Summary
Elite has been rubbish for years, and Season 8 is no better, but it at least manages to bring some closure to a once-great franchise.
Elite is proof that you can have far too much of a good thing. For a couple of seasons, the Spanish Netflix series was proof that the streamer’s international content strategy was working; it was sexy, dynamic, interesting, and engaging. Then it wasn’t. Eventually, it really wasn’t. Season 8, which has felt like a long time coming after a rubbish Season 7, is the equivalent of sneaking into the franchise’s bedroom while it’s sleeping and pressing a pillow down on its face.
And thank goodness for that, honestly. This is a show well past its use-by date, and the final season doesn’t have any new tricks up its sleeve. Once again revolving around the haves and have-nots of the exclusive Las Encinas, there’s a largely uninteresting murder in the middle of things and the same old questionable decision-making putting the students at dangerous odds with one another.
Elite has been the same for so long that there’s no novelty remaining in any of this. The classism themes have been done to death, every hot-button young-adult socio-political issue has been explored in painstaking depth, and half of the student body has been killed. New characters feel like they’re arriving too late to make much of an impact, and old characters are wheeled out for the sake of nostalgia but without much apparent narrative function.
The overall effect is hollow. This is a show that has been in its death throes for years, but never quite as obviously as in this final season.
Elite has always thrived on its characters, but after so long, even that is an issue. Having to refresh the original cast after the first three seasons was something the show never quite recovered from, and having gone through that process a couple of times since then, we’re now at a point of having no new stories to tell with the new guys and no reason to bring back the old ones.
Elite Season 8 | Image via Netflix
The show tries, though, which is perhaps worse. Nadia is around for basically no reason at all, and even Season 7’s cast largely feels superfluous after having wrapped up their personal arcs already. The new catalysts for this season’s drama are siblings Emilia and Héctor Krawietz, but it’s impossible to imagine how they’d stand out in the now expansive Rolodex of Las Encinas alumni.
The only unique thing about Elite Season 8 is that it has the task of ending the show for good. And, to be fair, it does manage to accomplish that, more or less, but not without some difficulties. The core murder plot this time around is predictable, so the twists and turns feel forced, and you’re basically just sitting around to see how it all concludes and where the characters might end up beyond the finale.
The question, I think, is who cares? For many, this season will just be the final hurdle, the last eight episodes to sit through before you can finally say that you completed Elite, for better or worse. Season 8 won’t justify the hours you’ve spent sitting through the last few seasons, but it does at least feel like an ending.
But it also feels like an ending so far removed from what the series was originally that it holds no real appeal for long-time fans. It’s simply something that had to happen for the sake of streaming contracts and giving us some closure. I hope we can all move on to bigger and better things together after what we’ve been through.
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