‘Sex Education’: Working one last miracle

Laurie Nunn is a gifted storyteller. The brilliance of the final season of Sex Education (Netflix) — the ambitious battle tank against everything both teens and adults should know about sex and still don’t know — makes that very clear. Nunn, aware of having reached a dead end in the third season — by far the most uneven and therefore flawed of the show, with characters strangled by the plot and unable to open up — decides to wipe the slate clean in the finale. She swipes away Moordale Secondary School, and send Otis — who has been played perfectly from the start by Asa Butterfield — to a new world: the very postmodern Cavendish College, a queer, nerd and emo-eco utopia.

Cavendish, one would say, is the future present. It’s a product of the dizzying and overwhelming changes that have rocked the teen world since 2019, when Nunn began her much-needed and more than healthy, respectful and nourishing show. The goal of the series was to give shape to what was lacking: a truly communicative sex education, which illuminates every corner, clears up all the unknowns and fosters understanding in order to overcome the enemy — pornography, which young people are exposed to without any sort of guidance. And that is exactly what it has done. In the process, it has shaped a new generation of teenagers who will face their own endings in this final season: the generation of Abbi (Anthony Lexa), Roman (Felix Mufti) and Aisha (Alexandra James).

And let’s not forget Sarah Owen (Thaddea Graham), the sex therapist at Cavendish College. This very popular student — with hundreds of thousands of followers on social networks — will confront Otis with his outdated, traditional model of gender. Because in addition to expanding the battlefield when it comes to everything related to sex and its consequences — from the organs involved (guys can detect lumps too) to reproductive age imbalances (menopause is discussed too, with Hannah Gadsby at the helm) — Nunn also normalizes gender fluidity by responding to what today’s teenagers are trying to say, and taking it a step further, to what’s ahead.

Yes, the old characters in the series — representatives of Nunn’s generation, and all those before it — are out of place in this world, searching for their place for the first time. This epitomized by Ruby (Mimi Keene), the popular straight girl, who is not at all popular in a world where the rule is to always be developing, breaking stereotypes or perhaps creating others or an infinite number of them. Even Otis’s mother, the very famous sex therapist Jane Millburn (played by a splendid Gillian Anderson, in the other role of her life), who is always at the vanguard, hopelessly ages in her ideas. And this is the miracle of a finale that feels like a new beginning: the characters, just like the series, adapt to what we should have and what we will hopefully have one day.

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