Sex Education’s fourth and final season goes off the deep end; doubling down on the mistakes of Season 3, and compounding that with utterly bizarre narrative choices and a complete lack of focus in the script. With an emotionally hollow ending, and any sense of the show’s original tone left in tatters, Season 4 feels like an entirely unnecessary affair that does more harm than good.

Since discovering the show not long after its first season premiered, I’ve had a keen eye for Netflix’s hit comedy Sex Education. The first two seasons were effortlessly hilarious yet deeply moving at the same time; offering an insightful examination of the sex lives of sixth formers at the fictional Moordale Secondary School. Even the third season had its moments despite an ostensible decline in quality (you can read my review here), and given its conclusion could have more or less wrapped up the series, I wasn’t entirely sure we’d be seeing any more. Nevertheless, after a tumultuous road getting here with flying rumours of cast departures and cancellations, Sex Education returned yesterday for a fourth and final season.

Spoilers ahead!

Following on from the last season, Sex Education Season 4 sees Moordale shut down by the local authority and our teenage cast sent further afield to the progressive utopia of Cavendish College. With its sensitive and student-controlled approach to education, not to mention it ticking just about every box on the diversity checklist, the fictional college certainly seems like the product of a left-wing radical’s wet dream, but it does provide some decent story material to kick things off as the former Moordale students try to assimilate to the new culture and existing social structure. Main character Otis (Asa Butterfield) begins the season with a reignited drive to offer sex therapy to the students of Cavendish, but his plans are scuppered by a social media star at the college already offering sex advice to her peers. This plotline that saw Otis competing with “O” (Thaddea Graham) for clients was not only uninteresting, but it also felt like it detracted from the actual sex therapy subplots that made the show so enjoyable in the first place. Thankfully Otis isn’t tied down entirely to this plot – it actually serves to give him more interactions with Ruby (Mimi Keene) that build on their relationship from the last season, and he is also faced with the difficulties that come with his long-distance relationship with Maeve (Emma Mackey), both of which serve as semi-compelling narrative material about Otis’ conflicted feelings between the two young women.

Maeve’s storyline opens up a new setting in the show as we gain some insight into her academic pursuits at Wallace University in America, after leaving last season to chase her dreams thanks to a generous scholarship. She struggles to impress her eccentric teacher, Mr Molloy (Dan Levy), and suffers from feelings of self doubt, and although it is a natural evolution of some of her story material from the previous seasons, it does also feel like this was written in almost exclusively for the purpose of giving her something to do until the midseason kicker that sees her mum Erin pass away due to a drug overdose. It comes as a bit of a shock, both inside and outside of the story, but it’s a logical way of getting Maeve back to England that builds on material from the previous seasons in a very organic way. The funeral subplot might well be the best this season has to offer; it’s focused, moving, and uses its characters (both from the cast of this season, and a couple of heartwarming returning cameos too) very effectively – an art nearly forgotten by the writers of the show judging by the rest of the season. Nevertheless, it informs the conclusion to Maeve’s character as a whole, as she returns to America in pursuit of a better life at the cost of her relationship with Otis, giving the pairing at the core of Sex Education a decidedly bittersweet ending.

As for tying up other areas of the plot, Season 4 doesn’t fare well at all. The writer’s brilliant idea for a grand finale saw our characters out searching for non-binary-but-also-transgender student Cal who goes missing after a mental health crisis, with many of their peers worrying that they may be at risk of suicide; obliviously walking the character into a stereotype I didn’t think the showrunners meant to play into. Nevertheless, the insanity doesn’t peak there, as series mainstay Eric proves to be the one that finds Cal in the end. Now, how might this have came about? Does Eric just happen across Cal through blind luck? Does he use his intuition and smarts to track them down? No, dear reader, Eric is guided to Cal by visions bestowed on him by God himself – or herself, as in the world of Sex Education God is apparently a homeless black lady. Occurring multiple times throughout the season, Eric’s visions ultimately inform his character’s ending as he decides what he wants to do with his life, but in the end it does more to catapult the remaining shreds of the show’s original tone out of the window than anything else. For much of the season Eric also becomes tied up in a subplot that sees him fall out with Otis over the latter’s indifference to identity issues, which just serves as another kick in the gut as the writers choose to prioritise politics over story, especially since the relationship between the two friends brought so much heart to the series in the first place.

In all honesty Eric’s arc feels a little tacked-on, and the same can be said for a lot of the show’s recurring characters, despite the fact there were a number of notable absences too. To name a few, Jackson, Ruby, Adam and Aimee are some of the most prominent characters who are left feeling like they didn’t have much of a place in this season but had half-baked subplots dumped on them anyway because the writers didn’t have the courage to relegate them to smaller parts. The newer characters don’t leave much of an impact either, and much like the addition of Cal in the previous season, they feel like their presence is owed more to some sort of diversity mandate above direction in the story. The highlights of the season actually came from unexpected places – for one, the storyline that saw Michael Groff breaking through in reconnecting with his family and himself was genuinely heartwarming, and Jean’s struggle with post-natal depression and managing her relationships was both moving and served as a great end to all her character development across the show. In the end it’s Otis who feels like he gets the short end of the stick, with a conclusion so harsh it seems to border on contempt. He loses his girlfriend, his friendship with Eric is permanently damaged, he’s cut off by Ruby, and he even gives up on sex therapy, leaving our main character in a frankly awful position for no good reason.

The ending really lacks any sense of finality or poignancy across the board, especially since the writers forewent the chance to lean into where the characters might go in the future given that they leave school at the end of the season, and all in all it just makes the entire season feel like one last wringing out of the goodwill the show created in the first place. Left in a tonal wreck and with a sharp decline in its quality of writing throughout; Sex Education Season 4 is a bitter end for a once-great show, having fallen victim to the very issues it avoided so well in the first place.

3/10