Sex Education

I'm not sure how this entire series went by without a forum thread to its name, but that finale has been stirring up a lot of opinions so I figure now's as good a time as any to air them out.

What's going on? Is the ending that bad?

I think there's a lot of bitterness over the handling of the Maeve / Otis pairing.

It was definitely the Ship Sinking for me. Not only does it render the least 4 years a total waste of time, but it just feels incomplete.

If I had a say in the writer's room, I'd push for "6 months later" epilogue showing Maeve at her graduation ceremony. Just as Maeve shakes the chancellor's hand, she sees Otis in the audience smiling warmly at her and she nearly bawls with joy.

Instead we end with Maeve wearing Otis' shirt and sitting by the window in the middle of the night looking like she might be regretting her decision.

Edited by DoctorSleep on Sep 24th 2023 at 4:04:55 AM

All the build up of Motis for just a short moment together and then nothing? They drag and prolong Otis and Maeve, and come up with increasingly contrived reasons to keep them apart, and when they finally do get together, we don't get any real happy moments

As for the way it ended, well, there's so many ways that they could've allowed Motis to happen while also still allowing Maeve to follow her writing dreams. Like have them be in a long distance relationship. And maybe have it where instead of studying in the United States, Maeve just moves to Manchester or London to complete her studies or Otis follows her after graduation. That kind of stuff.

Edited by dmcreif on Sep 24th 2023 at 11:09:11 AM

I don't care about ship spoilers myself but y'all should probably spoiler tag stuff that just came out.

I'm finding it hard to get through season 4 because the Moordale group dynamic was very endearing and I now have to care about these random new people :(

I don't care about these new people either.

The problem was that the Coven were too perfect and they seemed to be stealing Eric and Cal away from the main cast. Part of Sex Education's appeal was always that everyone is a bit of a screwup but still had their share of redeeming moments. With the Coven and Beau all we got was "good guys and a bad guy". Gloria also didn't have much of a role outside of making Maureen jealous.

I also binged the new season over the weekend. My contention is that it felt like it was very rushed. A lot of the dialogue feels very first draft, there's a ton of situation that could have very reasonably be avoided. I usually don't put that much stock into that kind of criticism, but when O brought up Otis' dad at the debate, I feel like that would have been real easy for Otis to just throw out by saying he doesn't agree with his dad. Like if that was a smear in a video or something, that's one thing, but he literally had the platform to rebut that then and there. Also, the scene at a funeral where Otis first goes out and can't find Maeve, and then Isaac goes out and immediately finds her really stinks of writing the plot to fit the set pieces they wanted. There's a ton of other scenes that telegraph what's going to happen so obviously that it took me out of it.

Personally I don't mind Otis and Maeve breaking up. Sometimes relationships just don't work out, and the grown up thing is to let go.

The new students really could have been developed as characters better, and they suffer from being new characters introduced in the last season, which also seems to have been written in a rush. The one thing I was half expecting with the new alpha couple was that they'd adress codependancy, and the way people sometimes think their first love has to be a soul mate thing immediately; Roman already having a big "ABBI" tattoo on his stomach reads as a red flag for me.

At the same time, my problem is that we never have a moment in the entire season where we get to see Otis and Maeve just enjoying being a couple. Something arbitrary always has to get in the way.

And honestly, the writers are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this. I realize that it's difficult to write a healthy relationship and make it interesting (which is probably why so many fictional relationships get saddled with heavily contrived conflicts). But when your show is supposed to be about sex, relationships and love, it's an oversight to not show that people can actually be happy and committed together. These writers clearly felt that just seeing Otis and Maeve be happy together for a while would be boring, forgetting that if the audience never gets to properly enjoy their happiness, their separation ending doesn't feel sad, just empty. If Otis and Maeve had been written as in love and committed and not constantly arguing for most of the past two seasons, the goodbye when they realize they have different life paths would have actually felt poignant and earned.

Of course, I doubt Maeve will be going back to America permanently. Because she can't. She doesn't have a long term visa. She can't work, she can't claim any sort of benefits or get medical insurance. She'll be undocumented and have no option but to work illegally; which would be probably worse than the caravan park. Realistically, she's going to have to return to Moordale to finish her secondary education (which is also where Maeve has much more of a proper support network).