Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Elite’ Season 7 on Netflix, The Penultimate Installment Of The Steamy Spanish Teen Drama

Elite returns to Netflix for its seventh season with the news that the spicy, soapy Spanish drama will conclude after its eighth and final installment. But what a run it’s been, with all of its hookups, heartbreaks, and whodunits. Elite has been on long enough to see all of its original castmembers depart, but that doesn’t mean its cycles of class struggle, moneyed arrogance, and season-long mysteries involving murders and cover ups ever abated. This season, the drama will return fan favorite Omar Ayuso to the cast, and include new faces like Brazilian star Anitta and Spanish model and actor Fernando Lindez.     

ELITE – SEASON 7: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Bang! Bang! Bang! The drive-by gunfire that closed out season six of Elite has the school community in Madrid on edge. “Las Encinas is reopening and aims to get back to normal,” a news report says. “Two weeks later, there is still little information about the shooting…”

The Gist: Omar (Ayuso) is watching that news report on television, and dwelling on the symptoms of depression he’s experienced since the death of Samuel (Itzan Escamilla) in season five. His sister Nadia (Mina El Hammani) has moved on from Madrid and high school, “living her best life,” as Omar puts it, but even though he’s studying social work at university, his mind and emotions are stuck in the past. “When will I stop having nightmares,” he asks his therapist. “Fucking anxiety, a black cloud hanging over my head?” When he gets an opportunity to take an internship at Las Encinas, it might offer a means of reckoning with his mental state.

At the school, a group of parents including María (Olaya Caldera) and Roberta (Luz Cipriota) are clamoring for the expulsion of Dídac (Álvaro de Juana) for what they see as his culpability in the shooting. Their argument is that he’s the scion of a criminal family. But he’s also the best friend of María’s son Nico (Ander Puig) and is in a burgeoning relationship with Isadora (Valentina Zenere), Roberta’s daughter. Nico vouches for Dídac, with support from new head of studies Luis (Alejandro Albarracín), as does Sonia (Nadia Al Saidi), and later, Isa gets the group together to welcome home Iván (André Lamoglia), who has survived being run over by a car. Sara (Carmen Arrufat) and her abusive boyfriend Raúl (Álex Pastrana) are there, too, and though Iván doesn’t know it, they were intimately involved in his accident.

It certainly seems scandalous when the entire school’s phones blow up with links to a sex tape. But new student Chloe (Mirela Balić) takes this introduction into the Las Encinas gossip mill in stride. We also meet Chloe’s mother Carmen (Maribel Verdú), whose link to Iván’s late football star father Cruz (Carloto Cotta) is still emerging, as well as Eric (Gleb Abrosimov), Nico’s social justice warrior cousin, and Joel (Fernando Líndez), who enrolls at the academy through unlikely circumstances and has his own links to Iván and Omar. Elite is definitely doing that thing again as its seventh season kicks off, where it tosses all of its individuals and their relationships into a blender and mashes the button for puree. But the series is setting up its long game, too – nobody dies in the first episode, but that doesn’t mean these people aren’t under suspicion.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Elite remains a mirror to Gossip Girl in many, many ways – the big money, the backstabbing, the booty calls – but one area where both shows excel is making you forget that most of these people are supposed to be in high school. (The same could be said for Euphoria, obviously.) It’s also interesting to note the considerable legacy of Elite itself: earlier this year, Netflix gave us Class, a “shameless and sexy” adaptation of Elite that moved the action to Delhi and a school called Hampton International.  

Our Take: Issues of class and friction between haves and have nots have been centerpieces of Elite from the very start, way back in 2018, and those elements remain as it enters its seventh season. (And from an American television perspective, besides Gossip Girl, those core themes can also occasionally suggest The O.C.) This time around, Nico’s cousin Eric is introduced as he’s being arrested by riot police at the makeshift migrant shelter he’s established in an abandoned building, and there’s pushback from Nico’s wealthy father about his wife’s nephew living with them. Not only that, but Carmen and her daughter Chole are newcomers to Madrid who have their own hardened view about how to get ahead. “What else do we have, mom?” Chloe asks. “We’re nothing but bodies. That’s what they want from us, and we take advantage.” It remains refreshing how Elite explores social hierarchy as an undercurrent to all of its trysts and relationship drama. It’s not like it wouldn’t still be eminently watchable if it was just a standard soap-style collection of sexting, bathroom stall hookups, and chaotic love triangles. But it’s admirable that it has more to say than all of that, even if the spicy stuff is ultimately what pays the bills.      

Sex and Skin: Come on. If you’ve seen even one second of Elite over its multi-season run – and don’t forget its vignette-style spinoffs! – you know the answer to this prompt. The series has never been very far from Decider’s annual roundups of the small screen’s best sex scenes.    

Parting Shot: With various parents softening their hardline position on Dídac continuing to matriculate at Las Encinas – each for them for very different reasons – Elite spends its parting moments teasing a developing storyline that’s sure to keep his movements under a microscope.  

Sleeper Star: ¡Ay, caramba! What’s going on with the mother-daughter duo of Carmen (Maribel Verdú) and Chole (Mirela Balić)? The new arrivals to Madrid and Las Encinas are making a big splash at the outset of season 7, with descriptors like “scheming” and “calculating” coming immediately to mind.   

Most Pilot-y Line: “Don’t worry babe, we’re all kind of extra here.” Isadora meant this in regard to Sara becoming emotional during a friends gathering. But basically, everybody on this show is being extra all the time.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Elite feels revived with energy anew as its penultimate season arrives – there are brand-new and existing flings and romances, characters questioning their place in society, and secrets burbling just under the surface that are bound to become louder as things move along. Get ready for hot goss, delicious deceit, and setups for that series finale to come. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.