I don’t think this show goes by school years, but class is back in some kind of session for Season 2
The second season of Sex Education is just as delightfully funny as the first, even if it gets bogged down in far too many cliched love triangle shenanigans between its supposed main couple, Maeve (Emma Mackey) and Otis (Asa Butterfield). Aside from them the rest of the cast does their part to fill out a fun, mostly satisfying Season 2, which is a relief because the cliche the first season ended on was so aggravating it nearly made me not want to come back.
But as the second season picks up, Otis is now dating Ola (Patricia Allison) with Maeve out in the cold, quietly sulking while she attempts to get back in school, reconnect with her drug addict mother and joins the quiz show team. It’s just as well, because there’s virtually nothing interesting about Otis and Ola, and the more colorful storylines come from the rest of the supporting cast. Eric gets a new boyfriend while navigating his problematic burgeoning relationship with Adam, who returns from military school the same self-loathing jerk as before, but maybe a little bit nicer. Still, although the connection between Adam and Eric is one of the more fascinating relationships, it’s filled with uncomfortable undertones, due to the years of bullying Eric suffered as the victim of Adam’s cruelness. To the show’s credit, it acknowledges this halfway through the season, but frankly, Adam was shown to be far too mean to be redeemed as a character, at least in terms of deserving Eric’s affection. You can go ahead and redeem him if you really want to keep Connor Swindells on the show (who is an intriguing presence and I can see why they would), but having Eric be in a relationship with him is difficult to watch.
Eric and Otis’s friendship is still one of the sweetest relationships on the show
In other areas, the show tackles various sexual intrigues of these wildly oversharing teenagers with the same blunt frankness as before, but oddly, the “sex clinic” that Otis and Maeve opened that basically served as the premise of the show is barely used this time. Otis gives out advice to maybe two or three people, as he’s more preoccupied with his own issues, and we hardly see Maeve performing her role at all. In spite of that, one of the season’s more effective subplots is Amy suffering an assault by a stranger on a public bus and her attempts to deal with it for the remainder of the season, a story no doubt inspired by the #MeToo movement. The careful observation of the many kinds of reactions these situations can provoke is a smart exploration of the subject and leads to a cathartic bonding moment between several of the girls near the season’s end.
Gillian Anderson returns as Otis’s mother Dr. Jean Milburn, who’s recruited to work at his school while navigating her own romantic difficulties with Ola’s dad and Otis’s father, and it finally allows Otis to regain some likability when he confronts his various asshole behavior this season and admits to being wrong about things. But that all leads back to the season’s final moment, which, unbelievably, rivals the first in terms of outright, cliched, keep the couple apart writing that just cannot be forgiven in this day and age. To go all in with such lazy storytelling tells me that the writers actually don’t want to put Otis and Maeve together despite exploring the pairing of so many other couples on the series, and that makes you feel like much of the show’s premise is a complete waste of time. I’m going to give them one more chance (and likely, so is Netflix, which has a tendency to cancel things after three or maybe four seasons now), but if this happens again next season, I am OUT. I can only take so much of the eyerolling Ross and Rachel near misses. Come on, show. Be original. So much of it is.
Grade: B+
Amy’s MeToo-inspired subplot for the win this time
