Sex Education has always been about touching the raw nerve of its audience. Three seasons cultivating a modern, hilarious, and relatable cast of characters beloved by long-term fans of the show has enabled the show’s success in reaching out to the taboo subjects around gender, sex, and all the rest of the worries and problems of being a teenager. Season 4 deserved to be a fabulous culmination of what the show does best, by making you laugh as quickly as it makes you cry, from a cast that, through a beautifully written and energetic script, feels like family.
In this final hurrah of the gloriously horny and awkward series, we find a lot has changed. Otis, Eric, Maeve, Ruby, Aimee, Adam, and the rest of Moordale are embarking on new paths following the closure of Moordale Secondary (aka. ‘Sex School’) at the end of the last series. We also lose many of the show’s staple characters. Orla, Lily, Anwar, Olivia, and most of the eclectic, angst-riddled background cast whose sexual frustrations and problems have supported the show’s basis for the past three seasons disappear to other colleges. In their place, the brand-new student-led campus of Cavendish College, a sparkling beacon of 2023-era wokeness, offers a dramatic shift in tone. With this new school also comes a wealth of new characters, Aisha, Abbi, Roman, and ‘O,’ each a yet unrepresented class of diversity, which, for a show priding itself on its skill in challenging perceptions around sex and gender, was overdue.
The overwhelming feeling when finishing the show is that writers put too much into the season in what often felt like a desperate last-ditch attempt to address every issue relating to sex and gender possible. Not only did this make certain storylines and critical moments miss the mark, like the rushed and stifled speech by Isaac and Aisha over ableism and barriers in society facing people with disabilities, but they equally marginalize the importance of these issues to its audience. Jackson’s discovery of a lump in his testicle should have been treated with the same time, focus, and depth that Aimee’s sexual assault in Season 2 received – too much critical and social acclaim. Instead, the plot was hurriedly resolved and buried beneath the multiple plot points that followed. And in trying to conclude so many different storylines, the final episode, instead of creating a nostalgic and impactful farewell that the previous seasons of the show deserved, was too messy to pack a proper emotional punch.
Despite this, the final season doesn’t deserve to be written off: so many elements of the many storylines took my breath away, as well as the raw charisma of the outstanding long-term cast.
The standout performance of the series came from Ncuti Gatwa, who managed to retain the soul of his character and deliver a performance that elevated a storyline no more deserving of recognition than any other. Similarly, seeing the conclusion of Aimee’s character arc after the depiction of her sexual assault in season 2, for me, seemed a fitting full-circle moment.
It was not the goodbye the past three seasons deserved, but maybe this fourth season did.
Edited by: Aimee Missen