Half the original cast was gone, the internet was already in meltdown mode, and I went in bracing myself. Turns out I wasn't bracing hard enough.
As you know several of the original cast had left the show. People who had been there from the very beginning, characters who were the backbone of what made Elite worth watching in the first place. That kind of shakeup is never not worrying. I had already seen the noise online: Reddit threads, Twitter arguments, TikTok videos of people completely losing it over this season. But internet reactions are always dialed up to eleven. You can never fully trust the doomsday energy of a fandom mid-crisis. So I told myself: surely it can't be that bad. This is Elite. The show knows what it's doing.
Right?
Right??
This post contains spoilers for Season 4 of Netflix's Elite.
How it kicks off
Season 4 opens with a flash forward to New Year's Eve, fireworks going off in the background while Guzman sits frozen in a chair, and somewhere nearby a girl is pulled from a lake, unconscious, maybe dead. A police officer wants answers he doesn't have yet. Then it rewinds to the start of the school year, and you find out how everyone gets there.
Las Encinas gets a new principal right out of the gate: Benjamín Blanco, a wealthy CEO who fires Azucena on her very first day back, then stands in front of the whole school promising a "new chapter" built on discipline, excellence, and merit. Translation: Samuel and Omar are told they now have to sit an advanced placement exam just to prove they still deserve their scholarships, a hurdle nobody else on scholarship faced before.
Benjamín brings three kids with him, and each one immediately tangles into the group. Ari catches both Guzman's and Samuel's attention immediately, sharp and unreadable in a way that makes her hard to pin down from the jump. Patrick is openly gay and starts flirting with Ander almost the second they meet, though the two nearly come to blows in class when Patrick defends his father over the exam situation. Mencía zeroes in on Rebeka, flirting hard enough that Rebeka, despite still refusing to speak to Samuel after last year's betrayal, actually takes the bait.
The exam sparks a real protest, students sitting in front of the school entrance to block Benjamín and his kids from walking in. Mencía, trying to impress Rebeka, joins the sit-in herself, furious to her father and siblings. She also hands the group useful intel: Benjamín's one weakness is Ari, the only person he actually listens to. That sends Guzman off to work Ari directly, hoping to get her to talk her father into scrapping the exam.
Rebeka and Mencía's flirtation turns into an actual date, drinks at a club, real chemistry, until Rebeka gets cold feet mid-hookup and bails without explanation. Mencía doesn't make it home until morning, which earns her a furious lecture from her father and siblings about being reckless.
Guzman takes Ari out too, opening up about losing Marina and Polo, and Ari, who's lost her own mother, meets him with real understanding rather than pity. It works. She agrees to talk to her father. But it costs Mencía something: cut off financially by Benjamín after she blows off a family dinner in a mood, she retaliates by telling Ari the truth, that Guzman only took her out to manipulate the exam situation.
Mencía spirals from there, wandering into a bar alone after Rebeka stands her up, where an older man named Armando buys her drinks and, it turns out, a lot more. Meanwhile Patrick offers Omar the exam answers in exchange for Ander joining him at a gay club that night. Omar hesitates, knowing Ari should be the real target, but Ander, tempted, goes anyway. Samuel makes his own desperate move too, cornering Benjamín at the restaurant where he bartends to beg him to drop the exam requirement for Omar, and gets fired on the spot for it. Benjamín almost softens, until Ari talks him out of it.
At the club, things between Ander and Patrick heat up fast, clothes coming off, right up until Patrick tries to go further and Ander shuts it down, insisting he'd never betray Omar. He storms out. Across town, Armando reveals he's a wealthy businessman and offers Mencía a room in a luxury hotel, free, no strings attached, or so it seems. She sleeps with him that night, and wakes up to find cash left at her bedside.
Exam day arrives, and Patrick slips Omar the answers anyway. Omar hesitates but uses them, scoring a 97, while Samuel passes on his own merit, both scholarships secured. Ari isn't fooled by any of it. She pulls Samuel and Guzman aside and makes it clear she sees exactly what they tried to do.
Then it cuts back to New Year's Eve, and the girl in the lake finally has a name. It's Ari. Paramedics work frantically to revive her while everyone watches, frozen, until a voice crackles through on a radio: she's still alive.
The twists and the escalation
Prince Phillipe's arrival gets treated like a state visit, security cameras and metal detectors installed just for him, all courtesy of a father back home who shipped him off to get away from unspecified rumors. Cayetana's instantly starstruck, rattling off his credentials to anyone who'll listen, though Ari wastes no time outing her as the school janitor in front of him, humiliating her before Phillipe can even respond. He tells her privately he doesn't care about her social class. It's the first hint of charm that turns out to be doing a lot of covering.
Mencía's still seeing Armando behind everyone's back, insisting each time is the last, though it never is. Sandra (Rebeka's mom) spots the two of them together and warns Mencía directly that Armando's known for going after young girls this way. Mencía brushes it off completely.
The Guzman, Samuel, and Ari triangle starts forming not too long after. Guzman admits he's attracted to Ari but tells her he's with Nadia, and the tension between him and Samuel over her doesn't take long to surface. Rebeka gets dragged into her own mess when a new screening policy forces her to disclose her mother's criminal record to the entire class. Mencía tries comforting her with a kiss in the locker room, and they get caught by Benjamín, who now looks at Rebeka like a delinquent. Mencía, stung by the rejection that follows, goes right back to texting Armando.
The old guard starts pushing back against the new regime, organizing a rebellious towel party at Samuel's house that turns into a release valve for everything simmering underneath. Ander, Omar, and Patrick end up in a three-way hookup. Rebeka and Mencía finally get together for real. Guzman tries video-calling Nadia mid-party, only for her to catch him dancing with Ari on camera. He steps outside to call Nadia, and the two of them agree to pause the relationship while they figure out if long distance is even sustainable. And Ari, rarely one to drink, gets drunk enough to lower her guard completely and ends up sleeping with Samuel.
Phillipe and Cayetana's hookup that same night gets complicated: the room turns out to be wired with hidden cameras, something Cayetana discovers later, along with a stash of footage showing Phillipe with other women. He explains it away as protection against false assault claims he's dealt with before. It's a strange, unsettling justification that nobody pushes back on hard enough at the time, and the show flashes forward just after to Ari lying in a hospital bed, unconscious and worsening.
Guzman and Nadia officially call it off not long after. Ari starts noticing things too, suspecting Phillipe was with Mencía the night she went missing, and warning Cayetana to be careful of him, though a search online turns up nothing to confirm it.
Mencía's arrangement with Armando spirals further. One of his associates gets aggressive with her, tying her down and refusing to let her leave, and it's Rebeka, using a hotel key she'd found earlier and assumed meant Mencía was cheating, who tracks her down and pulls her out. Benjamín, meanwhile, finds a stash of cash Mencía's been hiding and jumps straight to blaming Rebeka's family instead of asking the real question.
Ander and Omar's relationship doesn't survive the tension either. Ander breaks things off, and Omar takes it hard, packing up and moving his things out before Ander even has the chance to properly process it. Guzman keeps circling Ari and Samuel too, and a flashforward drops a strange detail into the mix: Samuel gets arrested trying to visit Ari in the hospital, a thread the season doesn't explain yet.
By episode six, Ari's trying to wall off her private life from Samuel entirely, telling her father never to invite him around again, even as the two of them keep colliding anyway. Patrick, chasing concert tickets to a show he wants to attend, starts pushing boundaries harder, at one point groping Ander in the middle of class, which Samuel witnesses and clearly disapproves of. Phillipe, cornered by Cayetana in the janitor's room, asks her outright whether people actually like him or just want what he can give them, a question that lands heavier in hindsight. His father warns him separately not to let old rumors resurface.
At a family dinner, Guzman, there as Ari's date, compares Mencía to his late sister Marina and quietly needles Benjamín over how he treats his own daughter. Later that night, a drunk Ari initiates sex with Guzman at the club itself and gets caught by Samuel mid-act. Guzman apologizes and leaves. It's messy, and it's clear Ari's stringing both of them along without fully deciding on either.
Patrick, meanwhile, figures out enough about Phillipe's past to use it as leverage, threatening to expose him unless he gets concert tickets for himself and Ander. At the show itself, Patrick catches Ander kissing someone else and spirals, accidentally busting Ari's lip in the process. After the dust settles, Ari kisses Samuel again anyway. A flashforward not long after shows Patrick noticing a fresh bruise on Guzman and asking, pointedly, who he'd beaten up.
By episode seven, the show layers in one more thread: Phillipe's mother arrives to manage his image and is horrified to learn he's involved with the school janitor. Armando resurfaces too, now positioning himself as a financial donor to the school itself, using the access to blackmail Mencía into staying quiet about their arrangement, threatening to expose her to her own family if she says a word.
The Christmas social event Phillipe invites Cayetana to, becomes the season's ugliest turning point. Cayetana meets her dream fashion designer there, only for him to make it clear he'll only look at her work if she goes back to his hotel room with him. She turns him down, and Ari, watching the exchange, gains a real respect for her because of it, going as far as commissioning a dress from her. Mencía, caught in an almost identical situation the same night, doesn't have the same ending. She gives in to Armando again despite Rebeka begging her not to.
Later that night, alone with Cayetana in a limo, Phillipe pushes past her repeated no, and she has to physically escape the car to get away from him. It confirms every rumor that trailed him from home. He's left shaken, seeming to realize, almost too late, exactly what he's done.
The scene closes with Ari finally coming clean to both Samuel and Guzman at once, admitting through tears, that she loves them both and doesn't want to choose. Guzman is furious while Samuel is left stunned.
How it all wraps up
Guzman doesn't take the news well. He calls Samuel an awful friend on the spot, and when Samuel tries to smooth things over right there, Guzman shuts him down and walks off. Not long after, he and Ander sit down for what looks like an early goodbye, Ander having decided to leave Las Encinas mid-year entirely.
Rebeka makes her own hard call, telling Ari the truth about Mencía and Armando, knowing full well it likely ends whatever future she and Mencía might've had together. She does it anyway. Meanwhile Phillipe corners Cayetana in the janitor's room, trying to apologize, but undercuts it almost immediately by claiming she'd given him "mixed signals" the night before. She walks off disgusted. When Ari confronts Mencía about what Rebeka revealed, Mencía breaks down and threatens to cut Ari off entirely if she takes it to their father.
Learning Ander's actually leaving, Omar asks for one more shot at their relationship, and after a moment of hesitation, Ander agrees. They kiss, with Patrick watching from a distance, furious.
Phillipe's mother pulls Cayetana into Benjamín's office next, trying to buy her silence, dangling the idea that Phillipe chose her over anyone else and that a life with him would end her family's money troubles for good. She even excuses her son's behavior as simple biology, men just being men. Cayetana sits through it visibly uncomfortable.
At the New Year's party, with everything the season's been building toward closing in, the Royal Highness pushes Cayetana one more time to approve of Phillipe publicly. Cayetana refuses outright, telling her that her son's aggression isn't biology, it's how he was raised. Phillipe and his mother are left stunned. Phillipe turns the accusation back on his own mother, blaming her for raising him to be exactly this kind of person. She tells him if he wants to be treated like an adult, he needs to own the consequences of his own choices.
Back together with Omar, a lighter Ander pushes Guzman to finally talk to Ari, but before he gets the chance, Samuel beats him to it, asking Ari to leave him alone and go back to Guzman. Guzman sees the exchange from across the room and reads it wrongly, which only deepens his anger. Inside, Patrick watches Ander and Omar dance together until he can't anymore, giving up and hooking up with a stranger instead.
Omar finds out Ander's real reason for leaving is just to see the world, and instead of holding him back, tells him to go, promising he'll wait. Around the same time, Phillipe records a voice message to a girl named Elodie, someone he'd hurt before, finally admitting to it and telling her to do whatever she wants with the confession.
Then everything collides at once. Rebeka catches Armando getting physically aggressive with Mencía down by the lake and attacks him herself to get her out of there. A drunk, distant Ari watches it happen and realizes Rebeka's been telling the truth the whole time. She confronts Armando alone, threatening to expose him to her father, and starts calling him before Armando cuts her off by hitting her. He keeps hitting her as she tries to crawl toward her phone. At the exact same moment, Guzman and Samuel finally boil over into a real fight inside the club, Guzman beating Samuel badly before catching sight of a message on his phone from Ari, asking him to meet her by the lake. It all happens right as the clock strikes midnight.
Guzman stumbles outside and finds Ari barely conscious on the dock. She begs him to go after Armando. Trying to stand, she reaches for her phone and falls into the lake instead. Guzman finds Armando in a storage room, and the fight that follows ends with Guzman grabbing a flare gun and shooting him dead. He goes back for Ari, not realizing she's already in the water, and searches the wrong places for her.
He finally runs back into the club begging Samuel and Rebeka if they've seen her, breaking down and telling them everything that just happened. The three of them agree to call the police, but only with part of the truth. Ari's rushed to the hospital in critical condition and, after everything the season's been flashing forward to, survives.
Once she's conscious again, Guzman sits with her, tells her he already knows she loves Samuel, not him, and lies about what really happened to Armando, saying he ran off. He says goodbye as she begs him to stay.
Not long after, Guzman and Ander leave Las Encinas together to travel, saying tearful goodbyes to Omar, Cayetana, Rebeka, and Samuel before driving off. Mencía, wracked with guilt over ever bringing Armando into their lives, asks Ari to stand with her while she finally tells her father everything. Benjamín's reaction is pure rage, tearing his own house apart once he hears it. And in the last quiet reveal of the season, it comes out that Guzman, Rebeka, and Samuel are the ones who dumped Armando's body into the lake, one more secret this group is going to have to carry together.
Where we left everyone:
Samuel: Helps dump Armando's body in the lake and tries to move forward. Back to being the guy the plot punishes for existing.
Guzman: Killed Armando to save Ari, covered it up, and leaves Spain to go travelling with Ander. Carrying a secret that will follow him wherever he goes.
Ander: Learns Omar wants him to go see the world instead of staying behind out of guilt, and leaves for real this time, Omar promising to wait for him. It's framed as bittersweet. It mostly just feels sad.
Omar: Does the selfless thing, tells Ander to go live his life, and stays behind holding onto a promise with Patrick still hovering around.
Rebeka and Mencia: End the season together, which is the one sweet note this season manages. Rebe is now sitting on the secret of Armando's death without Mencia knowing.
Ari: Survives Armando's attack, ends up in hospital, and Guzman lies to her face about what actually happened.
Patrick: Got played by both Ander and Omar, ends the season alone. Hard to feel much about it either way.
Cayetana: Still here.
Phillipe: The SA allegations go mostly unresolved. Ends the season with his reputation intact enough. The show just kind of moves on.
Where Season 4 lost me
They destroyed the best friendship on this show for a girl. This one hurts the most, so let's start here. Samuel and Guzman started as actual enemies, then slowly, through shared grief and the total hellscape of what went down with Marina and Polo, these two built something real. A proper friendship. By the end of Season 3, their bond was one of the few things on this show I loved without reservation. Then Ari shows up and the writers throw it all in the bin. Both of them have feelings for her, and suddenly two guys who survived a murder cover-up together are giving each other death stares in the hallway like they've never met. It's so generic, so far removed from who these characters actually are at this point that it feels like the writers started fresh without reading their own previous scripts. Guzman especially gets done dirty. This is a guy who showed real, visible growth across three full seasons, and now he's just being petty and territorial over someone he met a few weeks ago. All that work, undone in about two episodes for a love triangle that doesn't even pay off in any interesting way. And here's the thing: Ari isn't even interesting enough to justify any of it. She's fine. She's pretty and she moves the plot around. But she's not the kind of character you burn a friendship over.
The new family is predictable, cliché, and kind of boring. Bringing in new characters is fine, it makes sense when your original cast starts leaving. But there's a right way to do it, and Season 4 does it the wrong way, giving us characters so clearly telegraphed from their very first scenes. The show seems to think expensive clothes and dramatic family secrets count as personality. Compare any of them to Lu from the earlier seasons. Lu was annoying, scheming, snobbish, awful a lot of the time. But she was also funny and surprisingly insecure, and her whole dynamic was strange and uncomfortable enough that you couldn't look away. She surprised you. The Blanco Commerford kids never surprise you once.
Omar and Ander deserved so much better. Omar and Ander were never just another Elite couple. From the very first season they were the couple for me, the one that felt real, the one where no matter how bad things got, they kept finding their way back to each other. Season 4 sets it on fire for shock value, and the show frames the mess that follows as bold storytelling. It's lazy, chaotic writing that blows up a beloved relationship with nothing meaningful on the other side of it. The "leaving it open ended" framing at the finale is nonsense. Omar deserved better. Ander deserved better. And honestly, so did I.
Mencia, Armando, and Rebeka is a mess the show made on purpose. Mencia's storyline is uncomfortable, and not always in the ways the show intends. A grown adult man blackmailing a teenager he's been sleeping with, and the show treats it like top-tier drama rather than something that should make you deeply uncomfortable about how it's being framed. The Mencia and Rebeka relationship is one of the better things this season does, and it's a shame the show buries it under so much chaos that it barely gets room to breathe. The Armando situation remains the most irresponsible piece of storytelling this season produces: sometimes the show frames him correctly as a predator, then the camera lingers on their scenes with charged music and a dark romantic glow, making it look like a complicated love story instead of what it actually is.
Cayetana got a prince this season and I still didn't care. I almost forgot she was still in this show, and that says everything. The whole point of Cayetana has always been the exhausting performance of pretending to be something you're not, so a prince who might not be what he seems could work for her story in theory. In practice it's flat, rushed, and dropped almost as quickly as it's introduced. Seems like the writers have never figured out what to do with her after Season 3. Why is she still here? I'm genuinely asking, because the show clearly doesn't know either.
The nudity issue: these are supposed to be teenagers. Elite has never been a shy show. Sex and nudity have always been part of its DNA, and that's fine, nobody sat down to watch this expecting something wholesome. But Season 4 takes it to a point where it starts to feel like the show is using bodies as a substitute for actual storytelling. There's a moment where you stop watching a scene and start wondering if the writers ran out of ideas and just decided skin would fill the time. Nudity and sex scenes work on television when they actually tell you something and Elite used to do this reasonably well. The intimacy between Omar and Ander in earlier seasons meant something because you were invested in them as people. This season it just feels gratuitous, scene after scene of heat and bodies that connects to nothing emotionally meaningful. It starts to blur. I became numb to it, and when you're numb to the intimacy on a show that relies on intimacy to drive its drama, that's a real problem. The Patrick chaos, the whole spiral he drags Omar and Ander through, is shot with this glossy, almost celebratory energy that feels completely disconnected from the emotional damage being done to characters you've spent three seasons actually caring about. The camera is having a great time. I'm not.
The ending was a lot of setup for a very soft bang. Eight episodes of buildup, all these threads supposedly converging, and the twist doesn't land the way it should, and the reason is the Ari reveal in episode one. The moment the show confirms she's alive, the urgency drains out and never comes back. You spend the remaining episodes just waiting for the show to confirm what you already figured out. And Guzman killing Armando should feel enormous. Instead it just kind of happens, because Armando was never a real character, just the villain the plot needed. His death brings relief, not devastation. After everything Guzman survived across four seasons, he deserved so much better than a trauma and a one-way ticket out of the country.
Overall thoughts
Not much worked this season, if I'm being real. The show's still visually stunning, and the actors are still good at what they do, but the writing was so messy that it's hard to find much to praise beyond the Mencia and Rebeka relationship, which is sweet, well-acted, and does a decent job of showing how complicated it can be to navigate love and trauma together. That's about it. The rest of the season feels like a series of missteps and missed opportunities.
Will I quit watching this show? No. Why? I don't fully know, and that's the most honest thing I can say about Elite Season 4. It frustrated me constantly. It wasted characters I've loved since Season 1. It brought in new ones I couldn't bring myself to care about. It took one of the show's most important relationships and put it through a shredder for drama that didn't even pay off properly. It handled really dark subject matter carelessly. And it wrapped up its central mystery with all the energy of someone quietly closing a browser tab they forgot they had open.
And yet here I am, still watching, still annoyed enough to write all of this, still holding onto the memory of what this show was at its best: the chaos of Season 1, the gut punch of Marina's death, the slow unraveling of Polo's guilt, the way Omar and Ander made you actually believe in something. Elite at its best was great television, messy and addictive and surprisingly emotional underneath all the drama and the glamour. Season 4 is a big step away from that. Whether it can step back is the only question I have left going into Season 5.
My Rating: 5.3
Are there people who have actually finished the show?
Lemme know in the comments. Am I crazy for still watching?
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