Eight seasons of secrets, sex scandals, murder, and filthy rich teenagers making the worst decisions imaginable, and this is how we go out.
Look, I have been on this Elite journey longer than I care to admit and the final season had a lot to live up to. Did it deliver? Sort of. Was it frustrating? Absolutely. Was I still glued to my screen? Every single episode.
This post contains spoilers for Season 8 of Netflix's Elite.
How It Kicks Off
The season opens the way Elite always does: we see the aftermath before we see the cause. Two drunk girls stumble across a body at a graduation party. The body is Joel. And then we snap back to the beginning, because the show needs us to understand exactly how things got that bad before it will tell us who did it. The premiere is literally titled "Alumni", and that's not subtle, because before we can even process the image, the Krawietz siblings walk in. Hector and Emilia are alumni who have returned to Las Encinas with money, serious influence, and motives that take a few episodes to fully surface. They have taken over the Alumni Club and turned it into something exclusive, thrilling, and dangerous. To get in, you need a sponsor. To keep your spot, you pass tests that escalate at a pace that would alarm any reasonable person. And the benefits are real, at least on paper: Nadia's UN internship reportedly came through this very club. So when the seniors start being tempted, you understand why.
The early episodes do solid work setting up the pressure each character is under, and the show does this sequentially enough that you can follow the web before it starts tangling. Joel is sleeping rough after things fell apart with Ivan. He's proud, broke, and trying hard to be independent, which makes him exactly the kind of person Hector gravitates toward. Dalmar is sitting on a deportation notice and holding a recording of Carmen pushing Raul to his death at the end of last season. Isa is flat broke and trying to keep Isadora House from collapsing while Detective Luis is already using his badge to squeeze her.
Everyone wants something from the Krawietzs. The Krawietzs want something from everyone. Hector's fixation on Joel, in particular, registers less like a crush and more like possession from the very first scene they share.
The Twists & Escalation
As the Alumni Club's initiation process escalates, what starts as social climbing and petty games slides into something much darker: a prostitution ring operating out of Las Encinas, right under everyone's noses. Joel, caught between his feelings for Ivan and his desperation to stop depending on him financially, eventually stops resisting Hector's pull and gets drawn into the Alumni's private sex parties. It's one of the more uncomfortable arcs the show has given a character in years.
Luis discovers the Alumni's activities and adds them to his extortion list, which now includes Isa and everything he knows about her club. Desperate, Isa approaches Joel and asks him to use his Alumni contacts to handle the situation. Joel agrees, goes directly to Luis, and tells him to back off. That confrontation is what signs Joel's death warrant, though we don't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dalmar has the video of Carmen killing Raul, Carmen knows he has it, and she is the kind of woman who will maneuver a situation rather than panic. She steers Chloe toward Hector and lets the Alumni Club handle its own problems. Later Joel, realizing what Dalmar is holding, tries to use that recording as leverage to force Carmen into paying Dalmar off. It does not go the way he planned. Chloe and Eric corner Joel in the Alumni room with a knife to scare him into backing down. Dalmar shows up and pulls Joel out. Eric drops the knife on his way out. Nobody picks it up.
Chloe, before she left, had turned her phone camera on and placed it on a shelf in that room. She was hoping to record something scandalous she could use. She got something much worse. Luis comes in while Joel had his back turned and was sending a message to Ivan, picks up Eric's forgotten knife, and slits Joel's throat. By the time Hector wakes up and finds the body, Joel has already bled out. The season's murder mystery is officially open, Ivan and Dalmar are the prime suspects, and the show has to spend its final episodes unraveling how to expose a cop for a killing that happened inside the most expensive school in Spain.
Omar's arc through the middle of this season is where my patience wore thinnest. He gets beaten badly by Hector's crew after refusing to cooperate with the Alumni. He gets threatened, circled, sidelined. For long stretches of the mid-season he's reacting to other people's plots rather than driving anything himself. Omar has been in this show from the very beginning, longer than almost anyone, and watching him spend the final season as a supporting character in other people's stories felt like a waste. His reunion with Nadia, when she finally arrives, is sweet. But it's not enough.
How It All Wraps Up
Ivan and Isa find Chloe's phone. The footage is on it. Luis's face is right there, clear as anything, picking up the knife and walking toward Joel. Omar gets hold of the video and immediately decides he's not handing it to the police, for the very logical reason that a police department is not going to enthusiastically arrest one of its own detectives on the basis of a video found by the people that detective was extorting. Instead, Omar tries to use the footage to force Hector and Emilia into signing a confession about the assault on him. He'll give them the video, which would prove their innocence in Joel's murder, in exchange for that admission. Hector refuses. And then Hector makes a different offer: he'll help Omar burn Las Encinas to the ground instead. Nadia is the one who talks Omar back from the edge, pointing out that if Las Encinas burns, the Krawietzs walk away clean from everything. The only real move is to go public.
Omar and Sara go live. Together. Omar runs through the entire history of Las Encinas: Samuel and Marina's deaths from season one, the covered-up accidents that nearly killed him and Ivan across multiple seasons, every crime the school absorbed and buried. Then Sara uploads the footage of Luis murdering Joel. While that's happening, Isa is in Isadora House, now Cruz9, with Luis, keeping him occupied. She tries to inject him with drugs while he's distracted. He catches on. There's a scuffle. Luena, the other detective who has been investigating the Alumni, sees the livestream and arrives in time. The police barge in and arrest Luis before he can seriously hurt Isa. And then, as they're leading him out, Isa quietly injects him anyway. He seizes. He dies.
Emilia had come clean about having tampered with the crime scene to frame Ivan. She and Hector got arrested. Then both siblings are mysteriously released and disappear, which the finale does nothing to explain and which reads as a deliberate setup for something the show may or may not ever follow through on. Carmen and Chloe leave Madrid together after Sara makes clear she's coming for them. Which is just dumb to me because the show made it clear how abusive Raul was to her. I hated her whole schtick with Nico too. The goodbye between Chloe and Eric is one of the better small moments in the finale: quiet, a little broken, no neat resolution. Eric stays, reconciles with Nico, and heads into whatever comes next. Dalmar gives Sara the video of Carmen killing Raul, puts the decision entirely in her hands, and accepts whatever follows.
And then the actual last scene. Las Encinas gets shut down permanently following the public fallout from Omar's livestream, and the senior class gets redistributed to a public school to finish their final exams. Ivan, Isa, Eric, Sonia, Nico, and Sara walk through the doors of a completely ordinary school, overdressed and visibly out of place, while normal teenagers stare at them like they've arrived from another planet. It's funny and a little sad. And it's quietly self-aware in a way the show has not always managed. That last shot is the best thing about this finale.
Why S1 to S3 Still Wins
Here's the thing people forget when they talk about how big Elite got: the first mystery, the one that put this show on the map, was Marina's murder, and Marina was played by María Pedraza. Her on-screen boyfriend Nano was Jaime Lorente. The scholarship kid who got pulled into all of it, Christian, was Miguel Herrán. All three of them were filming Elite's early seasons while also playing major roles in Money Heist, Lorente as Denver and Herrán as Río, at the exact same time. That's not a coincidence, that's a show that had stacked talent before anyone outside Spain knew its name. Danna Paola, who played Lu, went on to become one of the biggest pop stars in Latin music. That's the kind of cast a first season rarely gets, and it shows in how tightly seasons 1 through 3 hold together. One mystery, one set of consequences, characters who actually had time to breathe.
After that, the show kept replacing its entire cast every couple of seasons, and the quality followed the cast out the door. Season 4 landed a rough 53% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Season 5 split critics over how far it leaned into excess for excess's sake. Season 7 got hit hardest, criticized for thin chemistry between the newer cast members and storylines that felt like they were stalling for time, Omar's arc in particular started feeling repetitive long before season 8 made it worse. By the time the finale rolled around, even critics who liked parts of it were calling the central mystery a letdown compared to what the show used to be capable of. None of this is me being dramatic. It's the consensus. The show knew its own glory days were behind it, which is honestly part of why the Alumni concept in season 8 felt like such a deliberate callback, it was reaching for that early-seasons energy and only partly getting there.
Where We Left Everyone.
Joel: Dead. Murdered by Luis in the Alumni room on graduation night with Eric's forgotten knife.
Omar: Alive and finally the one who brings everything down. He goes live with Sara, exposes eight seasons' worth of covered-up crimes, and ends the season with Nadia choosing to stay.
Ivan: Cleared of Joel's murder. Still grieving.
Dalmar: Released from custody once Luis is unmasked.
Chloe: Leaves Madrid with Carmen after Sara signals she is not done with them.
Eric: Stays behind. Reconciles with Nico. Heads to the public school with the rest of the group.
Isa: Alive. She killed Luis herself, quietly, as he was being led away by police. Cruz9 is still hers.
Nico and Sara: They find their way to each other. I don't care for them.
Hector and Emilia Krawietz: Arrested, then freed. They vanish. The ending clearly left a door open for something else.
Luis: Dead. Isa injected him mid-arrest. He had a seizure, threw up, and died.
Las Encinas: Shut down permanently.
FINAL VERDICT & OVERALL THOUGHTS
My Rating: 6.5
Season 8 is frustrating in a very specific way: it's not bad, it just doesn't feel like a finale. A show ending its run after eight seasons should be closing doors. Instead, the Krawietz siblings disappear into thin air, the Alumni prostitution ring gets introduced with maximum shock value and then quietly dropped, and the answer to the central murder mystery is a character who doesn't make sense. Luis as Joel's killer did not work for me. The show had spent the whole season building Hector's obsessive jealousy and Emilia's cold calculation to a point where pulling Luis out as the actual answer felt more like a plotting convenience. Emilia had the motive, the ruthlessness, and the opportunity. She would have been the better choice. Also, the fact that Sara hitting Ivan with her car back in season 6 was never addressed, not once, not even in passing, is something I am choosing not to let go of.
And look, I'll say it plainly: the show as a whole had a lot of lows. Seasons 4 through 7 are not seasons I'm rushing to defend, and a lot of that comes down to a show that kept swapping out its entire emotional core every time a contract ended. Seasons 1 to 3 are still, and probably always will be, the best version of this show. Tighter mystery, characters who got to actually develop instead of getting replaced mid-arc, and a cast that turned out to be stacked with people who went on to bigger things. That's not nostalgia talking, that's just what the show actually was before it had to keep reinventing itself every season to survive.
Now for the parts of season 8 that actually worked. Joel is one of the most interesting characters this show has written since the original cast. His arc from pizza delivery boy to Alumni pawn to accidental extortionist was good. Omar and Sara's livestream, pulling eight seasons of buried crimes into the open all at once, is cathartic in a way the show pulls off well.
Would I rewatch the whole show again? Probably not all of it. The first two or three seasons are where the magic lives and they still hold up completely. But as a farewell to a show that somehow kept pulling me back no matter how messy it got, even on a binge where I could feel the drop in quality happening in real time, this is a decent enough goodbye, even if it didn't quite earn the ending it was reaching for.
I'm just glad it's over.
What did you think of the finale?
Did Luis as the killer work for you, or were you also sitting there convinced it had to be Emilia? And while we're at it, where do you personally think the show jumped the shark?
Drop your hot take in the comments.
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