Sex Education Season 3 is finally on Netflix, it’s finally here. It’s been over a year since we last checked in on Otis and his fellow classmates at Moordale, and a lot has changed. New relationships, new friendships, new students, new dynamics, even new staff. So join me in taking an early look at the third season of Sex Education and how it continues the burgeoning story of these young teenagers.
Instead of continuing on from the cliffhanger that had a fanbase around the world screaming in collective anguish, Sex Education Season 3 makes the creative decision to jump forward in time. We pick up with Otis believing that Maeve is simply ignoring his voicemail from the end of the previous season, and with Maeve not realising she even get a voicemail in the first place thanks to Isaac. All of the other main cast members are also in different places to where we left them. Adam and Eric are in a happy relationship, with Adam finally beginning to accept who he is after the events of the previous two seasons. Aimee is working on the trauma that she experienced in the last season, slowly but surely. I won’t go into the full depths of every single character’s status quo, but rediscovering them in a fresh new light is incredible fun and kicks this season off with a bang. As you’d expect with Sex Education, it doesn’t stay happy go lucky for very long, but even when it starts to become a more….bumpy ride for the teens it’s still as enthralling as ever. The writers understand how teenagers process drama, and how they constantly get into new forms of trouble, and that helps immensely. Any other writers would likely grossly overestimate how actual real-life teenagers respond to these situations and it would become almost comical, whereas the Sex Education writers manage to make it still feel real.
The cast is as good as ever, although at this avenue it’s to be expected. Asa Butterfield’s Otis is a character filled with charm and angst, his performance is as layered and complicated as ever. Gillian Anderson is back as Jean Milburn, Otis’s mother, except this time she’s pregnant with Jakob’s child and is extremely conflicted about how to proceed with the baby. Ola (Patricia Allison), Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood), Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and quite frankly the entire cast are back and ready to proceed forward into a new year of the sixth form. Each cast member is utterly fantastic, with no real flaws to be found throughout the course of the show. There’s a reason I’ve rushed through most of the cast though, and it’s not because I don’t think they’re amazing at what they do, because they are. No, I want to particularly highlight three members of the cast as being incredible this season, two of which are actually new additions.
We’ll start with somebody you may be familiar with, Emma Mackey’s Maeve Wiley. Mackey gives perhaps her best performance so far this season, with Maeve as a character stuck in the middle of two different people that she cares an immense amount about. It takes acting skills of a high calibre to pull off a character as layered and complicated as Maeve, but Mackey balances it effortlessly and you care about her from the moment she returns to your screen. As for the newcomers, well I can’t really say a huge amount about Jemima Kirk’s Hope Haddon other than that she’s the new headmistress of Moordale Secondary School.
From the outset, Kirk plays Haddon as somebody who is there to do their job but is in over her head, and that bleeds through the rest of the season. You get to see Hope crack under the pressure, and eventually some of her old-fashioned prejudices and beliefs bubble to the surface, creating tension between her and the students. Kirk makes sure that this isn’t some random descent into cartoon villainy, but a calculated realization that perhaps Hope is outmoded in this modern era. The final newcomer I want to discuss actually faces a lot of these old-fashioned prejudices that Hope has, Dua Saleh’s Cal. Cal is introduced to the viewers early on in Season 3, and is non-binary, going by the pronouns they/them (Saleh themselves go by these pronouns too.). They’re the first non-binary cast member in Sex Education, thus presenting a new opportunity for the education (No pun intended) of the students on complex LGBTQ matters and how people can fall outside of a gender spectrum. As previously mentioned, they face opposition from the new headmistress, but to say much more would be to spoil the season so I’ll stay quiet. It’s important to note though that Dua Saleh’s performance as Cal is quite impressive, especially for their first performance in such a huge show and for bringing light to something previously unexplored in the show.
The thing about presenting teenage angst in an entertainment medium is that a lot of shows try it and ultimately fail dramatically. Riverdale, for example. attempts to show the growth of teenagers through their own lens while making them battle outside influences. Except the issue with something like Riverdale is that after the first season murder-mystery it completely and utterly jumped the shark with plots about rocket ships, cults harvesting organs and around five different fake siblings. 13 Reasons Why also attempted to exploit the anchor of teenage angst and youth, but did so in an entirely wrong way and displayed the worst parts of this type of storytelling. Sex Education differs from these in that it actually understands how angst and relationships work throughout our most formative years, and it uses this knowledge to great effect. It never jumps the shark, and it never goes too far, knowing the boundary between believability and unreality is thin and fickle.
Sex Education continues to go from strength to strength. It shows the struggles of youth through a nuanced and thoughtful script, with incredible actors that rival even the best that Netflix has to offer. If the show continues on this path, and finds a definitive ending rather than flaking out, this could seriously be one of the best beginning-to-end shows ever produced in the 21st century.
If you want to see some of our previous coverage of Netflix originals, why not take a look at our Lucifer Season 6 review?
Review Disclosure Statement: Access to Sex Education Season 3 was provided to us by Netflix for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.
Summary
Sex Education Season 3 is an absolute triumph. It develops upon the previous seasons, yet never dwells upon the past too much. Seriously, if you’re looking for quality TV, look no further.
