…………………………………………………

Elite Season 4 Review

The fourth season of Elite isn’t quite as strong as the last (best) one, but it’s still a reliably entertaining time to be had once again with this fun teenage soap opera.

………………………………………………….

“Your son’s impulsiveness isn’t really

a matter of biology, Your Highness“

…………………………………………………..

After the explosive last season, things drastically change for the Las Encinas school and the entire show as a result. Not only is Polo dead, but Carla, Nadia and Lu (all important characters) are gone in this season. Well, Nadia is here, but only through video chat in a storyline that obviously led to the breakup between her and Guzman.

Instead of these old favorites, we get an entire new family joining the school and the main cast. A powerful family, they consist of the father who is the new school principal and his three kids: Patrick, Mencia and Ari. They hold the bulk of the season’s storylines, so let’s discuss each of these three very strong additions to the show.

First off, Ari is probably the weakest. She is great herself, but she was straddled with the love triangle, the most basic and boring story there is in all of teenage entertainment. Her fraught relationship with her sister was more interesting, but the will they, won’t they between her, Guzman and Samuel got old pretty quickly. Eventually, it was all rather unimportant in the bigger scope of things.

…………………………………………………..

The testing of their friendship was at least well explored, and actually the two still ended up being great friends. How these two went from enemies to rivals to friends was unrealistic, but still a satisfactory arc that here got quite a moving conclusion. I just wish that the two got more interesting things to do in this season that chose Ari over them as the stronger focus.

As for Mencia, her arc is probably the most important as it leads to the eventual murder and cover-up. That entire conclusion was definitely a repeat from the last season, but I was still fine with it as they did not dwell too much with it, but instead decided to throw a goodbye sequence for Ander and Guzman, which was definitely very moving.

But going back to Mencia, I just loved her character. A rebel kid who won’t listen to her family and who is always making problems for them all, she is a flawed, but undeniably wonderful person. Her dark storyline with Armando was surprisingly well executed, leading to some silly horror-thriller scenes near the end, but most of it worked.

…………………………………………………..

But her romance with Rebe was just beautiful. I loved every second of it. It wasn’t just done for the lesbian representation, but it was genuinely an amazing love story and one of the best on this show in fact. The exploration of Rebe’s character and how she would always stand up for her closest people no matter the cost and the pain was just beautiful as was the mother-daughter talk near the end that really touched me. How Rebe went from a side character in Season 2 to one of the best people on the show was what I wanted all along for her and I am glad that I got it here.

There are two other storylines here. One is the Cayetana-Prince Florian relationship, which to me treaded the same ground as her previous relationship. I did not quite care for this European prince who has anger problems and is abusive toward women. The class issues were once again done well in this season, but overall this relationship wasn’t all that interesting. Still, it led to the growth of Cayetana once again and she really needed to toughen up and stand on her own legs after all this time chasing wealth.

…………………………………………………..

The last big storyline of the season is of course the triangle that develops between Omar, Ander and Patrick. Patrick as this sexy young twink was a fun addition to the show and his cockiness was entertaining to follow, but their fling with him only eventually led to their reconnection, which resulted also in one of the best romances on Elite. I loved how they did not ruin their relationship as they easily could have. This subplot was the sexiest and soapiest.