I went into Season 4 a little nervous, not gonna lie. 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 cannot be that bad. This is Elite. The show knows what it is doing.
Right?
Right??
This post contains spoilers for Season 4 of Netflix's Elite.
What's New This Season
Las Encinas has a brand new principal: Benjamin Blanco Commerford, who rolls in with his three kids like they already own the place. First up is Ari, the eldest. Sharp, calculated, and immediately the center of a love triangle that somehow manages to destroy one of the show's best friendships in the process. Then there is Patrick, the younger brother. Free-spirited, sexually fluid, and he drifts into existing relationships like a lit match near dry paper. And finally Mencia, the youngest, who gets arguably the darkest storyline of the season. She ends up caught up with Armando, a grown adult man connected to her family, in a situation that gets disturbing very fast and eventually becomes the center of the season's big mystery. There is also Phillipe von Triesenberg, a literal European prince who enrolls at Las Encinas with a full security detail and immediately makes everyone around him uncomfortable. His storyline connects to Cayetana. I did not care about either of them.
Meanwhile the returning characters are doing their thing. Omar and Ander are trying to hold it together, which on this show means they are probably three episodes away from another disaster. Rebeka gets some solid material tied to her family's situation. Cayetana is out here dating said prince and somehow still managing to be the least interesting person in any room she enters. And Samuel is completely gone over Ari while his friendship with Guzman quietly falls apart in the background.
Now, the Mystery
The season opens the way Elite always does: non-linear, dropping you into the chaos before rewinding to show you how it all went wrong. What we see right at the start is Ari, apparently dead. And almost immediately the finger points at Samuel. Of course it does. The guy cannot catch a break. But then, by the end of episode two, the show just tells you Ari is alive. She did not die. So the mystery shifts. If Ari survived, what actually happened? Who is responsible? Genuinely interesting questions. The problem is what the show does with them across the episodes that follow.
They Destroyed the Best Friendship on This Show for a Girl??
This one hurts the most so let us start here. Samuel and Guzman started as actual enemies. Not just rivals, not just competitive: they genuinely could not stand each other. And then slowly, through shared grief and loss and the total hellscape of what went down with Marina and Polo, these two built something real. A proper friendship. The kind you only get from going through things together that most people never have to face. By the end of Season 3 their bond was one of the few things on this show that I loved without reservation.
Then Ari shows up and the writers just 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 have 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 is just being petty and territorial over someone he just met a few weeks ago. That is not an arc. That is a reset button. All that work, undone in about two episodes for a love triangle that does not even pay off in any interesting way. And here is the thing: Ari is not even interesting enough to justify any of it. She is fine. She is pretty and she moves the plot around. But she is not the kind of character you burn a friendship over. If you are going to blow up one of the best dynamics the show ever had, at least make it worth it. This was not worth it.
The New Family: Predictable, Cliché, and Kind of Boring.
Bringing in new characters is fine. It makes sense when your original cast starts leaving. But there is a right way to do it, and Season 4 does it the wrong way: by giving us characters who are so clearly telegraphed from their very first scenes that you have already clocked their entire deal before episode two ends. Ari is The Ambitious One. Patrick is The Wild Card. Mencia is The Troubled One hiding pain behind a cool exterior. These are not people, they are archetypes. And the show seems to think expensive clothes and dramatic family secrets count as personality. They do not. Compare any of them to Lu from the earlier seasons. Lu was quite annoying: scheming, snobbish, awful a lot of the time. But she was also funny and surprisingly insecure, and her whole dynamic was so strange and uncomfortable you could not look away. She surprised you. The Blanco Commerford kids never surprise you once. Everything they do is exactly what you expected the second they walked on screen.
And here is the frustrating part: there is actually something interesting buried in Benjamin that the show never commits to. This man clawed his way out of poverty. He attended Las Encinas on a scholarship himself. And then he shows up as principal and on day one fires Ander's mother, forces Samuel and Omar to re-earn their scholarships from scratch, and blocks Mencia from dating Rebe because of her mother's history. A man who was once the scholarship kid at this exact school, treating scholarship kids like they do not belong here. That irony is sitting right there. It is compelling. And the show just walks straight past it like it does not exist. The whole family ends up feeling like a plot delivery service: just people-shaped objects the story needed in certain places. Meh.
Omar and Ander: The Couple That Deserved So Much Better
These two 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, no matter how many times the show tested them, they kept finding their way back to each other. And then Season 4 just sets it on fire.
Ander gets pulled into Patrick's orbit and does not hold the line. What follows is a messy, ugly spiral of cheating and jealousy. And because one betrayal apparently was not enough, Omar sleeps with Patrick too. Both of them. The same guy. The show frames this as bold storytelling. It is not. It is lazy, chaotic writing that blows up a beloved relationship purely for shock value, with nothing meaningful on the other side of it. And then the ending, which is honestly the part that stings the most. It's Omar who actually ends it. He tells Ander to go, to stick to his travel plans and not stay in Madrid for him. They agree to see other people while Ander is away. The show frames it as the loving thing to do: Omar letting go because he loves him. On paper that almost sounds sweet. It does not feel sweet. Omar deserved better. Ander deserved better. And honestly, so did I.
Mencia, Armando, and Rebeka: A Mess the Show Made on Purpose
Mencia's storyline is uncomfortable, and not always in the ways the show intends. Benjamin cuts off her allowance and she ends up turning to sex work. The show wants you to read her as troubled and self-destructive, but what it keeps skimming past is why she has been like this long before Season 4 even starts. When Mencia was a kid she ran away from home. Her mother and Patrick went out in the middle of the night to find her, got into an accident, and their mother died. Patrick spent years recovering from a coma. She has been the quiet black sheep of that family ever since, carrying blame that was never officially assigned to her but was always there in the room. So when her father cuts her off and she spirals, it is not just a rich teenager making bad choices. It is a girl who has spent her entire life being quietly blamed for the worst thing that ever happened to her family. That context would make everything that follows so much heavier. But the show barely touches it.
She meets Armando, who starts as a client and quickly becomes something much worse. Once she tries to walk away, having started dating Rebeka and wanting out, he begins blackmailing her to keep her from leaving. A grown adult man blackmailing a teenager he has been sleeping with. And the show treats this as a dramatic plot engine rather than something that should make you deeply uncomfortable about how it is being framed. The Mencia and Rebeka relationship is actually one of the better things this season does. Rebe comes in guarded, Mencia pursues her with a persistence that eventually wins her over, and there is something genuinely real between them. When Rebe finds out what Mencia has been caught up in she does not run. She shows up, physically confronts Armando at the New Year's Eve party, punches him, and pulls Mencia away. They end the season together. That part works. But the show buries this sweet relationship 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 Did Not Care.
I almost forgot she was still in this show, and that says everything. This season she is dating Phillipe the prince. A wealthy, titled royal who takes an interest in her, the working class girl who has always been desperate to belong somewhere she was never meant to be. The whole point of Cayetana has always been the exhausting performance of pretending to be something you are not, so a prince who might not be what he seems could genuinely work for her story. But then SA allegations against Phillipe come up, and the storyline gets complicated in ways the show does not have the patience to sit with. There are real questions buried in there about who is telling the truth, about what Cayetana chooses to ignore because she finally has the fairytale she spent two seasons chasing. Interesting territory, in theory. In practice it is flat, rushed, and dropped almost as quickly as it is introduced.
She has been on this show since Season 2 and the writers have never figured out what to do with her. Every season she gets a new situation, a new love interest, and every season it lands with a soft thud. Not interesting enough to root for. Not messy enough to be a compelling villain. She just exists. Taking up screen time. Surviving seasons that more compelling characters did not get to see. Why is she still here? I am genuinely asking. Because the show clearly does not know either.
The Nudity Issue: These Are Supposed to Be Teenagers!
Look, Elite has never been a shy show. Sex and nudity have always been part of its DNA, and that is fine. Nobody sat down to watch this expecting something wholesome. But Season 4 takes it to a point where it genuinely starts to feel like the show is using bodies as a substitute for actual storytelling. There is 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. This season crosses that point early and keeps going.
Nudity and sex scenes work on television when they actually tell you something: when they reveal character, shift a dynamic, or carry real emotional weight. Elite used to do this reasonably well. The intimacy between Omar and Ander in the earlier seasons meant something because you were invested in them as people. But 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 are numb to the intimacy on a show that relies on intimacy to drive its drama, that is 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 have spent three seasons actually caring about. The camera is having a great time. I am not.
The Ending: A Lot of Setup for a Very Quiet Bang
Eight episodes of buildup. All these threads supposedly converging. The real victim turns out to be Armando. The man who spent the entire season being predatory and manipulative toward Mencia ends up being the body at the center of everything. Here is how it goes down: Rebe tips off Ari about what Armando has been doing to Mencia. Ari, furious, confronts him directly and tells him she is going to tell their father everything. Armando responds by nearly beating Ari to death. Guzman finds her barely conscious, chases Armando to a boathouse, and kills him with a flare gun. Then Samuel, Guzman, and Rebeka dump the weighted body in the lake and try to move forward like it never happened.
There are interesting pieces in there. But the whole thing does not land, and the reason is that Ari reveal in episode two. The moment the show confirms she is alive, the urgency drains out and never comes back. You spend the remaining episodes knowing Samuel is being wrongly accused again, just waiting for the show to confirm what you already figured out. It is not a slow burn. It is a slow fizzle. And when Guzman kills Armando, that moment should feel enormous. This is a character we have known since the very first episode of the entire series. Him taking a life should be one of the heaviest things this show has ever done. Instead it just kind of happens. Because Armando was never a real character. He was 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.
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. His friendship with Samuel is in pieces.
Ander: Omar is the one who actually calls it, tells Ander to go live his life and not stay in Madrid for him. They agree to see other people while he is away. Ander leaves with Guzman. The whole thing is framed as bittersweet. It mostly just feels sad.
Omar: Did the selfless thing, let Ander go, and is now left behind with nothing resolved and 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. Her triangle with Samuel and Guzman is completely unresolved going into Season 5.
Patrick: Got played by both Ander and Omar, ends the season alone. Hard to feel much about it either way.
Cayetana: Still here. Still the least interesting person in any room. Carries on as usual.
Phillipe: The SA allegations go mostly unresolved. Ends the season with his reputation intact enough. The show just kind of moves on.
Final Thoughts: Why Do I Do This to Myself
Will I quit watching this show? No. Why? I genuinely do not know. And that is the most honest thing I can say about Elite Season 4. It frustrated me constantly. It wasted characters I have loved since Season 1. It brought in new ones I could not bring myself to care about. It took one of the show's most important relationships and put it through a shredder for drama that did not even land 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.
Are there people who have actually finished the show?
Lemme know in the comments. Am I crazy for still watching?
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