Sydney Sweeney's 'Godzilla' Scene Has Euphoria Fans All Saying The Same Thing

Don't terrorize any major cities as Godzilla if you haven't seen "Euphoria" Season 3, Episode 5, "The Little Piggy." Spoilers ahead!

During the opening of "This Little Piggy," itself the fifth episode of the third season of the HBO series "Euphoria," Sydney Sweeney's Cassie Howard becomes larger than life, and I mean that literally. After a montage of Cassie filming hours upon hours of footage as an adult media creator (aided by her high school bestie Maddy Perez, an aspiring manager played wryly by Alexa Demie), we watch her leopard-print outfit start to burst at the seams and explode, and she gets bigger and bigger. Now a giant like Godzilla, Cassie starts advancing upon a cartoonishly small version of Los Angeles when she happens upon a man in an office building who's, uh, watching one of her videos while spending some time with himself. 

Cassie doesn't speak as she surveys this tiny man pleasuring himself to one of her videos. Instead, she wordlessly presses her body right up against the window, causing an explosion and, presumably, killing the guy. The metaphorical meaning of it all is clear: As Cassie becomes more and more successful as an adult media creator under Maddy's tutelage, she's getting larger than life, and even though I think that's pretty simplistic imagery from showrunner Sam Levinson, I see the point.

Still, fans are reacting on the Internet, as they are wont to do, and they're asking some reasonable questions about this sequence — namely, what it actually accomplishes, and how we're supposed to better understand Sweeney's Cassie after an interminably long and super literal representation of her professional success. (This also feels like a good time to note that "Margo's Got Money Troubles" over on Apple TV is doing a storyline similar to Cassie's way better.)

Over on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), users are pretty uniformly roasting Sam Levinson's extremely direct approach to showing how Cassie Howard is becoming too big to ignore. As user @JozuJoestarr bluntly put it, "They got Sydney Sweeney doing Godzilla p*rn on Euphoria. wrap this sh** up man." It sure seems like @ca11mebiles agreed, writing, "this sequence was scarier than ACTUAL godzilla."

Elsewhere, fans of "Euphoria" wondered how we got to this scene after previous seasons of the series. "[H]ow'd we go from euphoria s2 ep5 intro giving us an emmy award winning performance by zendaya to s3 ep5 intro of cassie walking through the city as a giant and shoving her t*ts into the window of a building for a guy to get off[?]" @chappellofliv asked, while @selenalovestory was even more direct: "WHY IS CASSIE STUFFING HUGE D*LDOS AND DEMOLISHING A SKYSCRAPER AS A GIANTESS WITH HER T*TS? THIS SEASON IS AWFUL."

Another question I saw a lot was, essentially, why? " I know Euphoria has always been disturbing and s*xual, but these forced Cassie scenes are nasty as hell to me. Every episode they push it more and more to the extreme for no reason," @wigsandtea wrote. "What was even the point of her being a giant smashing her b**bs through windows? They're literally wasting money and energy on scenes that add absolutely nothing." There's also a post from @theepopprince that got right to the point: "what is the point of this long ass scene with cassie being a giant or whatever like[?]" Then there's @FlynnWhitaker, who referenced 2023's "Barbie" by writing, "Sam Levinson watching the opening scene of Barbie and immediately thinking 'what if it was giant Cassie as a porn star showing her boobs[?]'"

Social media chatter about "Euphoria" — especially its third season — has been pretty rampant and largely critical, and honestly? I agree with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing. Typically, I don't turn to X, a website that I still stubbornly call Twitter, for intellectual or nuanced takes, but when it comes to "Euphoria," the knee-jerk reactions about how nonsensical this show has gotten are actually quite welcome. Frankly, if Sam Levinson is going to give us this hyper-sexualized slop, his audiences reserve the right to yell on the Internet about how and why it sucks.

All of that is to say that, while I ostensibly understand what Levinson was going for by having a giant Godzilla Cassie kill a guy with her boobs or whatever, he still managed to make it feel embarrassing, exploitative, and even boring. (A lot of people online are right in saying that this scene goes on for way, way too long as well.) It's also no secret that, throughout "Euphoria" Season 3, Sydney Sweeney has been put through a number of humiliation rituals on Levinson's behalf, whether she's spreading her legs to show off a diaper and popping a pacifier into her mouth as part of an "erotic" photoshoot or melting down after her disastrous wedding to the debt-ridden Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). Pretty much everything Cassie does and says in the third (and hopefully final) season of "Euphoria" tends to be just straight-up embarrassing, and her enormous stroll through Los Angeles is no exception. 

If you want, you can go watch "Euphoria" on HBO Max now.