eve, talking about life. Addiction. Loss."

God, I want to be all-in on this line, this sentiment, this poetry. But it cannot help but play like a justification for this episode’s structure, which is quite literally two people sitting in a diner on Christmas Eve, talking about life, addiction, and loss. It feels like Levinson patting himself on the back, telling himself it’s okay to write something so explicitly interested in just thinking about ideas, without a ton of narrative momentum or action, and subsequently telling us that we need to be on board and believe in it. Yes, it makes sense to an extent for Ali to tell Rue this at this time, and yes Domingo sells the line as excellently as he can. But even though Domingo is inserting himself within the text as immersively as possible, Levinson’s line can’t help but feel frozen in visible authorial quotes.

This ain’t the first time Euphoria has gone a bit meta; the Season 1 finale ends with an out-and-out music video, while Rue/Zendaya often sang and danced directly to us. But it did so with no abandon, with utter confidence in itself, without feeling the need to ask for permission or forgiveness. I love Euphoria because of its courage, despite its characters’ deep vulnerabilities. I’m here for an hour-long episode of two people talking about everything in a diner; I’m here for its poetry. I’m just not here for the poet explaining why I need to be.

"Euphoria Special Episode Part 1: Rue" is now streaming on HBO Max.