fifth season
After the departure of Miguel Bernardeau and Arón Piper, the students of Las Encinas try to keep interest afloat in a series that is going through its worst moment
A little less than a year ago, we told here that we had liked the first four episodes of the fourth season of ‘Elite’. There was no irony. After a very weak third season, the new characters had managed to breathe life into a fiction condemned to repeat itself between low intensity mysteries, rather sculptural bodies and parties watered with alcohol and drugs. It was a hasty judgment because when all the chapters were finally uploaded to the platform, all traces of self-parody had disappeared and ‘Elite’ was more like always, only more tiresome. Well, the fifth season has already arrived at the service and it is more or less the same: downhill and without brakes.
It has not been good for him to lose two of his most popular characters Guzmán (Miguel Bernardeau) and Ander (Arón Piper), who decided to flee after, beware that spoiler is coming, the death of Armando in the previous season, during the fateful New Year’s Eve party held by Phillippe. The new batch of episodes begins with the imposition of new rules at the Las Encinas institute – no mobile phones, no social networks and, attention, strict dress code – by the director of the center, Benjamín, who is played by an always wise Diego Martín, while some of the plots of the previous season, such as the disappearance of Armando or the rape of Cayetana at the hands of Phillippe – the way in which the writers have treated the subject is embarrassing – continue to float in the air.
Once again, an interrogation before the police and the presence of what looks like a corpse floating in a pool are the starting point of a mystery that will gradually be revealed. His interest is inversely proportional to the turns that fiction takes to solve it. The first bars of the series also serve to introduce three of the new characters: on the one hand, Isadora (Valentina Zenere), who is nicknamed the queen of Ibiza, a very superficial girl hooked on drugs who stays at the Four Seasons of Madrid. On the other hand, Iván (André Lamoglia), son of a famous Brazilian soccer player, always partying and surrounded by women, who will soon become one of Patrick’s great friends.
But we are here, above all, to find out what is happening with the lives of the boys. Omar is still hooked on Ander, although he hardly responds to his messages on his trip around the world, and takes it out on Patrick. Samu and Ari continue their relationship, but the boy, who comes from a lower class, is focused on achieving academic success and will not hesitate to put himself under Benjamín’s orders. Meanwhile, Mencía and Rebe, who started a relationship last season, will play cat and mouse for much of this series of episodes. For his part, Phillippe is being harassed by a good part of the students of the center and ignored by some of his friends. The Frenchman will find an ally in Isadora, while he tries to ‘fix’ what happened with Cayetana.
And the parties and debauchery continue, with love triangles -this time, father included-, risque scenes and large doses of objectification of boys and girls. He has ‘Elite’ skill when it comes to shooting this type of sequence, even if they abuse the same scenarios over and over again; On the other hand, in other circumstances – that drive-in movie theater full of luxury cars – one doesn’t know if they’re playing parody or if things really are that ridiculous.
It seems that the writers have less and less to tell. The mystery that surrounds each season was always an excuse to show the life of luxury and the excesses of these upper class teenagers, but it seems that those who develop the series have been filing more and more its importance, leaving it practically empty. Perhaps now, with that goal in mind, ‘Elite’ is a more perfect fiction, but also much more bland and boring.
‘Elite’ is available on Netflix.
#Elite #downhill #brakes