This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Netflix's Elite.
Season 1 ended with the truth sitting right there in plain sight and the wrong person still went to prison for it. Season 2 picks up directly in that wreckage and does not let you forget for one second how completely rigged the whole thing was. Nano is behind bars for a murder Polo committed. Carla is holding the cover-up together through sheer will and cold calculation. Samuel is grieving, furious, and running out of legitimate options. And into all of that chaos, Las Encinas welcomes three new students who each bring their own special brand of disaster.
Season 2 premiered on Netflix on September 6, 2019, eight episodes, same structure as before. Flash-forwards drop you back into police interrogations while the season slowly walks you toward another body. It is faster and messier than Season 1, and it works more often than it has any right to. You just have to accept upfront that none of these people behave like actual teenagers. Make your peace with that and it is a gripping watch.
Las Encinas Added Three New Problems This Year
Three new faces walk through the doors of Las Encinas this season, and each one of them arrives carrying their own particular flavor of chaos. Rebeca, rolls in with new money energy and a wall of performative toughness she dares anyone to test. She is working-class, stylish, and completely unbothered by the social hierarchy she just walked into. She shakes up the dynamic fast and makes it clear that having money does not automatically buy you a seat at the table. Her arc brings its own drama, but her real job this season is to remind everyone that outsiders at Las Encinas come in different shapes, and not all of them are as easy to brush off as Samuel was. Then there is Cayetana, who is out here performing rich heiress while her mother is literally mopping the floors of the same school. She has been playing this character so long she has almost convinced herself it is real. Almost. The gap between who she pretends to be and who she actually is makes her the most interesting of the three new additions, not because the show always handles her well, but because that specific lie has real weight behind it. We will absolutely be coming back to her because the finale lands directly in her lap in the most gut-punching way possible.
And finally there is Valerio, played by Jorge Lopez. Lu's chaotic half-brother, who shows up ready to destabilize everything within about three episodes flat. He is fun to watch the same way a fire is fun to watch: impressive, destructive, and impossible to take seriously as an actual human being. The show uses him to inject chaos whenever a scene needs a jumpstart, but he never becomes more than a very stylish grenade. And he is genuinely very stylish. This man walks into a prestigious academic institution in unbuttoned shirts and sunglasses. Every single episode. He is never dressed like someone who has ever thought about attending a class, and somehow it works completely. I respect it.
Samuel vs Carla Is the Only Reason to Watch This Season
The real backbone of Season 2 is Samuel going after Carla, and it was the best thing the show had going. His only witness, Christian, gets taken off the board almost immediately. Carla's father arranges a hit-and-run that puts Christian in a hospital, then ships him off to Switzerland, which is such a specific rich person way to make a problem disappear. With that door shut, Samuel figures out fast that playing by the rules is not going to free his brother. So he stops playing by the rules entirely. He gets close to Carla. Builds trust. Uses every conversation and every stolen moment to chip away at her composure. He is not flirting; he is constructing something, patiently waiting for the right crack to appear.
Meanwhile Carla is running the exact same play in reverse. She keeps him close because close means controllable. The problem neither of them accounted for is that real proximity creates real feelings, and feelings do not care about your strategy. By the halfway point, the whole game has tilted sideways and the wine cellar scenes have this current running through them that makes you forget everyone is supposed to be playing everyone else. It just works. The actors are doing genuinely good work here, and the show is smart enough to let those scenes breathe rather than cutting away the second things get complicated.
The Secret That Quietly Destroyed Everything Around It
Polo is falling apart. Not loudly, not dramatically, just slowly and visibly crumbling under the weight of what he did. The show does a solid job of showing how guilt with nowhere to go just starts rotting everything around the person carrying it. When he finally breaks and confesses to Ander, it feels like relief for about five seconds before you realize what a massive disaster he just created. Because now Ander knows. And that secret is too heavy to carry and too dangerous to pass on, especially to Omar. Watching it hollow Ander out across the season is one of the more believable character deteriorations in the whole show. The warmth just drains out of him completely. And the quiet casualty of all of it is his relationship with Omar, taken apart piece by piece by something Omar is not even allowed to know about.
Also worth pausing on: the locker room scene between Guzman and Nadia. In a season where almost every single character is running some kind of angle, that scene had none of it. Just two people who actually wanted to be honest with each other and could not quite get there. No performance, no strategy, no agenda. Just two people stuck. In the middle of all the noise this season throws at you, that quiet moment hit differently.
The Finale: So Close, and Then Completely Rigged.
Samuel's plan actually works. Carla breaks. The weight of it all, watching an innocent man sit in a cell for something Polo did, keeping a lie alive that has slowly poisoned everything around her, finally becomes too much. She goes to the police. She names Polo. She tells them everything. Polo gets arrested. And for one brief, almost shocking moment, the system is actually working the way it is supposed to. And then Polo walks back into school.
Cayetana, who had found the murder weapon, made a choice. She hid it. She destroyed the evidence. She decided that protecting Polo, a boy she had gotten close to, a boy she watched falling apart at the seams, was worth more than the truth. Without the trophy, Carla's confession does not hold up. The arrest falls apart. Polo walks free. And Cayetana, the girl who spent the entire season desperately performing like she belonged at Las Encinas, finally crossed the line into actually becoming one of them. Not through money or connections. Through covering up a murder. That is either brilliant writing or a coincidence that landed perfectly. Either way it stings like hell.
Where We Left Everyone.
Polo: Free again. Cayetana destroyed the evidence that would have kept him locked up. He just walks back in.
Carla: She confessed to the police and it meant absolutely nothing. That has to be its own kind of devastating.
Nano: Finally released, but a wrongful arrest does not just evaporate. The damage is done. He left Spain for Morocco.
Samuel: Got his brother out, but the method cost him more than he expected, including whatever he and Carla actually became to each other.
Ander: Completely hollowed out. Polo's confession broke something in him that his relationship with Omar is now quietly paying for.
Omar: Being pushed away by Ander for reasons he is not allowed to know.
Cayetana: Burned her integrity to belong somewhere. Still not entirely sure she actually does.
Valerio: Still here. Still underdressed for an academic institution. Still somehow everyone's problem.
Final Verdict and Overall Thoughts
Season 2 was actually decent. The Samuel and Carla dynamic carries the whole thing on its back, the pacing keeps you moving fast enough that the cracks only show up when you actually stop to think, and the finale delivers a gut punch. The show is fully in heightened territory now where everyone does the most extreme version of whatever the plot needs from them, and the trick is just trusting that the audience will keep up. Mostly it works. The new additions work at different levels: Rebeca earns her place immediately, Cayetana becomes essential by the finale, and Valerio is chaos with a collar. The real question heading into Season 3 is whether the show can hold this kind of tension now that Polo is the known quantity rather than the hidden one. A secret is only dangerous while it is still a secret. Now everyone knows. What does the show do with that?
Did Cayetana destroying that evidence make you as furious as it should have?
Drop your take in the comments. And if you somehow feel bad for Polo after all of this, I want to understand your reasoning.
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