Why bother with a plot when you can have elite debauchery? 

Élite Season 5 came back with its usual "someone is dead" mystery but now we've lost even more of the OG characters - Guzman and Ander are simply gone with the wind. All that's left of the compelling starting line we had are Samu (Itzan Escamilla) and Omar (Omar Ayuso) and they seem to be going through some inexplicable rift. They're mad at each other and we don't know why. Later we're given a why in the form of a token black character whose entire existence seems to be to add some explicable drama to Omar and Samu's roomie life. 



Élite picks off somewhere around where Season 4 left off  - Armando is still dead and everyone is trying to get back to normalcy - or at least what counts for normalcy for Las Encinas students which is drugs, champagne, public sex, love triangles, love squares and of course a murder. Because someone's getting interrogated by the police while someone else lies face down in a pool.

We have a new mystery. Or maybe not - as Élite spends the next 4 or 5 episodes on the new characters and their preferred brands of debauchery.

The running theme of Season 5 seems to be "what happens if you want to have sex with someone but they don't want to have sex with you?"

Well, the new Las Encinas student, the Empress of Ibiza, Isadora (Valentina Zenere) will simply latch onto the object of her desire, stalk his every move, protect him from cancel culture by waving her angled brush and giving a very twisted speech about how Cayetana not coming out to the school to say the Prince  (Phillipe played by Pol Granch) also tried to rape her is some sort of feminist stand. 

Her defense for the assaulting Prince of  France went like this:

Dont be like these hysterical haters, they're all ugly and left wing. Was Philippe wrong? Perhaps. Did he apologize? A thousand times... Don't help him run away sugar. Support him, support your man... Be happy, live the life you want. This is feminism.




 Isadora, deeply committed to her Princess role that nobody ever cast her for, also pretends to be Phillipe's happy girlfriend for the 'gram and repeatedly drugs him without his consent so he can plaster on a happy face while she's around.

It's obvious the Empress is supposed to be a replacement for the Marchioness but she falls flat and only succeeds in strutting around looking like the ghost of Paris Hilton. The background and friendship ties that humanized Marchioness and made her such a compelling character are missing in the Empress - she's bored, rich, and alone. So she does drugs - a lot of drugs. She even makes ignorant statements like equating working at an NGO with "working with starving black kids dying of AIDs". That's her backstory and honestly, it's a little difficult to humanize - unless you sprinkle a little gang rape. 

The other new character - Iván (André Lamoglia), son of a pro soccer player - is Patrick's new eye candy. And what develops into a love square between Patrick, Iván, Patrick's sister - Ari, and Iván's father, Cruz is extremely difficult to watch. Iván is all over the place with the signals - grabbing Patrick's butt and in a shower, his phallus but still insists that he's straight and does that with all his friends.



 Patrick, thrown off by the mixed signals yet unwilling to walk away from this incredibly absurd situation chooses to throw a lavish party just on the off-chance that Iván will make out with him. Instead, the latter chooses to make out with everybody but him (Patrick's sister Ari, a very lesbian Rebeka, and an extremely surprised Samu). Frustrated by Iván's repeated rejection, Patrick flirts with and provokes Cruz (Carloto Cotta) until it becomes a fusion of bodies.

 Oh, Ivan also has sex on a very public boat, in a very public place with Ari (Carla Diaz) who's feeling a little neglected by her boyfriend, Samu who's pretty much at the beck and call of her father because he wants a better life.

The mystery takes the backseat on this debauchery train and that may well be; seeing as the mystery isn't all that compelling in itself. We already know who killed Armando and we don't particularly know enough to care about who's lying face down in a pool. By the time we discover who's in the pool, it looks like Samu may have orchestrated the whole thing just to give the principal a taste of his medicine. It's an insane thing to do because he could have just taken the money and still kept a copy of the SIM card as leverage. But it appears Samu is getting a little addicted to life on the edge of the hill.



Elite also tries its hands at a redemption arc for characters who have had a pretty shady past. Cayetana gets some redemption when she befriends the drug-addled empress and ends up in a lip lock with a non-rich childhood friend who does charity work. The Empress gets her redemption by getting gang-raped by her fellow school students who she showed a good time. Philipe the controversial prince also gets his redemption by being physically but not mentally in the room while Empress Isadora was getting assaulted and then proceeding to hold her hand while she reports the incident. While Élite tries to make this a "moment", it doesn't really succeed because on the one hand we have a serial assaulter who still hasn't come to terms with what he did (choosing instead to flee from the consequences), and then we have a woman who repeatedly drugged him and also prevented another girl from sharing her story.

It's a mess. And there's not a single silver lining in this entire plot. There's also a very gaping hole left by the absence of any sensible parents or siblings of the Las Encinas students. Ivan's father, Cruz is smack in the middle of the high school mess and Patrick's father/the principal is creating a new mess by using a very naive Samu to cover up his past mess. 

The bonds and friction that made the first three seasons of Élite so compelling is completely gone and we're left holding the tail end of a thong after a very confusing drug-induced orgy.

Élite has been renewed for a sixth season. Seasons 1 - 5 are streaming on Netflix.