Sex Education Season 4 review: Netflix’s trailblazing teenage show goes out on top

Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Eric's (Ncuti Gatwa) friendship has always been the backbone of Sex Education. (Screen grab/ YouTube/Netflix)

“I’m a mess, but I think all teenagers are and that’s why it’s so important that we can talk,” Otis claims in a scene from the fourth and last season of Netflix’s Sex Education. It’s a little campaign speech Otis makes for the counsellor’s position at his new school. It is also the perfect logline for a series which has pioneered the idea that sexuality, gender and humanity are intertwined as this messy little puzzle box that reveals something new every time you open with a fresh pair of eyes. To a world where the gaze, the struggle to identify with it remains perpetually beyond reach, empathy might just be our only anchor. That, in essence, is the one thing therapy offers. In its last season, Sex Education crams a lot of plot and stuffs far too many ingredients down the pike. On the other side, though, it still comes out beaming with the same bittersweet perspective on life that it introduced itself with the first time of asking.

In this last season, the action moves to Cavendish, a distinctly woke school – even more than Moordale – where people put money in a jar for gossiping, and pretty much everything is recycled. It’s the creators’ way of jostling with both anticipation and creation that must stem from the fear of validation. Cavendish is a pitch bright glimpse into what peak wokeness might look like and it feels as stifling as it also feels inauthentic. Too much of anything is bad. Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) join the new school as Maeve (Emma Mackey) sets herself up across the Atlantic in America under the tutelage of an ambiguously harsh literary teacher (Dan Levy). While Otis and Eric confront, or more so contemplate, splicing the new territory for riches, it comes with its own little caveats.

Otis’ attempt to start a brand-new sex clinic is thwarted by the presence of seemingly better-equipped competition in O. Maeve struggles with professional rejection and holding onto her relationship with Otis, while Eric redraws boundaries within his conservative family. A lot happens in this season which also includes Jackson going down a wormhole to investigate his parentage, Aimee and Isaac having a bit of a naughty tiff and pretty much every supporting character the show has ever cast, meaningfully chewing into the narrative space. There is also a new pivot in the sexually ambivalent Cal, whose disappearance by the end of the season, gives the show a nudge before it begins to drift. Otis’ mother, played by the exceptional Gillian Anderson, by the way, raises a child by herself until her sister shows up. Everyone’s given a little battle to fight and while there are mixed outcomes to collect, there is this sprawling, if disjointed feel to a show that has grown in stature and courage. There are also guest appearances from ally actors like Hannah Gadsby and Dan Levy, of which the latter feels more rewarding.

Of all the arcs in Sex Education, it is maybe Adam’s and his father’s tense relationship that has felt the most poignant and endearing. Out of school, Adam’s inability to handle academia or some of the more bureaucratic obligations of an adult life, continue to weigh down on him. Here he tries to become a horse instructor, ludicrously looking for purpose or that handsome light at the end of familiarly inhospitable tunnel. His father, the former headmaster played by Alistair Petrie, is equally lonely, having been culled from her life by his wife. Though peripheral, the dynamics between these three characters, outside the youthful furnace of Cavendish feels all the more moving and affecting. It’s the sign of a good show that can tell its meaty mindful threads from its frilly splinters.

The only problem, and this is picking a bone with a show that can be so life-affirming on the worst of days, is that it wanders too far from the mothership. The delicate friendship between Otis and Eric has always been the backbone of the show and though present, it repeatedly feels undone by the barrage of eventualities that the plot must consider for the sake of movement. The rivalry between Otis and O, for example, struggles to fully install itself within the emotional parameters of the show. The actors try their best to manoeuvre a hook, but none attaches itself to a world that could have just stuck to its goofy, but intimate witlessness.

Sex Education has blazed a trail for young-adult fiction, filling a boneheaded vacuum of depravity with caution, with playfulness and most importantly, instructive provocation. It has dealt with sex and sensuality in a way that probably no pop culture artefact ever has and it has given us four seasons of jaunty, at times silly, but also deeply moving storylines. The show probably stretched itself thin by dragging its dopey, sexually unconfident teenagers into a fourth season, but for every barbarous misconception about sexuality, desire and love floating out in the real world, Moordale (and now Cavendish) always felt like a joyous, even rebellious comeback.