Elite is what happens when you throw three broke kids into a school built entirely on money and secrets. It's messy, it's soapy, and I could not stop watching.
This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of Netflix's Elite.
How it kicks off
Samuel, Nadia, and Christian walk into Las Encinas as outsiders on day one. Their old school, San Esteban, had its roof cave in, and the construction company behind the shoddy job, run by Teo and Ventura, both of whom have kids enrolled at Las Encinas, hands out scholarships as a PR move to make the whole thing look less bad.
Nadia gets hit with the culture clash immediately. The school markets itself as multicultural, but she's told to take off her hijab on campus, which goes against everything she stands for. Christian, meanwhile, isn't interested in the classroom at all. He's there to get close to the popular crowd, and gets shut down hard on his first attempt, laughed at by Lu and told by Guzman that their conversation is a private affair. Christian doesn't take the hint. He wants in badly enough that it becomes the thing that defines him for the rest of the season.
Then you meet the rich kids properly. Guzman is Marina's brother and the one drawing the hardest line against the scholarship students. Carla catches Christian's eye immediately, though Ander lets him know early that she's been with Polo since they were twelve. Lu is sharp and territorial, and it's clear that something is going on between her and Guzman.
Ander turns out to be the principal's son, not actually rich himself. He and Christian end up bonding over a bag of weed that leads them to a dealer named Omar, who happens to be Samuel's childhood friend from the old neighborhood. Small world energy, except it matters later. Ander is also quietly closeted, sneaking onto Grindr behind his mother's back, and when he finally works up the nerve to meet someone off the app, it turns out to be Omar.
At home, Samuel's older brother Nano has just gotten out of prison, and the two of them go tag a house with spray paint one night for no real reason beyond boredom and brotherly bonding. That house turns out to belong to Ventura, the same man funding the scholarships, and it comes back to bite Samuel almost immediately.
Marina gets pulled into the center of things through her sixteenth birthday party, which her parents are using as another PR opportunity, insisting one of the scholarship kids gets invited. Samuel goes, brings Nadia along, and he discovers that the party is being held at the same house he and Nano tagged days earlier. Over the course of the night: Christian and Carla's hookup turns out to be staged for Polo to watch, Guzman finds out about the tagging and threatens to expose Samuel, and Nadia shuts that down fast by threatening to reveal something she walked in on between Guzman and Lu. Marina, meanwhile, tells her family flat out that she's not ashamed of anything, including being HIV positive, a status she got from an ex who likely didn't know he had it either.
By the end of the night, the show cuts to Marina being carried out in a body bag. Everything from here on out is building toward how she ends up there.
The twists and the escalation
School rolls out a social media project that pairs everyone off: Marina gets stuck with Samuel, Polo with Carla, Christian with Ander, and Guzman ends up with Nadia, which is exactly what Lu wanted. She'd been pushing Guzman toward Nadia the whole time, and it comes out that the two of them made a bet: Guzman could get Nadia into bed. Nadia finds out and confronts him, humiliated, and for a while it looks like whatever was building between them is dead on arrival. Except Guzman keeps showing up anyway, gives her a custom hijab as an apology, and he even fumbles an attempt to grovel to her parents but accidentally exposes the fact that the school banned Nadia's hijab. He finds his own father doing lines of cocaine at a family event and decides to protect him instead of exposing him. Later, Nadia decides he's actually grown into someone worth forgiving.
Nano's debt problem isn't going away either. The men from prison jump him at work, and when he still can't pay, they hand him a gun and a name: shoot a man named Fer for missing a payment. Nano tracks Fer down, and in a twist he doesn't see coming, Fer turns out to know Omar. Nano talks to him, learns he has a family, and can't go through with it. The thugs don't care. They kill Fer themselves, stab Nano as a warning, and raise what he owes from forty thousand euros to sixty. He drags himself home half dead, and Marina is the one who patches him up while Samuel's in the other room, completely unaware.
Meanwhile Marina hands Samuel a lead without meaning to. While the two of them are filming for the school project, she forgets the camera's still rolling and admits on tape that her father is sitting on documents proving the construction company cut corners on the school that collapsed. Nano finds the footage on Samuel's laptop and immediately sees an opportunity: blackmail. Samuel is horrified at first, but with his brother stabbed and drowning in debt, he agrees to help find the papers. It's Marina, though, who ends up making the theft possible. She lifts a set of house keys and the alarm code from Carla's place and hands them to Nano, telling him to clear out her father's watch collection and sell it. He breaks in, barely dodges getting caught, and walks out with the entire collection, including one red-banded watch that turns out to hold the actual evidence everyone's been chasing.
Nano and Marina sleep together around this same stretch, and almost immediately Marina realizes it's Nano she's actually in love with. She starts avoiding Samuel with no explanation, which he takes badly. Then her HIV status, something only her family and Samuel knew, gets read out loud in front of the entire class by a teacher trying to make an example of a confiscated phone. It's a brutal way to have that information become public, and it's also where the season finally explains how she got infected in the first place: at fourteen, by a boy named Pablo who didn't know he had it. Her parents didn't press charges. They paid Pablo to disappear and quietly let it slide that Guzman, Polo, and Ander had beaten him nearly to death over it. That detail is the reason the police eventually look at Guzman as a real suspect.
Christian's situation with Carla and Polo keeps sliding further from anything he actually understands. Polo reveals he's known about the staged hookup the entire time, then instead of ending things, pulls Christian into an actual threesome with Carla. Polo lands Christian a modeling opportunity through his connections, then quietly sabotages it out of jealousy the moment things start looking real between Christian and Carla. Carla is furious enough to call the relationship dead, though it takes a few more episodes and Christian finally asking to be her actual boyfriend before she means it and breaks things off with Polo for good.
Ander and Omar's relationship gets forced into the open the hard way. Guzman, angry after a fight with Nadia, outs Omar to her as both gay and a dealer. Nadia struggles with it given her family's faith, which stings Omar enough that he tries to cut Ander off entirely. It doesn't last very long. The two keep finding their way back to each other, even after Ander's mother catches them kissing and Omar's father, once he learns the truth, decides to force Omar into an arranged marriage rather than let the shame stand.
Marina's pregnancy becomes impossible to hide once she collapses and ends up in the hospital. Samuel assumes the baby isn't his and becomes obsessed with figuring out who the father is, not realizing it's Nano. Marina considers ending the pregnancy, but Nano talks her out of it, promising the stolen watch money will be enough to start over somewhere else, just the two of them. Samuel's hunt for answers goes badly wrong when he wrongly accuses a teacher and attacks him in front of the principal. Nadia ends up being the one to clear things up, exposing an actual blackmail arrangement between that teacher and Lu in the process, which gets the teacher fired and Lu suspended.
It all blows up by the end of episode seven. Carla can't prove Marina and Nano are behind the blackmail, but she tells her father anyway, who tells Ventura, and the confrontation that follows forces Marina to admit she's pregnant with Nano's child. Guzman, blindsided and furious, pulls in Ander and Polo to help him go after Nano. But when they show up, it's Samuel who throws the first punch. The whole thing turns into a full brawl. Guzman runs and hides at Nadia's family shop, Polo slips away, and Ander is left beaten badly enough that Omar finds him bleeding in an alley.
How it all wraps up
Marina and Nano have a plan by the season finale. Her father intends to force an abortion the next morning, so the two decide to skip town before that happens, heading to Asilah in Morocco to start over and raise the baby there.
That night is also graduation, and Marina ends up winning the school's top scholarship trophy by default, since Nadia's been pulled out of school by her father and Lu is serving a suspension, leaving neither of them able to sit their exams. Marina slips away from the party early to wait for Nano by the pool, and that's where Samuel finds her, crying, caught between leaving and staying. He tries one last time to talk her out of going but she says no. He goes to find Guzman, begging him to talk his sister down, but Guzman's done trying and brushes him off completely.
Alone by the pool, Marina gets a visit from Polo, who's spiraling and convinced that getting the watch back is his only shot at winning Carla back. He begs her to hand it over. She won't, and whatever she says back to him cuts deep enough that he grabs the trophy she just won and hits her with it. Marina goes down bleeding, and Polo, in shock, grabs the trophy and runs.
He ends up in the locker room, trying to clean himself off, and walks straight into Christian and Carla mid hookup. Carla takes one look at him and gets the whole story out of him. Rather than panic, she goes into damage control immediately, forcing Christian to help build an alibi. The story they land on is that Polo left drunk earlier, changed, and came back, nothing more. She finds him a clean shirt, makes him repeat the story until it sticks, and the three of them walk back out and rejoin the party like nothing happened.
Nano gets to the pool right on schedule and finds Marina already dying. She falls into his arms and doesn't make it. He calls out for help that never comes, and when no one shows, he panics and runs, which is exactly what Samuel sees: his brother fleeing the crime scene.
By the time the police arrive, Samuel's account is enough to make Nano the prime suspect. Polo sticks to Carla's story without cracking, and it holds up well enough that no one looks twice at him. Guzman, wrecked with grief, turns his anger on Samuel, blaming him for ever introducing Marina to Nano in the first place. Samuel doesn't let that slide either, pointing out that he'd begged Guzman for help hours earlier and got ignored.
Guzman almost doesn't make it through the next day either. Lu finds him standing on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, and talks him down. He tells her he needs her and it's the one honest moment either of them gets that morning. Nano gets formally arrested on suspicion of murder, and Polo walks away a free man. Samuel makes one last attempt to get Christian to help clear his brother's name, but Carla texts Christian to leave before he can commit to anything. The trophy that actually killed Marina ends up sinking to the bottom of a reservoir, buried along with the truth.
Where we left everyone:
Polo: Free. Not a scratch on him. Walking back into school thinking he got away with it clean.
Carla: Completely untouchable. She managed an entire murder cover-up in real time and her world is still exactly how she designed it.
Christian: Trapped. He is an accessory now and Carla holds that over him indefinitely.
Nano: In prison for a murder he didn't commit.
Samuel: His crush is dead, his brother is behind bars, and he's the reason the police even looked at Nano in the first place.
Guzman: Wrecked with guilt and grief. He stood on the edge of a bridge the same night Marina died, and Lu was the one who talked him down.
Nadia: Pulled out of school entirely by her father, missing her own exams in the process.
Ander: Badly beaten in the brawl and left bleeding in an alley, found by Omar.
Omar: Still with Ander despite everything, but staring down a forced marriage his own father is arranging to bury the shame of him being outed.
What worked and what didn't
Omar and Ander were easily my favorite part of the whole season. Their chemistry felt so real, and their scenes together were the only moments where I actually got to giggle and kick my feet. Everyone else is scheming or spiraling, and then you cut to these two just trying to steal a few quiet minutes together. The Carla, Polo, and Christian storyline was also a highlight for me. Watching Carla operate was fascinating, she's terrifying in how calm and calculated she stays while everyone around her falls apart.
Samuel just didn't do it for me as the lead. A few episodes in, I could already tell you exactly what he was going to do in any given scene: the honest thing, the noble thing, the thing that costs him. There's no contradiction in him, no moment where he surprises you. It's why he ends up attacking an innocent teacher over nothing more than a hunch, so locked into protecting Marina that he doesn't stop to check if he's even right. Compare that to Carla, who you cannot predict, or Marina, who's a mess of guilt and rebellion in ways that keep shifting. Samuel is just steady in one direction the whole time. That makes him easy to root for and completely uninteresting to actually watch. For a show built on a dead body and a mystery, your main character should be pulling you forward, not sitting still while everyone around him does the heavy lifting.
The Lu and Guzman bet was one I went in already rolling my eyes at. A bet to take someone's virginity is such a tired, gross setup on paper, and normally I'd check out the second a show tries it. But credit where it's due, the show kinda pulled it off. It turned something that could've been lazy and mean spirited into an actual redemption arc, so I'll let this one slide.
The major thing I couldn't get past was the whole Nano and Marina relationship, and I need to be blunt about it: Nano is a grown man in his twenties, Marina is sixteen, and the show frames this as a forbidden romance. That's a grown man sleeping with a high schooler, and the writing just glosses over it, no pushback from any other character, no acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong here. I understand the plot needs Nano in Marina's orbit for the blackmail storyline to work, but there were other ways to get there that didn't require romanticizing whatever this was. It soured a real chunk of the season for me, and it's the one storyline choice I can't give the show a pass on.
Overall thoughts
As a whole, Season 1 held up well. The pacing and the mystery structure worked, and I was locked in from start to finish. The class divide is basically the whole engine. Rich people get away with things because the system is built to believe them, and poor kids become the easy scapegoat.
My Rating: 8.3
Have you seen Elite?
Drop your take in the comments. I also want to know if you think Samuel should have stayed quiet or if the honest thing was still the right thing even knowing what it cost.
More reviews and takes at The Watchlist Chronicles.