Season 3 is basically a season-long autopsy of a tragedy that was set in motion the moment Marina died back in Season 1.
This post contains spoilers for Season 3 of Netflix's Elite.
The real question isn't just who did it, it's how everyone got pushed far enough to let it happen in the first place.
Once again we're in flash-forward territory, and it's heavy, claustrophobic, and kind of all over the place. The writers clearly knew where this era of the show needed to end, but getting there meant juggling so many storylines at once that the whole thing kept buckling under its own weight. New characters, new love triangles, new traumas stacked on top of old ones that were never properly dealt with to begin with.
How it kicks off
The season opens at a graduation party gone wrong, a body crashing down through the club's upper level onto the dance floor below while Carla stands nearby, stunned, next to shattered glass. Then it rewinds five months, and the real story starts.
Polo's out on bail, but the case isn't closed. A judge orders a formal confrontation between him and Carla to compare their accounts, and Carla tells him that she's done covering for him, though she'll give him a chance to confess first. Her father, on the other side, has other plans. He blackmails her into staying silent, warning that the truth coming out risks exposing his own dealings and taking her mother's business down with it.
A new face shows up at Nadia's family store: Malick, another Muslim student at Las Encinas, and there's a little chemistry between them. Elsewhere, a postcard from Nano finally arrives, sent from Asilah in Morocco. He's healthy and settling into a new life, though even from a distance he doesn't sound convinced Polo will ever actually face justice for what he did.
Ander finds a growth that worries him enough that Omar pushes him to see a doctor, a thread that's going to matter a lot more soon. Valerio drags his own mess back into frame too, showing up at school strung out on cocaine and living out of his car after getting disowned. Lu, guilty and protective despite everything, invites him to stay the night while their father's away, only for their father to come home early and catch them together. Lu takes responsibility, insisting nothing forced ever happened between them and that she chose it. He doesn't care and tells her that if she wants to live like an adult, she'll be cut off financially and thrown out the moment she turns eighteen.
Samuel makes one more attempt to reach Carla, telling her he loves her no matter what she decides about testifying. She slaps him for it, accusing him of only loving her on the condition that she does what he wants. He tries to push back, insisting the opposite's true.
At the college fair, the pressure keeps stacking. Polo's unraveling, calling Ander over and over only to be ignored, terrified of a future where he's always waiting to get caught. Cayetana still won't get rid of the murder weapon, insisting it's safer sitting in her closet than anywhere else right now. Nadia gets hit with fallout from Lu's leaked video when a university recruiter tells her, impressive résumé or not, the rumors following her around are enough to cost her a scholarship. Ander gets his test results back and breaks down in front of Rebeka. And when Guzman spots Polo casually flipping through an Oxford brochure, the same school that was Marina's dream, something in him snaps and he attacks Polo on the spot, hard enough that the principal threatens expulsion for anyone who steps out of line again.
At the actual confrontation, Polo looks like he's finally about to break and admit everything, until Carla cuts in first and claims the whole accusation was a lie. Guzman turns on Samuel for it, convinced Carla just proved she was never trustworthy to begin with. Samuel doesn't back down. If anything, it hardens his resolve to get Polo caught no matter what it costs. He even tells his own mother to leave for Morocco and be with Nano, choosing to stay behind alone.
Then the timeline snaps back to the future, to the body on the dance floor, and a detail nobody saw coming: someone stabbed him before he ever hit the ground. Carla tells the Inspector she ran straight down after the fall, but what actually happened is she followed a blood trail to the bathroom first and pocketed a broken, bloody bottle before anyone could find it. When the Inspector searches her bag, though, it's gone. Carla insists, shaken, that she could never have hurt him, she loved him. Because the body on the floor isn't a stranger. It's Polo.
The twists and the escalation
Nadia's got real motivation to land the scholarship this time, especially once it comes out that the funding's coming from Polo's mothers, basically a bribe dressed up as opportunity for anyone connected to the case. Lu's chasing the same scholarship for real reasons now too, cut off financially by her father. Nadia tries to pressure her out of the running by threatening to expose her and Valerio, but Lu calls the bluff, and it's Nadia who backs off once she learns just how broke Lu actually is.
Guzman starts playing a longer game with Polo, acting friendlier, letting him believe he's finally been forgiven. He lures Polo to his house, drugs him, ties him up, and plays Marina's old dance footage on a loop while demanding to know where the trophy is. Polo finally cracks and admits he killed her, insists it was an accident, but won't give up the trophy's location. Guzman nearly strangles him before Samuel steps in to pull him off, and what's left is a Guzman who's become scared of what he's capable of.
Samuel's situation gets messier by the episode. His mom leaves to join Nano in Morocco, leaving him alone with rent he can't cover, and Valerio, freshly disowned and living out of his car, moves in once he cleans himself up enough to function. Somewhere in all of it, Samuel also strikes a deal with the police: help take down Rebeka's mother's drug operation in exchange for progress clearing Nano's name. He agrees, not realizing how badly that choice's about to complicate things with Rebeka, who he's also started something real with.
Ander's world changes fast. What starts as a worrying growth turns into a leukemia diagnosis, and he spends weeks trying to hide it before finally telling his mother and Omar. He tries to push Omar away out of guilt, insisting Omar deserves better than watching him get sick, but Omar refuses to leave his side. As the treatment drags on and starts failing to respond the way it should, Ander spirals into isolating himself, eventually lying to Omar about being with someone else just to force him out the door and spare him the ending he thinks is coming.
Someone starts impersonating Polo online, tweeting confessions about Marina's murder and taunting details of her final moments, which throws suspicion onto both Samuel and Guzman. Neither one confirms or denies it. It later comes out that at least one of those tweets, the cruelest one, mocking Polo's suicide attempt, actually came from Cayetana, which nobody in the group finds out for a long time.
Rebeka and Valerio's drug business becomes its own slow-motion disaster. Samuel keeps feeding information to the police behind the scenes, all while Rebeka has no idea he's the reason her mother ends up arrested. Guilt eats at him the whole time, especially once Rebeka and Valerio start dealing again out of financial desperation. It all comes crashing down at a blackout party, where UV paint exposes Samuel's hands as the one who stole evidence meant to identify who tipped off the police, and in the same reveal, Omar and Malick's secret affair, and Nadia saw them. Rebeka ends things with Samuel on the spot. Nadia slaps Malick and walks out.
Carla's spiral runs almost parallel to all of it. Pushed by her father to stay attached to Yeray for the family's financial survival, she starts using heavily to cope, culminating in her nearly drowning in a pool mid-party after taking too much, saved only because Polo happens to notice in time. It's Rebeka, ironically, who sold her the drugs that put her there, and the guilt of that moment's enough to push Rebeka to finally quit dealing, at least for a while.
Polo, Cayetana, and Valerio end up in a relationship together, something that briefly seems to work until Polo's parents catch them and make their disgust with Valerio impossible to ignore, quietly torching Valerio's chances at studying abroad with Polo's help.
Nadia's storyline tangles further when her father essentially forces her into an engagement with Malick to keep the peace, not knowing about the affair. She finds her own way out of it, choosing to go to New York alone rather than live a lie, a decision that comes right after a raw, blistering monologue to her parents about no longer being the daughter they think she is.
By the time graduation approaches, nearly everyone's paying for something. Samuel, Guzman, Valerio, and Rebeka all get expelled over the drug fallout, and the group splinters over who's to blame, with Polo suspected but never confirmed as the one who reported it. Guzman, worn down, admits to Samuel that he's done hating Polo entirely, since hating him clearly hasn't changed anything and Polo seems happier than either of them regardless. Ander, meanwhile, tells his mother that he doesn't have long left and refuses to spend what time remains studying for exams he may not live to take.
At the graduation ceremony itself, everything that's been simmering boils over fast. Yeray forces Teo's hand and installs Carla in charge of the family business as a condition of funding, finally giving her some real power in a life defined by other people controlling her. Polo ends things with Cayetana for good, telling her she never loved him, just the life he could give her. Lu and Nadia win the scholarship together on stage, only for Lu to go off script mid-speech and tear into Polo and his family in front of the entire school, which gets the scholarship pulled entirely by his humiliated mother. Samuel learns the deal he made with police to help Nano was a setup from the start, and that giving up Sandra's location actually got Nano arrested rather than cleared. And that night, over dinner, Polo finally tells his parents the truth: he killed Marina, and he wants it made right by getting Nadia and Lu's scholarship reinstated.
The graduation party that follows brings a strange peace to a few corners of the group, Guzman and Nadia finding their way back to each other for whatever time they have left, Ander and Omar sharing one last real goodbye before Omar leaves for New York with Nadia and Malick. It's the last calm moment before the body hits the dance floor.
How it all wraps up
Polo shows up to graduation for one reason: he wants the trophy from Cayetana so he can turn himself in. She refuses, and when he demands to know if she's the one who sabotaged his chance to transfer abroad, she admits it, telling him it was because she loves him and couldn't let him go. Before he can process that, Lu storms up drunk and throws a drink in his face, blaming him for wrecking her life. He tries to tell her the scholarship's being reinstated but she's past listening.
The night keeps sliding sideways. Omar refuses to even hand Polo a napkin at the bar. Samuel, drunk and spiraling, spots a knife left behind and moves toward Polo with real intent before Guzman physically pulls him off. Lu, still furious, grabs a champagne bottle from Valerio and jokes to Nadia about smashing it over Polo's head. Samuel even asks Rebeka to have someone rough Polo up. She says no.
Guzman intercepts Polo again near Lu and Nadia, telling him to leave before he gets hurt worse than last time. Polo asks, one more time, if Guzman could ever forgive him once he confesses. Guzman tells him that he never will. In the middle of that exchange, Lu drops her champagne bottle and it shatters, and while everyone's distracted picking up the pieces, the broken neck of it gets kicked out of sight across the floor.
Lu follows Polo into the bathroom now holding that broken bottle neck. She unloads on him, blaming him for everything he's taken from her and from Guzman by killing Marina. Polo lashes back with something cruel, echoing almost exactly what he once said to Marina right before he killed her. Lu snaps. She pins him against the wall, and the bottle in her hand goes into his chest. She's horrified the second it happens, pulling it out and begging him to know she didn't mean it. He tells her he knows, but it doesn't stop her from falling apart.
Polo stumbles out bleeding, trying to reach Guzman, but slips and hits a cracked glass barrier that gives way under him. He falls straight through to the dance floor below. Guzman sees it happen and sprints down after him, and Carla, seeing the whole thing, quietly pockets the bottle neck to protect Lu before anyone else notices. By the time Guzman reaches him, there's nothing left to do but hold his hand. He tells Polo he forgives him, the one thing Polo begged for all night and never got, and Polo dies holding onto that.
What follows is the group closing ranks. Carla pulls Samuel aside and tells him the truth: Lu did it, by accident. Valerio points out that everyone already saw her throw a drink at Polo earlier, so no one's going to believe an accident story anyway. So they get to work covering it up together: passing the bottle neck around so everyone's fingerprints are on it, staging the scene to look like suicide, even letting Cayetana, playing grieving girlfriend, get close enough to press Polo's fingers to the weapon herself. She cuts her own hand doing it and doesn't say a word before tossing the bottle onto the dance floor for the police to find.
When the police start questioning everyone, Guzman comes up with the plan that saves them: everyone claims they saw a different person follow Polo into the bathroom. Samuel names Valerio. Valerio names Cayetana. Cayetana names Ander. Ander names Guzman. Guzman names Omar. Omar, of all people, names his own sister. Nadia names Carla. Carla names Rebeka. Rebeka names Lu. Every statement cancels out the next, and the whole timeline turns to static.
In the middle of it, Ander tells Omar the lie about seeing someone else was just that, a lie, meant to push him away so Omar wouldn't have to watch him die. Omar doesn't forgive it easily. He tells Ander he got exactly what he wanted and walks out. Lu, meanwhile, nearly breaks in her own interview, on the verge of confessing everything, until the Inspector needles her about not really being Polo's friend. That's the thing that finally holds her together. She tells the Inspector, through tears, that whatever else was true, Polo was her friend, that all of them were, messy and broken as that family is.
By morning, some things settle. Guzman and Nadia finally kiss, done pretending they don't want each other. Samuel and Carla share a last kiss on the cheek before she leaves to study abroad. Omar leaves with Malick, Ander left standing alone. Rebeka goes home and tells her mother she's done with the drug business for good.
At the station, the case resolves itself when Polo's own parents hand over the real murder weapon, the trophy he used to kill Marina, and lie to the Inspector, claiming Polo confessed before he died rather than let the investigation reopen and risk the truth about Lu coming out. At his funeral, Cayetana turns down his parents' offer to pay for her education, telling them she's done pretending to be something she's not. Carla hands the family winery over to Valerio to run while she's away.
Time passes. Nadia and Omar are about to board a flight to New York when Omar realizes at the last second he can't actually leave Ander behind, and turns back for the hospital instead, arriving just in time to learn Ander's cancer's in remission. Omar's father, finally coming around, refers to Ander as his son's boyfriend without flinching. Lu, cut off by her own parents for good, is taken in by Nadia's family instead. Guzman leaves Nadia a voicemail promising to wait for her.
Two months later, most of them walk back into Las Encinas for one final year: Samuel, Guzman, Rebeka, Omar, Ander. Cayetana isn't among them as a student anymore. She's the school's new janitor, mopping the same halls she once faked her way through.
What worked
Former enemies who chose each other. In the middle of all that mess, the writers actually got two things right this season: the friendship between Nadia and Lu, and the one between Samuel and Guzman. Think about where Samuel and Guzman started, Guzman actively making Samuel's life miserable, treating him like an outsider who had no business being at Las Encinas. Then Marina died, Nano went to prison for something he didn't do, and something shifted. Two people with every reason to hate each other became each other's most reliable allies, a friendship built on shared stubbornness and surviving something awful together. It's one of the few things holding the season up when everything else is falling apart, because it wasn't built on attraction or strategy but on grief and mutual respect. Nadia and Lu land somewhere similar. Two characters who spent two seasons tearing each other apart over the same scholarship, the same boy, the same need to be the best in the room, finally choosing each other once they see how they'd both been held back by the same toxic people and the same exhausting expectations.
The cover-up. For the first time, instead of protecting themselves at each other's expense, the whole group chose to stand together. These people spent three seasons at each other's throats, betrayal after betrayal, cover-up after cover-up, everyone protecting themselves first. And in that moment they finally chose each other instead. It was the only time their bond felt completely real and unforced, and it was the perfect way to close out this chapter of the show.
A couple of smaller notes: the throuple situation with Cayetana, Polo, and Valerio had its moments, three outcasts finding comfort in each other's a compelling idea, and the show almost pulls it off. And Polo at Las Encinas this season is the saddest the show has ever made a character look, which is remarkable given that he's a murderer. That tension, between what he did and what he became afterward, ends up being one of the most interesting things about the whole season.
What didn't
Two new faces, zero reasons to care. Neither new addition this season was worth the screen time. Malick showed up, dated Nadia as a cover, and then started something with Omar behind her back. He wasn't really a character so much as a plot device with a face, someone the writers dropped in specifically to blow up the one relationship in this show that actually deserved better. That's his whole personality. Yeray was somehow even more pointless. His entire purpose was to buy Carla's affection on her father's behalf. He was a rich guy with a name, and the show didn't even bother pretending otherwise.
What they did to Carla was unforgivable. Carla spent two full seasons being the most calculating, self-possessed person in any room she walked into. She managed an entire murder cover-up in real time in the Season 1 finale, ran circles around everyone including Samuel, and kept Polo from completely falling apart while doing it. She was dangerous and controlled and compelling to watch. Then Season 3 handed her a controlling father, a transaction dressed up as a boyfriend, and a pill bottle, and called it a character arc. Watching her get reduced to a business arrangement by her own father, essentially sold off to maintain a family alliance, was depressing. What makes it worse is her arc this season doesn't feel tragic in any meaningful way. It just feels like the writers ran out of ideas for her and stripped away everything that made her interesting. Carla deserved a much better send-off than a plane ticket and a vague sense of freedom.
Drama for the sake of drama. I can't get over what the writers did to Omar and Ander this season. After everything these two survived in Seasons 1 and 2, watching them get dragged through a cheating storyline with no real payoff and no real point was just painful. Clearly the writers had no idea how to write a couple supporting each other through something hard, so they went for the cheapest conflict available instead. Treating them like a disposable plot point, manufacturing drama just to create tension in an already overcrowded season, felt like a betrayal of everything the first two seasons built. The show eventually walks it back and lets them find their way to each other, but the damage was already done.
Overall thoughts
Looking back, the Season 3 finale really did feel like the natural conclusion to the story Elite started with. Marina's death finally got real closure. Most of the main cast actually grew as people. The last scene at the school played like a goodbye to an era, and the collective cover-up in the finale, the first time these people ever truly chose each other over themselves, paid off three seasons of watching people betray each other in one coordinated act of loyalty.
I'm currently watching Season 4, and a big part of me thinks the show should've stopped at Season 3. When you have a cast with this much chemistry and a central mystery that kept you hooked for three seasons, it's almost impossible to recreate that energy once you start swapping people out. Elite was always a three-season story. The original mystery begins with a murder Polo committed and ends with his death. Everything in Season 4 so far doesn't look so good.
My Rating: 7.4
What did you think of the season?
Drop your take in the comments. I also want to know if the collective cover-up in the finale made you emotional or if you saw it coming from a mile away.
More reviews and takes at The Watchlist Chronicles.