The final episodes provide beloved characters the spotlight to say a proper goodbye — especially Emma Mackey’s Maeve
We’ve come a long way since the start of “Sex Education,” when we were all rooting for (or at least commiserating with) Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), the Netflix dramedy’s awkward, anxious and slightly dysfunctional hero. Four years later, we’re saying goodbye to the show’s high school student-turned-amateur sex therapist and his brilliant sex therapist mother, Dr. Jean Milburn (played by the incomparable Gillian Anderson), along with a lengthy cast of characters we’ve all grown to love.
In this final season, we get to see each character develop into the people we’ve wanted them to become. And in a sense, it seems like some end up outshining Otis, making it feel like perhaps he was never really the hero of this story, but rather an entry point into the interwoven lives of the diverse residents of the fictional town of Moordale.
But first, some bad news: Thanks to the closing of Moordale Secondary School at the end of Season 3, there are a handful of folks who don’t return for the final episodes. Ola (Patricia Alison) and her alien-fixated girlfriend Lily (Tanya Reynolds), as well as Ruby’s crew, Anwar and Olivia (Chaneil Kular and Simone Ashley), are presumed to have wound up at different schools this year. It’s a hard pill to swallow, especially if you were rooting for Ola and Lily to get their happy ending.
You might also be wondering if we’ll see Maeve (Emma Mackey). Last we checked, she was bidding adieu to Otis on her way to America. Fortunately, she is most definitely present this season, despite being across the pond at the start. In fact, she’s the first character we see in the season premiere, toiling away at an essay about the Brontë Sisters (a fun easter egg given she played the starring role in the 2022 biopic about Emily Brontë) for her class under Professor Thomas Molloy (played by “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy).
