This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of Netflix's Elite.
Okay so. Three broke kids get shipped off to Spain's fanciest private school because a rich man's shoddy construction work literally collapsed their old one. His guilt money becomes their scholarships. Samuel, Nadia, and Christian show up with nothing but good grades and the nerve to exist in a space that was never built for people like them. And by the end of Season 1? One student is dead, an innocent man is rotting in prison for it, and the actual killers are at school on Monday morning like nothing happened. That is Elite. That is the whole show in a breath.
Elite was created by Carlos Montero and Darío Madrona and released on Netflix on October 5, 2018. Season 1 ran for eight episodes and was watched by over 20 million households in its first month alone. It is set at Las Encinas, a fictional elite private school in Spain, and it tells its story through flash-forwards that drop you into police interrogations before walking you back through the events that led there. You already know someone is dead before you even meet them properly. The whole season feels like watching a car crash in slow motion, and you cannot look away.
How It Kicks Off (The Beginning)
The setup is simple and the class tension is immediate. Samuel, Nadia, and Christian are poor kids who earned their place. Everyone else was born into theirs. Las Encinas does not need to explain why the scholarship students do not belong. The architecture says it. The uniforms say it. The way the rich kids look through them on their first day says it louder than anything else.
Samuel is earnest and quietly brave, the kind of person who tries to do the right thing even when the right thing costs him personally. Nadia is sharp and guarded, navigating both the snobbery of her classmates and the strict expectations of her conservative father at home. Christian is the one who bends, who sees the wealth around him and immediately wants a piece of it, which makes him the most vulnerable of the three from the very beginning.
The show wastes no time telling you how the class divide actually functions at a school like this. It is not just about who has money and who does not. It is about who gets the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. At Las Encinas, money means your mistakes get managed. Being poor means you become the explanation. Season 1 earns that argument by the time it finishes. Every story beat is designed to make you feel it.
Marina is the first person Samuel connects with, and the show uses her as the bridge between the two worlds. She is wealthy, she is Guzmán's sister, she has every material advantage available to her, and she is still miserable in ways that Las Encinas cannot fix. Marina is HIV positive, diagnosed after a relationship at fourteen with an older boy who did not know he was infected. Her parents responded by paying the boy off to disappear and refusing to ever discuss it again. They sent her to therapy and shut the conversation down completely every time she tried to open it. She has been carrying that in a school that runs entirely on secrets, and the weight of it has made her reckless in the specific way people get reckless when they have decided nothing matters much anymore. Samuel likes her immediately. She likes Nano.
The Twists and Escalation (The Middle)
Nano is Samuel's older brother, fresh out of prison, owing money to people who will not wait for it. When he walks into Marina's life she stops seeing Samuel entirely, and the show does not pretend this is fair to Samuel. It is not. But it also understands what Marina sees in Nano. He is chaos in a life that has only ever offered her controlled misery. She has been told what to do and who to be for so long that someone who operates completely outside every system she knows feels like freedom.
The problem is Nano owes serious money and needs it fast. Marina helps him steal an expensive watch from Carla's father's collection, rationalizing it as targeting someone who already has too much. What they do not realize until after the theft is that one of the watches contains a USB drive with documents that implicate both their fathers in the corrupt construction deal that collapsed the public school and sent Samuel, Nadia, and Christian to Las Encinas in the first place. Suddenly what started as a robbery becomes blackmail material, and Marina and Nano decide to use it. They plan to extract money from Carla's father, take the money, and leave together. Marina is also pregnant by this point. She initially plans to terminate the pregnancy but changes her mind. She and Nano are going to run.
Meanwhile, the Carla and Polo situation is slowly detonating. Carla pulled Christian into their relationship as entertainment, dressed it up as something open and progressive, but it was always about Carla having control. Christian thought he had won. He was a toy and he was the last to understand that. Polo knew it too. He was losing Carla slowly and spending the whole season frantically trying to find a way to win her back, which meant doing whatever she needed and hoping it was enough.
The Lu and Guzman situation burns at a slower temperature but is just as destructive. Lu saw Guzman noticing Nadia and set a trap. She dared him to pursue Nadia, banking on Nadia either falling for a fake approach or shutting him down cold. What she did not plan for was Guzman actually catching feelings halfway through the bet. Spending time with Nadia did something to him. She did not perform for him. She did not shrink. She was the most confident, most grounded person in that school and carried it without trying. Guzman did not just develop a crush. He started to genuinely respect her, which was probably a new experience for a boy who had never had to look up at anyone before. By the time Lu detonated the bet publicly, Guzman had already become someone worth Nadia's time. The damage was real. So was the growth.
Ander and Omar are doing something completely different from everyone else in that school. They are not playing games or running schemes. They are just trying to exist somewhere that has no room for who they are. Ander is being crushed under the weight of his father's expectations, performing the perfect son routine every single day. Omar is Nadia's brother, selling drugs to save up enough to one day get out from under a household that cannot accept him. They are sneaking around, stealing small pockets of time together, and those scenes are the warmest thing in an otherwise very cold season. Everyone else is playing chess. These two are just trying to breathe.
How It All Wraps Up (The Climax and Ending)
The night of the end-of-year party, Marina wins the school's award for best student. She accepts it knowing she does not deserve it, in a school full of people who have never deserved anything they have. She is waiting by the school pool for Nano so they can execute the plan, hand over the evidence, collect the money, and leave. Samuel finds her first and tries to get her to stay. She says no. He walks away.
Then Polo shows up.
He is there for the watch. Getting the watch back is his way of proving himself to Carla, of making himself useful enough that she will want him again. Marina refuses. She mocks him. She calls him Carla's puppet, tells him she pities him, and turns her back. Polo picks up the trophy she just won and hits her over the head with it. He does not plan it. There is no premeditation. It is one second of rage from a boy who cannot handle being dismissed, and Marina collapses by the pool.
Here is the detail that makes it even worse: she did not die immediately. If Polo had called an ambulance, she would have survived. He did not call one. He took the watch, took the trophy, and ran to Carla. She was in the locker room with Christian. She assessed the situation in seconds, cleaned Polo up, and turned a witness into an accessory before Christian had time to fully understand what had happened. One conversation and she owned him. Marina bled out alone by the pool.
Nano had arrived at the school that night for the handover. He found her. He was the last person seen near her, he has a criminal record, and he comes from a poor family. Samuel, trying to be honest with the police and tell them what he knew, told them about Marina and Nano's relationship and that he had seen Nano near the pool that night. He handed his brother a life sentence without knowing it. Nano was arrested. Carla, Polo, and Christian went home.
Where We Left Everyone.
Polo: Free. Not a scratch on him. Walking back into school like nothing happened.
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 and his brother is behind bars and he accidentally helped put him there.
Guzman: Grieving and spiralling. He's convinced Nano is guilty and that grief is going to drive everything he does in Season 2.
Nadia and Ander: Still standing, barely. Both are exposed and exhausted in different ways.
Omar: Still surviving at home, but at least he has Ander now. It is the one relationship this season that does not collapse.
Final Verdict and Overall Thoughts
Season 1 is Elite at its sharpest. The class divide is not just set dressing here, it is the whole engine. Rich people at Las Encinas do not get away with things because they are smarter or more careful. They get away with things because every system around them is designed to make them easy to believe and poor people easy to blame. Nano did not get arrested because the evidence pointed to him. He got arrested because he was the most convenient explanation, and Samuel's honest statement made the math work perfectly. An innocent man went to prison because the actual killers were the kind of people the system was built to protect.
Marina was not a saint. She was reckless, she stole from people who trusted her, she kept secrets that hurt people who cared about her. But she was also a girl who had been failed by every adult in her life, carrying a diagnosis her parents refused to acknowledge in a school that weaponized it against her the second it got out. She deserved better than bleeding out alone by a pool because Polo could not handle being dismissed for five seconds.
Season 1 earns the anger it makes you feel. That is a harder thing to do than it looks.
What did you think of how Season 1 wrapped up?
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.
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