Netflix's ever-horny Elite doesn't quite go out with a bang

The final season of Netflix’s highly addictive and infinitely watchable Spanish series Elite is framed around—what else?—a dead body. The mystery surrounding this latest victim (Who killed them and why?) is absurdly familiar to anyone who’s been watching this show set at a posh private school in Spain. Such mysterious deaths have long haunted the kids at Las Encinas, with those whodunnit plots having driven season-long arcs for eight years running. This sendoff batch feels not so much like a culmination of that well-worn formula as its final limit case, proof, perhaps, that there were only so many more times characters and audiences alike could be so intrigued by another gruesome murder mystery among these horny, moneyed teens.

At the start of the episode that kicks off the last season (which drops July 26) is another hallmark of Elite: a rager. There is nothing the students at Las Encinas love more than a party, one where alcohol, drugs, lustful kisses, and vengeful fights run aplenty. This one, right outside the school’s grounds, is no different. And for good reason: This is the last one before the senior class bids farewell to the place where they’ve spent a better part of their teenage years. It’s no surprise, then, that it ends in bloodshed. That’s par for the course here. And that’s on top of the fact that Raúl’s demise from last season (and Chloe and Iván’s mother’s involvement in it) is still sending ripples through Las Encinas.

The identity of the bloodied (naked!) body that sparks this season’s central mystery is best kept a secret. So much of the salacious fun of Elite is watching its many jigsaw narrative pieces slowly fall in and out of place, so it’s best not to dispel such enjoyment in a review. But, as ever, this crime sits at the center of the many subplots on which the season rests, sometimes handily and at others clumsily, making them intersect to send endless red herrings our way with such brazen abandon you cannot help but be impressed by the series writers’ inventive zeal.

But a new year doesn’t just bring a new body. It also brings fresh blood. Not new students, per se. This year, Elite welcomes a pair of vicious siblings, Emilia and Héctor Krawietz (Ane Rot and Nuno Gallego), who run the aptly named Alumni organization that’s equal parts secret society (despite having its own wing on school grounds), old-school frat (with requisite initiation rites and subsequent hazing), and global-networking club (with astronomical fees and wealthy members to match). In essence, Alumni arrives as a way to further upend allegiances and friendships alike, with everyone from Isadora (Valentina Zenere) to Chloe (Mirela Balic) and Joel (Fernando Líndez) seeing in a possible membership a chance to redress, respectively, their failing club, their social standing, and their money woes.