All good things must come to an end, and after a two-year wait, Netflix‘s “Sex Education” returns for its fourth and final season. It’s always bittersweet when a fan-favorite show wraps up, but in the case of a series as inclusive, intelligent, and big-hearted as this one, it’s an end particularly hard to take. For a certain generation, “Sex Education” wasn’t just another teen show: it was the teen show, a series that updated the high school drama formula with mirth and panache, remaking the familiar adolescent addles into a generous choir that resounds with a call to its audience to be who one is, no matter how messy, silly, imperfect, or strange. Add in a premise that treats sex and identity both as mature themes and lively material for laughs, and Laurie Nunn‘s creation may be one of the best things that Netflix has ever done.
So how does Nunn send her sex-crazed student body off? The show’s last eight episodes exude the bittersweet tang all finales have. But for diehard fans, “Sex Education” Season 4 may end up tasting bitter over anything else. While the show retains its bawdy, high-spirited honesty and offers its ensemble a heartfelt goodbye, this kicker isn’t the same as Seasons 1-3. That’s partially due to a new school and classmates to introduce, and some cast members aging out of their roles entirely. But Nunn and her creative team clearly want to do something different for their send-off; and they also want to do too much. And while the show’s heart remains intact, like one of its characters, Season 4 opts to sacrifice some of it to make a statement. The result? “Sex Education” at its weakest and most uneven, even as the cast remains in top form.
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With Moordale Secondary closed, its students need a new place to go to school. And for a good chunk of Moordale’s best, brightest, and horniest, that’s Cavendish Sixth Form College. As Otis (Asa Butterfield) pines for Maeve (Emma Mackey), he and Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) are excited for a fresh start, but Cavendish proves innovative in all the ways that Moordale wasn’t. The campus offers yoga, meditation, sound baths, silent discos, a communal garden, gender-neutral facilities, and sustainability practices. As Eric describes it, “It’s like Amsterdam, but in space.” Moreover, Cavendish is student-run, with Principal Lakami barely an authority figure and more a behind-the-scenes presence for institutional guidance. So much for the days of Headmistress Hope.
While some Moordale students find adjusting to the progressive campus easy, others struggle. Eric quickly bonds with Abbi (Anthony Lexa), Roman (Felix Mufti), and Aisha (Alexandra James), a popular all-queer clique known as The Coven. Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) commits to her healing journey and signs up for an Art A-level on a whim, where she meets another recently enrolled local, Isaac (George Robinson), Maeve’s ex. Meanwhile, Otis plans to start a new clinic on campus, but there’s a catch: Cavendish already has a sex therapist. And O (Thaddea Graham) has a loyal client base and a buzzy social media presence. Does awkward but authentic Otis stand a chance against O’s well-curated persona?
Some of Moordale’s finest don’t fare as well as Eric and Aimee. Mr. Groff (Alistair Petrie), now a substitute teacher at Cavendish, discovers that Adam (Connor Swindells) isn’t back at school. Instead, Adam want to keep working with animals and pursues an apprenticeship at a local farm. Ruby (Mimi Keene) finds herself socially unmoored without Anwar and Olivia, made worse when she realizes she shares a bitter past with O. A casual fling makes Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling) question his sexuality before a health scare has him track down his biological father. Viv (Chinenye Ezeudu) gets thrown off by Cavendish’s non-competitive academics and her new, over-controlling love interest, Beau (Reda Elazouar). And Cal (Dua Saleh) starts taking testosterone to help with their body dysmorphia, but it leads to their libido surging off the charts, making them feel more out of place than ever.
Elsewhere, an overwhelmed Jean (Gillian Anderson) struggles to raise newborn Joy alone and makes matters worse by applying for a gig as a radio host. To help out at home, Otis calls in reinforcements: Jean’s estranged sister Joanna (Lisa McGrillis), who’s bad with money and even worse with boundaries. And across the pond, Maeve lives her dream at elite Wallace University. As she and Otis try to make their long-distance relationship work, Maeve makes new friends like Tyrone (Imani Yahshua) but also butts heads with her teacher, cult author Thomas Molloy (Dan Levy). But when tragedy strikes at home, a crushed Maeve returns to Moordale, inciting reunions bittersweet, necessary, and everything in between.
If all this sounds like too much to juggle in eight episodes, that’s because it is. Season 4 sets up a lot before the tether pulls Maeve back to Moordale (to steal a lyric from Ezra Furman, back with more original music). And once she returns, most of the original cast barely grazes one another. Eric and Otis spend most of the season estranged, with Eric pulled between new friends, his church, and his various awakenings. Aimee and Maeve reunite, but it’s transitional scenes between hospital visits, funerals, big dates, and bigger reveals. Adam doesn’t cross paths with anyone and sees Eric only once. New characters, who are all fine, take up runtime to establish themselves. And despite plenty of scenes, Jackson, Viv, and Cal are often so tangential to Season 4’s central attraction (which is almost always Maeve, what she’s going through, and where she’ll end up) that they sometimes don’t feel like an essential part of the show at all.
There’s also this season’s knack for pushing a more earnest tone to the forefront. Some of that comes from knowing the show is over. But for a series that’s typically a bawdy and heartfelt romp, the show’s sincerity in Season 4 often feels over-serious. Sure, there’s a character’s death and funeral that serves as this season’s centerpiece, but “Sex Education” has never felt this uneven when it comes to laughs, levity, and love. Some new characters lack the chemistry with onscreen partners that exited ones had. For Jean, Jakob was a presence in her household that challenged her to her core and for the better, whereas Joanna often feels like just another chore for her to do. And brief cameos by Ms. Sands and Mr. Hendricks remind viewers how conspicuous their absence this season is. It’s not that Season 4 isn’t funny; it very often is. Rather, it lacks the balance and bouyancy that Seasons 1-3 effortlessly display.
But what Season 4 really misses is Moordale and the movement Maeve and Otis created in its asbestos-soaked bathrooms. Without that school’s broader community, the big heart of “Sex Education” beats a little less loudly. While these new episodes expand the show’s representative demographics even further, they lack the spirit that made the series so novel in the first place. The allure of “Sex Education” was never only about being seen. There’s also the culture Moordale’s students create through that recognition: one where emergent adults discover self-expression through sexuality and then wield it as a political statement. What starts in Season 1 as graffiti on desks evolves into a full-blown movement, where an entire student body stands up for their singular personhoods against a rigid institution that fails to affirm their identities and desires. And the irony is that it all this pride emerges from two outcasts struggling with heteronormative desire for one another.
Whatever radical statements “Sex Education” has to say in Season 4 get muddled in attempts to do too much. Roman and Abbi may be a groundbreaking representation of trans experience onscreen, but they and Aisha are three more characters in an already loaded ensemble that writers must account for. A student sit-in over a broken elevator in Episode 7 satirizes Cavendish as a woke institution that overlooks its basic practicalities. That’s clever enough, but the protest lacks narrative weight like Season 3’s triumphant all-school assembly. Instead, the sit-in serves as a token chance for the series to make another group’s rights visible and a cheap way to get Otis and O stuck together to hash things out. And while that pair’s election for campus sex therapist provides commentary on talk therapy as a practice, a profession, and a position of power, Otis lacks investment in an actual victory.
That’s because after the first two episodes, Season 4 forgets the show’s initial focus on Otis’ ability “to make people truly feel seen” at his clinic and instead puts his love triangle with Ruby and Maeve front and center. The tension around who he’ll end up with is the climax of too many episodes this season. And in the process, Nunn and her writers relegate several characters, old and new, to the sidelines to focus on whether or not Maeve will stick around. The answer should be obvious from the first couple of episodes after Maeve writes “Southchester,” a brilliant but unsentimental potrait of her youth in Moordale. But Molloy’s advice to Maeve that “a writer has to be allowed to evolve” only further drives home that “Sex Education” uses its final episodes ultimately as a vehicle for Maeve to achieve her liberty and leave Moordale behind.
It’s a satisfying end for Maeve’s journey, but it shouldn’t retcon character development from previous seasons. In Season 3, Anna (Indra Ovré) and Maeve’s half-sister Elsie show her that surrogate families may provide the stable and reliable consistency Meave needs to thrive. But no, after Maeve’s brother Sean (Edward Bluemel) lets her down again, Maeve plows through that pair (barely seen in Season 4) and the other people who love her to, as Jackson puts it, look for something better. It’s important that Maeve achieve her dreams, but it shouldn’t come at the neglect of those who helped her reach them in the first place. A bolder ending to “Sex Education” would have Maeve not sacrifice her dreams at Wallace but instead adjust them, recognizing that she never would have escaped her circumstances without Otis, Aimee, Isaac, Ms. Sands, and everyone else who truly saw her along the way.
Molloy may be right when he tells Maeve that “writing is supposed to cost us something”; anything worth doing does. But this season’s focus on Maeve’s victory and its sacrifices costs other “Sex Education” characters worthier endings than they receive. Adam deserves more than another season where he proves his competence and acts as a sounding board between his separated parents. Likewise, Ruby develops into a nuanced, comprehensive character in Season 4 and could have bloomed further if she weren’t so often yanked around by Otis and Maeve’s relationship status. Only Eric’s ending reaches the same heights as Maeve’s. His ultimatum to his church and family in the finale may as well be the adage of the entire show: “I love myself too much not to tell my truth.” But each character in “Sex Education” has a truth to tell. And while some of them succeed in doing so, in this season, Maeve’s truth often drowns almost everyone else out.
It’s ironic that after four seasons, “Sex Education” ends with a statement about feminine agency that undercuts its more crucial ethos that everyone, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, or disability, has the right to tell their truth. That includes the normy, awkward hetero guy whose therapeutic talents sparked all of this growth in Moordale (and in Maeve) in the first place. But what is Otis’ truth? It’s a little disappointing at the end to drift away from Otis’ window and into the sky, watching the show’s main character, already a wounded healer, take in that while he’s a little older, a little wiser, a little more wounded, and a touch less arrogant, he’s still more or less the same. But the most pronounced, enduring growth “Sex Education” advocates may not be personal so much as interpersonal. As Season 4’s tagline goes, sometimes growing up means growing apart — and that means growing firmly and more distinctly into who you are.
However, it’s important to remember that “Sex Education” opts for something more open-ended in its final moments. Although worlds apart, Otis and Maeve still look up and out across the same sky. And while Otis may be heartbroken, and Maeve arguably as alone as she ever was, that doesn’t mean their stories won’t converge again. In that sense, having “Sex Education” end with its central soulmates separate but still a part of each other, sharing the sky through the same act, invites audience members to do the same. Imagine the people who made adolescence such a hot and heavy chapter in your life story, for good and ill. The likely lack of resolution there isn’t bad storytelling, but an essential part of the story itself. Chances are those people from chapters past are attempting the same thing that Moordale’s residents continue to do as “Sex Education” draws its curtain: to live their truth, or at least find the capacity to do so, feeling their way through this thing called life. Ultimately, that’s all any of us can do; and however much it hurts to do it well, feel it nonetheless. [B]