Summary
Overcrowded and nonsensical, the seventh season of Elite is a show that hasn’t been good for years operating at its very worst.
No series typifies Netflix better than Elite, a lusty Spanish high-school melodrama that has just debuted its seventh season despite not having been any good for at least three. It’s no secret, of course, that raw viewership is the only real metric that matters, but most shows at least have the decency to put some effort into pleasing their rabid fanbase. No such luck with Elite Season 7, though, which can barely be bothered to make any sense at all.
And yet we’re here, in the seventh season, with an eighth already confirmed. Mercifully, that will apparently be the show’s last, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
How did we get to this point? Well, if nothing else, this latest eight-episode season can tell you. Almost everything that people loved about the previous six outings is here – beautiful people, salacious drama, explicit sex and (sometimes) violence, progressive attitudes to gender and identity, the whole nine. But where it was riveting in the past it’s head-scratchingly stupid in the present, lacking the most essential element of all – a reason for us to care.
Elite Season 7 review and plot summary
Consider all this. The sixth season ended with a number of mysteries still unsolved, or at the very least unknown to certain important characters. But this, for whatever reason, seems entirely secondary to introductions of new students – and reintroductions of old ones – that all seem to amount to more tedious love triangles and little else. Key dynamics, plot points, and even character arcs are abandoned. Even the show’s best tension-building gimmick, that of every season starting with a murder that is subsequently solved through multiple viewpoints in the following episodes, isn’t even employed here.
It doesn’t help that almost none of the cast from the first few seasons are here. Omar returns in Season 7, still grappling with the loss of Samuel, but it feels like a cheap nostalgia play on one hand and an excuse for another love triangle on the other (his love interest, Joel, has eyes for Ivan.)
Lingering subplots from the previous season proceed in odd ways. Isadora and Didac are “officially” separated, mostly because she has problems feeling sexually comfortable, but privately they’re still more or less ongoing. Didac’s brother has secretly bugged his phone to record Isa’s private business shenanigans for petty one-upmanship purposes.
Sara and Raul’s relationship retains the same uncomfortable abuse dynamic, but there’s barely any mention of Sara being responsible for Ivan’s accident, which he has by no means gotten over. A new character named Chloe, who is very pretty but likes to record herself having one-night stands and “leak” the videos, later factors into this subplot in a highly questionable way.
On the subject of questionable, there are several scenes – including a mother and son hooking up – that are clearly there to be questionable without fulfilling any other purpose. They’re indicative of a larger problem, which is that nobody seems to have a reason for doing any of the things they’re doing anymore. It’s all surface-level provocation, a way to ensure drama without having to work for it. You could slap many labels on this season of Elite, but the most damning one is “lazy”.
Elite’s seventh season is the worst yet
Once upon a time, this was a crime show that had some eroticism as a backdrop. Now it’s a tawdry relationship drama in which stuff simply happens for the sake of it happening. It took me several episodes to even realize what the overarching plot was supposed to be, and even then it hardly seemed worth the deduction.
There’s barely a story here, and there’s really no depth at all, not to the setting or the characters or the quasi-themes that sometimes germinate from their personal circumstances. “Style over substance” is cliché royalty, but I’m not even sure Elite is stylish enough these days to justify its use.
It’s just – let’s be frank – tired, the television equivalent of a hangover or a drug comedown. People will watch it, as they always do. But at least with the faint promise that the next season will bring it all to an end, there’s at least some acknowledgment that Elite has run its course – and only several years too late.
What did you think of Elite Season 7? Comment below.
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