The horniest, most murder-y teens in all of Spain have returned to grace our screens with the messiest drama you’ll find in a prep-school uniform. Yes, season three of Netflix’s Elite is upon us, and brings with it, if you can believe it, yet another murder.
Season two saw tiny prince Samuel faking his own disappearance in hopes of forcing everyone’s favorite little marchioness Carla to finally turn in Polo, her ex, for Marina’s murder. I know, it’s a lot. It’s Elite. The plan works — Carla confesses the cover-up to the police — but there’s a problem. Polo’s girlfriend, Cayetana, has hidden the murder weapon (the school’s academic trophy), and without that, it’s just Carla’s word against Polo’s. So, Polo remains free. Which is how it comes to be that Polo is found dead on the dance floor at Teatro Barceló after falling through a glass wall.
Season three follows the five months leading up to Polo’s death, and makes the case that literally everyone is a suspect. But discovering who really killed Polo is only one of many insane moments in a season full of twists and deceit and people professing their love while wearing a harness. So let’s get into the most gasp-worthy moments of them all because, as Lu, our ride-or-die headband queen would say, “I have feelings, bitch.†Like, so many feelings.
Carla lies in court, thus setting Polo free!
Because the law is absolutely wild, the court calls both Carla and Polo in to tell their stories about Marina’s murder while sitting, like, a foot away from each other, literally facing the other. It looks like Polo is about to confess when Carla, who has once again been threatened by her father — an actual monster — takes back everything she said in order to prevent her family from losing its fortune. (If Polo goes down, her dad goes down; it’s this whole season-one thing.) She tearfully says she made it all up and then she strolls out of there with her coat sitting perfectly on her shoulders like a cape, one of those rich-people superpowers. Of course, this means that Nano, Samuel’s brother and the one originally convicted of this crime, has to remain in hiding because Polo will face no repercussions for COMMITTING MURDER, and he matriculates back into Las Encinas. It goes very smoothly, she wrote sarcastically.
Lu tells her dad the truth about which sibling kissed who first!
At the end of season two, once Lu and Valerio’s father discovers his two children are hooking up, he disowns Valerio, believing his perfect daughter is an innocent victim. Well, Lu’s heart wants what it wants, which in this moment specifically is her half-brother. When she learns Valerio’s living out of his car, she invites him to stay at her house while their father is out of town. Only that dude is definitely not out of town. Surprisingly, when he catches Valerio at his house, it does not take long for Lu to confess everything: It’s not Valerio’s fault, and she’s not the angel daughter he thinks she is. The English translation of what she says is actually “I fucked him because I needed him,†which, like, is a lot to say to your dad, even for Lu. “Love is not a crime, and you are not a criminal,†she tells her half-brother/ex-lover, invoking Game of Thrones incest law. Regardless of her feelings (because of them, really), when she turns 18, Lu will be completely cut off from her family. Her entire future goes down the drain in one awkward-as-hell conversation.
Ander finds out he has leukemia, thanks to a blow job!
Honestly, the more I mull this over, the more I think this probably happens fairly often? Or, at least, a little? When else is a guy’s groin area being inspected so thoroughly? Anyway, poor Ander, right? After just surviving months of torture because his one best friend confessed to murdering the sister of his other best friend, and no matter what he did with that information he was betraying someone, there he is, sitting back, playing video games and getting a blow job from his hot live-in boyfriend. But then Omar feels a lump. Ander quickly learns he has leukemia and must aggressively treat it with chemo. He tries to be noble and actively pushes Omar away so he’s not saddled with a dying boyfriend. Can’t these star-crossed lovers ever get it together?
Guzmán ties up and drugs Polo to get him to hand over the murder weapon!
There was simply no way Guzmán could forgive Polo for murdering his sister by episode two. So in “Samuel y Guzmán†when he starts acting all chummy with his onetime best bud, I completely expected it to be some type of trick. I did not, however, expect that Guzmán would invite Polo over to play video games, drug his beer, duct-tape him to a chair, make him watch videos of Marina dancing, and then start beating him in order to get him to reveal the location of the trophy. That was, um, a surprise. Luckily, Samu pops over and is like, “Oh no, this is bad,†and stops his friend (can you believe, these two, friends!) from doing something truly irreversible. I mean, the two guys who hate Polo the most in the world then proceed to harass him with fake Polo twitter accounts, so it’s not like Samu is a saint here. Just saying that the line Samuel won’t cross is physical harm … for now!!
Cayetana ruins Polo’s chances of leaving Las Encinas so she can keep him for herself!
Once his former best friend ties him up and beats him senseless and then teams up with others to make those Twitter accounts, Polo wants out of Las Encinas. His life is hell, and he needs to get away from that school. When the fake Polo account tweets about how he tried to kill himself after killing Marina, Polo’s mothers finally get it. They’re on board with transferring him to a school abroad. Mysteriously, a new Twitter account pops up and starts sending all the original tweets to any of the schools that would’ve considered taking Polo. No one wants a murderer attending their school, so Polo is stuck at Las Encinas. Eventually, we see Cayetana deleting the secret account from her phone: She wanted to make sure Polo stayed at Las Encinas with her, regardless of how tortured he is and unknowingly handing him a death sentence. That’s some real Fatal Attraction shit right there.
Guzmán wears a harness while he professes his love for Nadia!!
IT MUST BE RECORDED FOR HISTORY.
The Throuple!!
You know Elite loves its three-ways. Rather than just rehashing the manipulative Polo-Carla-Christian situation of season one, season three brings us the union of three misfits: Polo, Cayetana, and Valerio, who fall for each other … as a unit? They make plans to run away to London for school once they graduate (hilarious that they are in high school, never forget). Things get complicated for the threesome, as they do, when Polo tells Valerio that his moms can only foot the college bill for him and Cayetana, and then even more so when Polo thinks it was Valerio who sold Carla the drugs that caused her to OD in a pool. Anyway, there’s a part when Polo’s moms find the three of them having sex in the pool, and Polo’s like, It’s no big deal, and his one mom is like, “Having an orgy at home?!!†And I guess it shouldn’t be funny, because teens shouldn’t be having three-ways in their parents’ pools, but it is fucking hilarious.
Nadia’s boyfriend is actually into her brother!!
Wow, okay, when Malick, the cute boy who starts dating Nadia, grabs Omar in the bathroom of Lu’s Valentine’s Day party and starts making out with him, reader, I did an actual live double take. Poor Nadia is out there thinking that if she wins the scholarship to Columbia that Polo’s moms have set up in hopes of making everyone forget their son is a murderer, she’ll be allowed to go to New York because Malick, a nice boy her parents adore, will be going, too. In actuality, Malick is using her as a beard and has fallen for her brother. Who, by the way, is still with Ander! Who is a sad cancer boy right now!! What a twist: Nadia ended things with Guzmán because love is not enough for something so complicated, and being with Malick was just easier, but really her relationship with Malick is the most complicated of all!
Rebeca’s truly inspired fluorescent-paint stunt at the Blackout Party reveals EVERYTHING!!
Rebeca is the only person I’ve ever seen who can truly pull off tiny sunglasses, she unironically wears earrings that spell out “s-e-x,†and she orchestrates this fluorescent-paint ploy to perfection. Samu makes a deal with the cops: He’ll bug Rebe’s mom’s house in exchange for helping Nano. Rebe’s mom, Sandra, now in prison, knows it had to be Samu. So, Rebe makes up a story about getting the hard drive from the security-camera company to find the traitor among them. She goes to Teatro Barceló on the night of the Blackout Party, makes the exchange, puts the hard drive in her purse, and then asks Samu to keep an eye on it while she uses the restroom. Of course, Samu, who thinks he’s about to get caught, tries to get rid of the purse. He hands it to Omar to throw out behind the bar and then pretends someone stole it. Then the lights go out, and under the black lights Samuel’s hands are glowing. Rebe covered her purse in fluorescent paint, knowing what Samu would do if he really was the guilty one, and now she’s caught him, er, fluorescent-paint-handed. BUT ALSO, the paint got all over Omar’s hands when he tossed the bag, which means it gets all over Malick’s crotch when the two hump in the back room! And Nadia sees her brother and her boyfriend covered in the paint and figures it all out!! It’s all very inspired. God bless Rebe, and God bless this show.
Nadia and Lu are friends? And expose Polo and his moms?? At that rave graduation?!!
Truly one of the wildest twists of season three is that by the end of it, Nadia and Lu have become real friends. When Nadia takes Lu’s advice and lets Malick know she’s going to use him to get to New York like he’s using her as a beard, and Lu says “that’s my bitch� Iconic. What really bonds them is a little healthy competition for the Columbia University scholarship, since now Lu is broke and actually needs the money. In the end, they decide to split it and go to New York together, which warms my tiny heart right up. Unfortunately, Polo’s mom arrives at Las Encinas and gets Valerio and Rebe expelled for drug dealing, and Guzmán and Samuel expelled for bullying Polo, and immediately Nadia and Lu know if they take this scholarship from this woman, they are selling out. So they decide to burn it all to the ground, like best friends do! At their graduation ceremony — which, yes, inexplicably includes a DJ onstage and strobe lights, because why not? — they collect their award and then completely put Polo and his moms on blast in front of everyone for trying to cover everything up with their money. Polo’s mom pulls the plug on the scholarship right there onstage. At least Nadia and Lu have each other?
Lu kills Polo!!!
All season long, we’ve seen snippets of the night Polo falls to his death at Teatro Barceló postgraduation party. We know before he falls through the glass — which has a crack in it, thanks to Samu’s head when he gets punched in the face by Rebe at the Blackout Party (truly, bless her) — he is stabbed in the chest by a broken Champagne bottle while in the bathroom. Finally, in episode eight, we learn that it is Lu, drunk and angry over the loss of her scholarship and the expulsion of her friends, who follows Polo into the bathroom with the neck of that bottle. They have a very heated chat: Lu always protects her friends, people only fear Lu, no one loves her and she will die alone — you know, normal threatening bathroom-conversation stuff. The entire time, she’s holding the broken bottle neck toward him, until finally, he’s up against the wall and she pushes him, falling into him with the bottle neck, and accidentally stabbing him right in the heart. He never gets to tell her he only came to the club because he convinced his moms to reinstate the scholarship, and he’s going to turn himself in to the cops. Unfortunately, Polo is a dead man before he even hits the glass.
THE MURDER PACT!!!!
These teens just love covering up accidental murders, don’t they? After Polo dies and the gang realizes they only have a few minutes before the only detective in town arrives to get their statements and figure out who did it, they decide they must protect Lu at all costs. Polo wouldn’t want her life wasted over one mistake, says Carla, making a HUGE LEAP. Like, have you met Polo? Also, maybe he would want Lu to pay for murdering him, I dunno, just guessing. Still, Tiny Prince Samu makes an impassioned speech about how they’ve all suffered enough, and they should all get to walk out of this club together and free. It is WILD. To pull off this murder pact, they all touch the broken bottle neck so that everyone’s prints are on it, thus rendering it useless. When they realize a few witnesses definitely saw Lu follow Polo into the bathroom, they decide they need to accuse one another so that all the eyewitness statements are conflicting. And guys, I am here to tell you that these horny dinks pull it off. They do, in fact, walk out of that club together and free! What a time.
Most people on this show get a happy ending!!!!
How in the hell does this happen? Somehow, someway, these troubled, high-drama, murder-y teens end this thing with mostly happy, hopeful endings. Okay, Cayetana is working as a janitor at Las Encinas (!!) in the end, but honestly that bitch was crazy and she deserves it. Otherwise, though, things are pretty rosy.
Lu, Nadia, and Malick head off to New York City. Nadia and Guzmán share an epic post-murder-pact kiss and then vow to wait for each other in truly the swooniest voice-mails ever recorded. Rebeca finally tells her mother it’s her or the drug empire; she is done with dead bodies and breaking the law. Carla’s ex Yeray — “the Bill Gates of Las Encinas,†who Carla’s dad pimps her out to and whose only real personality trait is that he wears his hat backward — agrees to invest in her family’s failing wineries, but only if Carla is put in charge, thus allowing Carla to escape the tyranny of her father. Carla, in turn, wants to study abroad and so puts Valerio in charge while she’s gone, which is hilarious. Valerio will be able to buy all the silk shirts he wants!
Carla and Samu end on good terms, admitting they still love one another, parting ways but not completely closing the door on their relationship. Omar finally wakes the hell up, ditches Malick, and runs back to Ander, who, bless all the things, is now in remission. The four who were expelled — Samuel, Guzmán, Rebe, and Valerio — all have to repeat their senior year, but are joined by Ander and Las Encinas’ newest student, Omar. Here’s hoping they all finally learned not to accidentally murder a classmate ever again.