Why Is ‘Euphoria’ Season 2 Tossing Kat to the Side?

During this past week’s episode of Euphoria, Rue briefly abandons her role as series narrator for one petty aside. “You know what? Actually, I don’t want to talk about Jules and Elliott. Fuck them,” she says, drawing the plot away from her estranged ex-girlfriend and drug buddy. Ironically, that aside is emblematic of how Season 2 is treating another character: Kat (Barbie Ferreira), who writer-director Sam Levinson has disappeared from Euphoria in increasingly confounding ways.

Ferreira gave a breakout performance last season as Kat, the acerbic best friend-turned-cam girl. For a show that claims to capture Gen Z life, her story as a very-online teen struggling to translate that digital confidence into real life was easily one of Euphoria‘s more relatable threads. And given that explorations of plus-size characters’ sexualities and coming-of-age journeys are still all too rare on TV, Kat’s storyline felt particularly refreshing.

By the season finale, Kat entered into a relationship with her sweet classmate Ethan, putting an end to several episodes’ worth of will they/won’t they tension. But by the time Season 2 rolled around, Kat was uneasy. Ethan seems like the perfect boyfriend, so why did she still feel dissatisfied and insecure?

A better version of this season could’ve extrapolated on how Kat’s perceptions of good sex and romance have been distorted by spending most of her her childhood online, or how teenagers can weaponize seemingly perfect relationships to earn acceptance. (“Kat, stop flaunting your healthy, non-abusive, wonderful relationship,” Maddy tells her at one point. “It’s actually triggering.”)

But that hasn’t happened, because Kat has just been absent from approximately 85% of this season. All we’ve really gotten are a pair of fun hallucinatory scenes illustrating her teen angst — a Game of Thrones Dothraki soldier “conquering” her after murdering Ethan and a cult of influencers vapidly advising her to love herself, respectively. Other than that, she only appears onscreen to aid Maddy in her war against Cassie, or spend all of 30 seconds moping over her relationship. Vape girl is rivaling her for screen time!

If the first five episodes of Season 2 were disappointing for Kat fans, episode 6 was downright infuriating. We finally caught up with her and Ethan during an awkward lunch date, where she gleefully called lifelong friend Cassie a cunt, and ignored her boyfriend after he gave up play practice for her.

Rather than simply telling Ethan she wasn’t feeling it, Kat bizarrely tried to convince him that she has a terminal brain disorder. When he caught her in this obvious lie, she defensively accused him of gaslighting her.

“Is this some sort of manipulation tactic you learned on some sort of fucking incel Reddit forum?” she asks. Wait…what?! It’s one thing to drastically minimize Kat’s screen time, but to make her cartoonishly cruel and manipulative when she actually does show up is absurd.

It doesn’t help that Kat’s mind-boggling characterization feeds into a viral rumor that the character has been underwritten because Ferreira and Levinson had a falling out. In January, gossip account DeuxMoi shared an unsubstantiated tip claiming that “some of the actors, especially Barbie Ferreira, were not vibing with [Sam’s] vision… Barbie got into it with him on set and left one day… He then cut a lot of her lines.”

Ferreira’s absence from the Jan. 5 red carpet only added fuel to the fire. Rumors about the alleged feud have become so prevalent that they were even referenced in a recent The Cut profile.

For her part, Ferreira said, “Kat’s journey this season is a little more internal and a little mysterious to the audience. She is secretly going through a lot of existential crises. She loses her marbles a little bit — just like everyone else in this season. The theme is everyone’s going a little crazy.”

Everyone is going a little crazy, but the character assassination Kat has undergone smacks of something else entirely. It’s a shame, because there are still shreds of wasted potential within her character arc.

The scene where Kat hallucinates picture-perfect influencers screaming at her to simply love herself was a brilliant representation of how the shallow positivity culture prevalent on Instagram can actually harm people by promising “quick fixes” to genuinely complicated issues.

And had that lunch breakup from hell been handled more carefully, it could’ve been a clever denunciation of the ways in which serious psychological terms like “gaslighting” and “love bombing” are often misused online to pathologize people’s dating problems (a la West Elm Caleb).

But without the proper attention and character development, the moment seems more like a jab at Kat than anything else. Euphoria is quickly becoming one of television’s iconic teen dramas. So why is it so eager to degrade one of its main players?

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