Few things going on for me with the show, the production value and budget is first class, because it's HBO, and I appreciate it, but I wonder if at times, the high gloss is propping up a show that is a little too draped in cliches to be as good as I may want to be.
Yet, the themes of teenage drug use and addiction hit me really hard, even my hard starts to race, maybe it's just that I am 33 now, but watching those scenes are uncomfortable for me, and that means the show is working. The topicality and shows finger near to the pulse of youth current/culture is to be admired, if a little on the nose at times, from fat shaming, fentanyl, blackout sex, date rape, (some of these are obviously universal, and omnipresent in history) but it veers into exploitation and near absurdity.
Which takes me to the episodes maybe most ridiculous scene, I appreciate the way the scene winds up the tension, but the scene with Rue's boy and the dealer is beyond cliche and unbelievable. I haven't done the research but I am still unsure where this show takes place, but I really doubt a character like Rue's primary drug source would be a full trapped out dude in sweatpants, in some sort of motel room safehouse with walki talki's and a 7,000 re/up, dude is selling to suburban kids like a Future video. Now, the relationship between dealer and addict, is nicely done, but the scene where the subhuman drug dealer does a drop, while looking like a cross between Bane and a Samoan body builder in the South Pacific, spitting out menacing lines and threats, is cartoonish. And, without the trappings of the HBO budget, and the tight direction, that scene would collapse.
The shows very soul seems to be so vindictive and blackhearted, it's hard to give it to the benefit of the doubt, of tackling real issues, and seems to more use those issues for a morbid backdrop, on which to hang these depraved people. Painting a high schooler as a rapist is one thing, but painting a high schooler as an actual mission orientated homosexual rapist, is a bit much to believe, and begs the question why we are asked to believe it in the first place? I can speak first hand to drugs and sex and sexual assault (observed and known, not participant) in high school, there is enough wrenching material without these kinds of scenarios.
How her sister on here 
with a better body tho
