sighs
This season was such a slog to get through. And look, I want to be fair: it is not as unhinged as Season 4 was. That was a dumpster fire with good lighting. Season 5 is more like a damp sock. It just sits there being wet and annoying and you cannot ignore it but you also cannot bring yourself to deal with it properly. Characters do whatever they want. The partying never stops. The sex never stops. The drama gets manufactured out of thin air every single episode. And somewhere in the background there is supposedly a school. A place of learning. Where teenagers attend classes. I have not seen evidence of this school actually functioning in quite some time.
Before we get into the chaos, let me introduce the new faces. Because this show, bless its heart, keeps adding characters as if the problem was ever that we did not have enough of them.
This post contains spoilers for Season 5 of Netflix's Elite.
We Got New Characters Again. The Show Has Not Learned Its Lesson.
Isadora is an extremely wealthy Argentine socialite and successful DJ whose parents own massive hospitality businesses. She arrives at Las Encinas with a helicopter entrance, a drug habit, and the energy of someone who has decided that being the loudest person in any room counts as a personality. On paper the concept is fine. A reckless rich girl with a hollow life underneath all the excess. There is a version of this character that genuinely works. This is not it. Then there is Ivan Carvalho, the son of Cruz, a famous retired footballer. He arrives carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who has spent his whole life being a supporting character in his own father's story. His misfortune this season is getting dragged into the most unhinged romantic plot this show has ever produced, and that is saying something for a show that once had a threesome subplot involving a man recovering from a cancer scare. And finally there is Cruz Carvalho himself. Former football legend. Iván's father. He becomes central to the most genuinely insane storyline this season has to offer, and I am giving him his own dedicated section because he has absolutely earned it. For all the wrong reasons.
Isadora: The Character Who Could Have Been Something
I can see what the writers were going for. A wealthy, untethered girl who uses parties and chaos as a substitute for a life her absent parents never bothered to give her. That is a decent foundation. The problem is that the show skips the part where you actually earn the audience's investment in her before piling on the trauma. By Episode 8 she has been assaulted by three guys at a party. It is dark. It is uncomfortable. And because we have spent most of the season watching her be loud and erratic and difficult, it lands more as shock value than as the gut punch the show clearly intended.
The finale scene where Cayetana talks to her through a shower wall is the one moment the whole storyline actually breathes. No drama, no music sting, just one person being quietly present for another. It works beautifully. But one good scene does not make a fully formed arc. The potential was there. The patience to develop it properly was not.
Samuel, the Universe's Favourite Punching Bag
Do you remember when Samuel was the main character of this show? When he was the wide-eyed scholarship kid from the wrong side of town, dropped into this gleaming world of money and secrets, and the whole show was essentially his story? Well, Season 5 Samuel confesses to a murder he did not commit, in exchange for a deal from the father of his girlfriend, on the promise that said father will sort out his bail. And he trusted this man. Samuel. Buddy. My guy. After everything this school has put you through??
The Benjamin dynamic is the most interesting thing Samuel's storyline has going for it this season, and credit where it is due: there is something almost poignant about a guy who never had a reliable father figure gravitating toward Benjamin over and over, even knowing it would end badly. Benjamin offers him Oxford, a scholarship, three thousand euros a month. Everything Samuel's life was supposed to be building toward. He almost takes it. The fact that he refuses, and ends up floating face-down in a swimming pool for his trouble, is both the most dramatic and the most completely on-brand thing that could have happened to this character. The reveal that he is the body in the pool at the end of Episode 4 was the one moment this season genuinely shocked me. I sat up. I actually cared. It was a good few minutes.
Patrick, Iván, and Cruz: What in the Absolute Hell Was This?!
Okay. Here we go. I need you to take a breath. I am about to describe a storyline that a room full of adults in a writers room pitched, approved, shot, edited, and released onto Netflix, and apparently nobody at any stage of that process raised their hand and said "hold on". Patrick and Ivan are circling each other from episode one. Fine. There is chemistry there. Ivan does the whole "I am not gay" routine which anyone who has watched television before knows is a countdown timer, not a character trait. They flirt, they connect over shared daddy issues, they are sweet together in the quiet moments, and it works. I was rooting for them.
And then Cruz walks in. Ivan's father. A man who, in the very first episode, walks in on Patrick in the bathroom and essentially cheers him on. We are not even warmed up yet and this man is already conducting himself like this. By Episode 4, he and Patrick are kissing at a fundraiser party. By Episode 5, Cruz looks Patrick directly in the eyes and says, with a completely straight face: "I waited for you". To his son's love interest. To a teenager. At a school event. By Episode 6 they hook up in a pool while Ivan watches from inside the house. The resolution is that Cruz, at the end, decides not to go to Qatar and instead urges Ivan to follow his heart and chase Patrick. A grown man, having kissed and actively pursued his son's classmate all season long, wraps everything up by graciously stepping aside and pointing his son in the right direction. The show plays this as a redemptive, even touching moment. I don't know what to tell you. I genuinely do not.
Rebe and Mencía: A Relationship Being Slowly Murdered for Sport
These two ended Season 4 in a good place. They had been through real things together and were standing on the other side of it. It was one of the few clean, hopeful notes the season ended on. So naturally, Season 5 spends its entire runtime methodically dismantling all of that. Ivan kisses Rebe at a party and it gets sent to Mencia. Rebe kisses a random woman called Jess at a drive-through cinema. There is a slap. There is a bidding event where Rebe bids on Mencia to win her back, which is genuinely sweet, and then something blows up almost immediately after. Pulled apart and pushed back together so many times across eight episodes that by the finale you are not relieved, you are just exhausted.
These two deserved a season that actually let them be together. What they got was a bad telenovela B-plot wearing a love story costume. If the writers are going to keep manufacturing conflict between two characters every single episode, they need to actually have something to say about them on the other side of it. Season 5 does not. It just cycles them through the same loop in slightly different outfits and hopes you are too distracted by everything else to notice.
Benjamin, Armando's Ghost, and a Cover-Up Nobody Could Keep Quiet
The central plot machinery runs on a simple question: what happens when Armando's body, dumped in a lake at the end of Season 4, eventually floats back up? And float up it does, face-down in the water at a fundraiser party, while Omar mistakes it for someone else entirely. Benjamin is actually the most complex character the season produces. A man who clawed his way out of poverty, became powerful enough to run the school he once attended on a scholarship, and is now burning everything down simultaneously to protect his children and bury his secrets.
When he pushes Samuel into the pool in the finale and watches him sink, the horror on his face is almost sympathetic. Almost. He gets arrested, the SIM card evidence seals it, and all three of his children are left standing around a swimming pool watching their father get put in handcuffs. It is one of the more genuinely affecting images the season produces. Whether that is a testament to the actors or just evidence that the bar has dropped very low, I honestly cannot tell you. Benjamin was always the most interesting of the new additions this era of the show brought in. The problem is the season spends so much time on Cruz and his helicopter parenting. He deserved a season built around him. He got a subplot.
Phillipe and Cayetana: Still Here, Still Unexplained
I wrote in my Season 4 post that the writers have never figured out what to do with Cayetana. Updated assessment: it is now Season 5 and they still have not. The SA allegations against Phillipe from last season drift rather than resolve. The school counsellor calls him a predator to his face, which is the most direct the show gets about any of it, and then the whole thing just drifts. He eventually gravitates toward Isadora, which actually gives him more purpose than anything he has done previously, because at least caring about her requires him to do something. He tries to stop what happens to her. He fails, but he tries. It is not nothing.
Cayetana, freed from his orbit, has nothing to do in the second half of the season except snoop around Benjamin's office in a cap and dark clothes like she has wandered in from a completely different, significantly cheaper show. I hope I don't see her in Season 6.
Where We Left Everyone.
Samuel: Pushed into the pool by Benjamin, hits his head, bleeds into the water, and is presumed dead. After five seasons of this show using him as a punching bag, this is how it ends for him.
Benjamin: Arrested. Handcuffed in front of his three children by a swimming pool. The most complete ending any character gets this season.
Patrick: Pulls Samuel out of the pool and watches his father get taken away. Rough evening does not begin to cover it.
Ivan: Stays in Spain instead of going to Qatar because Cruz tells him to follow his heart. After all the back and forth this season, I had stopped caring.
Cruz: Steps aside. After spending the entire season pursuing his son's classmate. Sure.
Rebe and Mencia: Pulled apart and pushed back together so many times this season that the emotional whiplash became its own subplot.
Ari: Her love story with Samuel was one of the flattest things this season produced, which is a shame because these are two characters who should work together on paper and simply do not on screen.
Omar: Walks away from the finale with Rebe. His whole Bilal subplot goes essentially nowhere. Omar has been coasting on the goodwill of his earlier seasons for two years now and the writers genuinely owe him a real storyline.
Cayetana: Still here. I do not know what else she is here for and based on the evidence, neither do the writers.
Isadora: Survived the season. Season 6 has a chance to actually do something with her. Whether it will is a different question.
So. Am I Actually Watching Season 6?
Yes. Obviously. Because I have watched five seasons of this show and stopping now would be irrational. What is also irrational is the amount of emotional energy I have spent on a Netflix show about Spanish teenagers who never go to class, but I have already made my peace with that. Season 5 is not the disaster Season 4 was. But it is forgettable in a way that Season 4, for all its genuine insanity, was not. Season 4 made me angry. This season made me tired. I am honestly not sure which of those is worse for a show that used to make me actually feel things.
The pieces are there for Season 6 to do something interesting. Samuel is gone, which removes the last anchor to what the show originally was. Benjamin is in handcuffs. The Blanco Commerford era is officially over. In theory that clears the stage for a proper reset. Whether the show has the discipline to actually use that space is the only question I have going into the next season. And yes, before you ask: I will be watching. Against all available evidence and better judgment. Because apparently this is just who I am now.
Drop it in the comments. I need to know I was not alone in this. Also if you somehow enjoyed the Cruz storyline unironically I really want to understand your reasoning.
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