No cold open dropping you into a crime scene this time. The story just starts and moves forward. That decision alone signals that the writers were trying to do something different.
This was the first season to drop the flash-forward interrogation structure the show had used since the beginning.
I went into Season 7 expecting absolutely nothing. After what Seasons 4 through 6 put me through I had basically written this show off and was just watching out of stubbornness. But here is the thing: Season 7 actually has consequences. People carry their baggage from one episode to the next, the decisions they make actually cost them something, the new characters come with real drama attached instead of just taking up screen time. Is it a full comeback? No. But it is enough to make me sit up and pay attention again, and after the last few seasons, that counts for a lot.
This post contains spoilers for Season 7 of Netflix's Elite.
How it kicks off
The season opens with Omar(yes, he's back) in therapy, his counselor Mateo pushing him to actually process his grief over Samuel instead of running from it, the nightmares still very much alive.
Back at Las Encinas, panic's spreading over Didac. His family's mafia ties put him at the center of suspicion for the shooting that closed out last season, and worried parents push for a vote on whether he even gets to stay. The new school director, Luis, tries to smooth things over, but Didac ends up suspended while the vote plays out. His own brother, Pau, tells him to stay out of it entirely when he asks about the shooting, though he promises Didac isn't going anywhere. At school, Nico wants to help him, though Rocio isn't so sure it's worth the trouble.
A new student named Chloe becomes the school's latest gossip target when her sex tape leaks. She doesn't seem to care much, brushing off Sonia's concern, and it later comes out that she's the one who leaked it herself, telling her mother, Carmen, that everyone's always going to try to use people like them, so she might as well control the game rather than let it control her. Carmen's got her own complicated dynamic going with a man named Jose Luis, who turns out to be Cruz's lawyer, and it's later revealed Carmen once signed away access to her own son in exchange for a payout from Cruz, something she's now trying to reopen.
Ivan finally gets discharged from the hospital, and the group throws him a surprise party. Sara's eaten up with guilt the whole time, and Raul quietly tries planting the idea that Patrick might've been the one who hit him. Ivan doesn't buy it. Just as Sara's on the verge of confessing the truth, Raul stops her cold by hurting her hand, then, once they're alone, offers to take the blame for the accident himself, a gesture that looks kind on the surface and manipulative underneath, especially once he's the one comforting her over the guilt of him "sacrificing" himself for her.
Elsewhere, Luis tries guilting Nico's parents, Maria and Alfonso, into letting Didac stay, pointing out how close he and Nico actually are. In the middle of that conversation, they learn Maria's nephew, Eric, has been arrested at a protest that turned into a riot, and they bail him out and invite him to stay with them, despite Alfonso's worry that Eric's activism will be a bad influence, pointedly bringing up Didac as the kind of friend Nico actually needs instead.
At Ivan's, the group tries lightening the mood with a small get-together. Ivan comforts Isadora, who's avoiding Didac entirely, telling her not to mourn what's lost but to make the most of the time she still has with people. Patrick leaves Ivan an emotional voicemail before officially leaving, promising it isn't goodbye forever and that he still loves him. Once everyone clears out, Ivan breaks down crying, only for the arrival of a pizza delivery guy, Joel, to interrupt. Ivan trips on his way to answer the door, and Joel catches him, ending up staying for dinner out of simple kindness.
Sara tries heading out to see Isadora, but Raul locks the doors on her, blaming her for provoking the earlier fight that left her bruised. They end up watching a movie together instead, Sara miserable the whole time as Raul dozes off beside her.
At the club, Eric's activism talk bores Chloe enough to split the group up. Nico apologizes to Sonia over how things went with Ari, and she tells him she accepts him exactly as he is. Chloe, dancing nearby, lets Eric try to comfort her about the leaked tape, unbothered enough to show it to him outright. She kisses him, he tells her he'd rather actually get to know her first, and she talks him into sleeping with her anyway, secretly recording the encounter without his knowledge.
Back at Ivan's, Joel comforts him through the loneliness and the two share a kiss, though Joel immediately pulls back, unsure it's the right move. Meanwhile Isadora invites Didac up to her suite, catching her mother Roberta's attention, while Pau grabs Isadora separately, wanting to talk. Isadora and Didac end up having an honest, emotional moment together over the uncertainty hanging over him, and it turns physical, until partway through Isadora dissociates and asks him to stop. He stays with her anyway, worried, rather than leaving. Elsewhere, Nico tries to kiss Sonia, but she deflects, wanting to just dance instead.
Ivan apologizes to Joel for the kiss, and the two clear the air, agreeing to just be friends, Ivan even offering to use part of his inheritance to help Joel's future. At the club, Eric tries getting Chloe to have a real conversation, and she just walks off. She later watches the secret recording with him, and when Sonia warns her to be careful with it, Chloe admits that she's the one who leaked her own tape in the first place before walking away. At home, Carmen tells her to have more self-respect, and Chloe pushes back, insisting everyone takes advantage of people like them, so she's simply playing the same game her own mother taught her.
Jose Luis and Carmen meet again, and it comes out that she's demanding access to Cruz's pension, the money tied to a contract she signed agreeing to stay away from her own son. If Jose Luis won't pay up, she's threatening to break that agreement and reach out to Ivan directly. It cuts straight to Ivan quietly looking over an old photo of his father.
At home, Joel receives a package from Ivan: a full scholarship offer to Las Encinas. Omar wakes up beside him and is stunned to see it, upset in a way Joel doesn't immediately understand, since Omar had told him he'd studied in the US rather than admit the truth. Omar finally comes clean about everything the school actually did to him and the people he loves. Joel argues it's not fair to deny him the chance regardless, and Omar, scared but supportive, agrees to back him.
When Joel shows up to register, Ivan's thrilled to show him around, and Omar turns up too, finally accepting the internship offer to help run the school's app. Maria and Roberta agree to let Didac stay, which Luis calls the right call. The episode ends on a gut punch: Luis, revealed to be an undercover cop, pinning Didac's photo up on an investigation board.
The twists and the escalation
The school's anonymous app becomes a weapon almost immediately, students piling onto Didac while Omar quietly spirals, unsettled by how close Ivan and Joel have gotten and increasingly convinced therapy isn't helping. He has a panic attack reliving the night Samuel died. Ivan, oblivious to any of that tension, buys Joel a suit for an upcoming race, and their flirtation deepens fast enough that when Omar finally meets Joel in person, Ivan introduces him as his boyfriend, and the moment was a little awkward for everyone.
Isadora's mother, Roberta, turns out to be the one behind the shooting that closed out last season, a secret Pau lets slip in a flashback, and she makes her disapproval of Isadora and Didac's relationship clear from the start. When Didac tries comforting Isadora through her ongoing struggles with intimacy, Roberta interrupts to pressure Isadora into entering their family's horse into an upcoming race, over Isadora's objections. The horse ends up poisoned not long after, and Roberta immediately points the finger at Pau.
Sara's unraveling under Raul's control becomes impossible to hide, breaking out in stress rashes she scratches raw and claims are just allergies. Her PE teacher, Jessica, notices and starts pushing her toward a self-defense class, planting the first real seed of resistance. Meanwhile Chloe, unaware Ivan is actually her half brother, starts eyeing him as her next conquest, until Carmen finally steps in and reveals the truth to stop things before they go further.
Sara, playing a longer game than anyone realizes yet, convinces Raul that getting Ivan to move in with them would help control the narrative around the hit and run and bring in rent money. Around the same time, anonymous cries for help start appearing on the school app, and it's eventually revealed Omar has his own history with suicidal ideation, a moment from his past where Joel talked him back from a ledge, one he still hasn't fully processed.
Sara's birthday party becomes the backdrop for Ivan officially moving in. Luis secretly hacks into Didac's phone under the guise of a hug, laying more groundwork for whatever he's actually building toward. Rocio, Nico, and Eric join a protest at a homeless shelter that turns violent, ending in a gunshot and Rocio's arrest while Eric panics and runs. Sonia, still hurt over Ari, gives Nico another chance after a mixtape gesture wins her over, while Chloe, chasing Sonia's attention out of spite, sleeps with Nico and gets caught in the act, earning herself a furious callout from Sonia for using people as pawns. Raul, riding high off the party, proposes to Sara live on stream. She doesn't answer. She shows up to Jessica's self-defense class instead.
Eric's mental health spirals harder in the episodes that follow, self-harming and swinging unpredictably between warmth and shutdown, a semicolon tattoo hinting at a history nobody's fully addressed yet. At a school exchange event, Ivan, still grieving his father, decides to apply for the program himself just to get away from everything, while Chloe and Eric's own connection keeps short-circuiting, undone every time either of them gets too close to being honest. Martin, Isadora's father, resurfaces to bribe Judge Duran over an eviction, with Luis quietly listening in the whole time. Drug dealers get raided at the club not long after, and it comes out that Pau orchestrated the whole thing.
Omar, trying to do right by everyone but himself, tells Joel to stop holding back and go be with Ivan, insisting he'll be fine alone. He isn't. Dalmar finds him passed out afterward surrounded by pills and empty bottles, a devastating low point that forces Joel to move in and keep watch over him instead.
As Omar recovers, Sara pulls Chloe further into her scheme, using her to help stage a threesome with Raul purely to catch him on camera and finally have real leverage against him. In the middle of all that, Ivan and Joel get caught sleeping together in Omar's own bed, gutting him completely, and Ivan, guilt-ridden, offers to end things if that's what Omar needs. Meanwhile, high on cocaine with Carmen while sorting through Cruz's old belongings, Ivan watches her hallucinate Cruz mid-conversation, and in her disoriented state, she kisses him before realizing what's actually happening and fleeing in horror, a moment made far more disturbing by a truth Ivan doesn't know yet. Isadora, pulled deeper into her father's orbit, gets offered ownership of the family club, and Luis quietly moves her from a background figure to a central name on his investigation board.
Sara turns on Chloe publicly not long after, throwing her under the bus to protect her own image, and it fractures whatever fragile trust they'd built. Isadora, manipulated by her father into signing off on an eviction she doesn't realize targets her own friends' building, is eventually talked back from it by Didac, who pushes her to see through the scam before real damage is done. Sara, cornered by Raul, finally turns the tables and threatens mutual destruction if he goes to the police, forcing an uneasy standoff between them. Eric's spiral bottoms out in an incident that ends with an ultimatum from Nico's family, therapy or nothing, while Carmen quietly begs Ivan to keep what happened between them secret, unaware Chloe's already overheard everything.
By the final stretch of this run, everything's converging. Omar, finally choosing himself, moves out and back in with his own parents, leaving Joel behind in tears over an empty room. Ivan and Joel commit to each other for real. Isadora, growing suspicious of Didac, secretly installs cameras and catches him photographing documents meant to expose her family, the exact betrayal Luis had quietly been engineering all along. And Ivan, done being used, finally confronts Carmen directly, coldly negotiating a two million euro payout in exchange for cutting all ties for good, unaware of just how much more complicated the truth of who she really is to him might still become.
How it all wraps up
The finale opens grim: police find a body and rule it a suicide before the show even tells you whose. Elsewhere, Nico's family panics when Eric goes missing, and when he finally comes home high, a frustrated Nico snaps and throws him out, a decision that's going to weigh heavily by the episode's end.
Isadora confronts Didac over Luis, and the two end up at the police station together, where Luis finally admits he went undercover after last season's shooting. Isadora, furious, tells him she won't betray the people she loves for his investigation, no matter what he's uncovered.
Sara watches Raul and Chloe together in the halls, and Jessica tells her exactly what's happening: Raul knows Sara's still hooked on him, and he'll keep dangling that control for as long as she lets him, the only real way out being to leave the school entirely. Sara, instead of leaving, lures Raul into sleeping with her one more time and secretly records it. Meanwhile Carmen, having finally gotten Ivan's payout, tries reaching out to Chloe for a fresh start, only to find Raul's blocked her number "for Chloe's own good." Sara catches Carmen in the hallway and warns her outright about Raul's history, how he isolates and invalidates before the abuse even starts, insisting even someone as sharp as Chloe isn't immune to it. Then she sends Chloe the tape.
Eric, meanwhile, is spiraling badly. Convinced everyone's given up on him after Nico's outburst, he ends up alone at the squat house, climbs to the roof, and posts on the self-help app that he wants to talk before he ends his life. Sonia's the one who answers.
Isadora, still wrestling with what to do about her family, gets pushed by Rocio's blunt insistence that people who do wrong should face consequences regardless of who they are. It's enough to make Isadora finally confront her parents directly, only to learn they already know about Luis's investigation and aren't worried, since the police don't have real evidence yet. Piecing it together, Isadora realizes the shooting and her horse's death were both her own family's doing, part of a power play against Didac's. She hands the trafficking documents over to Judge Duran, enraging her father, while Roberta, oddly sympathetic, tells her this is exactly why she wanted her daughter kept out of the family business in the first place.
Ivan asks Joel to come with him to South Africa, encouraging him to take the good moments life offers. Joel, torn, turns to Omar and Dalmar for advice. Omar tells him to go if he loves Ivan. Dalmar pushes back hard, telling Joel to stop letting men run his life and to actually live for himself for once.
Chloe notices Ivan's bags packed and gets pulled away by Raul before she can process it, right as Sara's tape lands in her inbox. Furious, she slaps him and tries to leave, and he responds by throwing her phone and hitting her. Carmen shows up outside, refusing to leave until the door opens, and Raul warns Chloe to keep it together or he'll lose control completely. She fakes calm, but Carmen clocks the fear on her face and the phone lying broken on the floor. As Ivan arrives to grab his things before heading to the airport, Carmen quietly tells Chloe to leave with him, then turns to Raul and invites him up to the rooftop for a drink instead.
Isadora sets her own trap in motion, telling Roberta not to come to the meeting with Martin and lying to her father that her mother's simply lost trust in her. Martin, thinking his plan's working, cruelly tells Isadora she'll never be cut out for the family business the way Roberta always said, since his real business with Duran is already finished and she's no longer useful to him. Right as Duran texts that she's arrived at the meeting location, Isadora quietly forwards her location to the police, then tells her father he's right, that she should prioritize the business over her own doubts, right before revealing she's been wearing a wire the entire time. The police, having heard everything, arrest Martin and race toward Duran.
Sonia realizes it's Eric on the other end of the app conversation and rushes to tell Nico, who runs to the squat house roof and finally reaches him, admitting his earlier anger was really at himself for not knowing how to help. He tells Eric how much he's changed his life for the better and how much he'd lose without him, and the two embrace as Eric agrees to come home.
At the airport, Ivan waits on Joel, who shows up bag in hand, uncertain until the moment actually arrives. Back home, Dalmar looks visibly anxious about something as Omar wonders what's wrong. In the end, Joel doesn't get on the plane, returning home heartbroken but resolved, and Omar, gentle but firm, tells him staying apart for now really is for the best, then goes back to therapy himself.
On the rooftop, Duran waits alone until Rocio joins her, and just as Duran senses something's wrong, Martin's men arrive with guns, dragging both women toward the edge. Police storm in just in time, arresting the men and taking Duran into custody for her own corruption, leaving Rocio devastated by the fallout.
Then the season delivers its real gut punch. On the rooftop with Raul, Carmen confronts him over hitting Chloe, needling him until he snaps and chokes her. She asks, almost calmly, for ice for her whiskey. Confused enough to loosen his grip, he lets her go, scoffing at how unhinged she seems, and she asks again what a man's supposed to do when a woman wants ice in her drink. While he's still processing the question, she shoves him off the roof, telling him to go get it himself. She looks down and finds him dead below.
The season closes on the fallout. Nico brings Eric home to his parents' relief. Roberta is stunned by everything that's come out, and Isadora pretends total ignorance about her father's arrest to Didac, telling him to stay away from her instead of explaining anything. Chloe and Carmen are both questioned by police once Raul's body is discovered, Carmen calmly telling officers he was a troubled abuser and that Chloe was with her the entire time. In the final scene, a flashback reveals Dalmar was standing near the building when Raul fell, and the footage on his phone clearly shows Carmen watching from the rooftop right after. He stares at the video, terrified of what he's just found.
Where we left everyone:
Raul: Dead. Pushed off a rooftop by Carmen. The police are calling it suicide for now.
Carmen: Covered by Chloe's alibi. Has Ivan's two million and also has Dalmar's video hanging over her whether she knows it or not.
Sara: Free. It took recording him, baiting him, and watching someone else finish the job, but she got out.
Chloe: Shaken but standing. She lied to the police for her mother. That relationship is unresolved in a way that feels very intentional.
Ivan: On a plane to South Africa. Moving forward the way Patrick asked him to. The Joel chapter is open-ended.
Joel: Stayed. He chose himself over Ivan's cab and went home to people who actually know him. Hurting, but finally making decisions on his own terms.
Omar: Back in therapy and out of Joel's space. A small step in the right direction.
Eric: Home and safe, thanks to Nico. The road ahead is still uncertain but he's on it.
Nico: Stumbled a lot this season but showed up when it counted most.
Isa: Father's under arrest. Corruption shut down. Steps out of her family's shadow for the first time. She and Didac part ways.
Didac: Still in love with Isa. His cooperation with Luis paid off but cost him everything else.
Rocio: Her mother was arrested for corruption. She deserved better from the writing this season and I'm still annoyed about it.
Luis: Case closed. Martin and Duran are both in custody. He got what he came for.
Dalmar: Sitting on video evidence of the night Raul died. He hasn't decided what to do with it yet. This will absolutely matter in Season 8.
What worked
Eric stole the show this season. His mental health arc gets more room to breathe than almost anything else here, and it hits because the writing treats it seriously rather than as a shock beat. Ivan handled himself with real maturity this season too, especially given everything he's been carrying since Cruz died. And Carmen pushing Raul off that roof works well as more than just a shocking finale twist, it's a woman finally acting on years of watching men like him get away with it, and the show earns that catharsis by the time it happens. Dalmar was a quiet highlight too, steady in a season full of people barely holding it together.
Overall thoughts
Season 7 is not bad. Actually, better than not bad, and I didn't think I'd be saying that after the last few seasons.
This is the best this show has been since Season 3. It's not a full return to form, but a real, visible step back toward what made the early seasons work. The drama hits harder because it's grounded in who these people actually are rather than just what scandalous thing happens next. The abuse storyline, Eric's mental health arc, Omar's grief, the toxic family loyalty threading through the corruption plot: all of it works because the writing gives it room to breathe.
The weak spots are still there. The dialogue is kind of cheesy, Isa and Didac go in circles for too long, and the organized crime subplot never ignites the way it clearly wants to. Rocio gets sidelined despite one of the more compelling setups this season. And the show completely drops Omar's role running the student app after using it to build the Eric storyline in the first place, a frustrating loose end for a character who didn't need to come back just to be forgotten again.
My Rating: 7.1
One season left. The show set up the right questions to answer. Here's hoping Season 8 actually crosses the finish line properly, because after seven seasons of watching these people hurt each other in increasingly creative ways, they all deserve a clean exit.
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