Summary
“20 Hours Missing” proves a solid start to the second season, with the fallout of Marina’s death lingering and a missing person to contend with.
This recap of Elite Season 2, Episode 1, “20 Hours Missing”, contains spoilers. You can check out our spoiler-free review of the entire second season by clicking these words.
There’s always some detective work to be done when returning to a complex series; the usual hasty Googling to remember who killed and/or slept with who. Netflix’s Elite seemed to anticipate that with a decent recap of the first, wildly popular season of the soapy Spanish melodrama, and it’s a good primer for the events that follow in Elite Season 2, Episode 1, “20 Hours Missing.”
The episode’s title is an unsubtle hint that we’ll be dealing with a disappearance here, and the seven subsequent episodes follow the same pattern. By episode’s end we’ll learn who’s missing, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Following Marina’s (Maria Pedraza) death, Nano (Jaime Lorente) is in prison for having committed the crime, while Polo (Álvaro Rico), the real culprit, keeps his cards close to his chest. The murder has reverberated throughout Las Encinas, but there’s little time for mourning. Before anyone knows it, Marina’s stuff is packed up, her family is gone, a new girl takes her place, and class is back in session.
As with the first season, “20 Hours Missing” introduces another multiple-timeline structure, as we leap back and forth between the ongoing present-day case and three months prior. Some students, like Guzmán (Miguel Bernardeau), are making their allegiances clear, once or twice in quite an unhinged way, whereas others, such as Omar (Omar Ayuso) and Ander (Arón Piper), just wish they could return to some kind of normality.
And what’s more normal for teenagers than a party? “20 Hours Missing” features an EDM-fuelled belter of a shindig, where tensions boil over, warnings are given, and, in an impressively disorienting sequence, Christian (Miguel Herrán) is brutally knocked from his bike. In a burgeoning subplot, Omar and Nadia’s (Mina El Hammani) father finds himself in the same hospital. And after promising Nano he’ll do everything he can to find Marina’s real killer, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that it’s Samuel (Itzan Escamilla) who is revealed to be missing.
“20 Hours Missing” is a solid start to the second season, proving itself capable of delivering the style, flair, and melodramatics that made the first outing such a huge hit.
