After an absence of almost an entire year, the students of Moordale Highschool returned to our screens earlier this January. Now that the dust has settled on this highly anticipated release, Conor Halion reviews the second season of Sex Education.
I remember getting to the final episode of Sex Education season one and being mildly irritated. While all round a great show full of loveable characters and quirky humour, pairing Otis (Asa Butterfield) off with Ola (Patricia Allison) felt somewhat manufactured. This became all the worse when I realized I had to wait another year to see if Otis and Maeve (Emma Mackey) would finally get together. The bad news is, spoiler alert, the ending of season two had me screaming at my television in frustration, because the ending of season two feels just as manufactured. The budding chemistry between Otis and Maeve in season one is not built upon at all in season two, and it was incredibly frustrating to see two characters who are so cleverly written act like complete idiots.
The good news, however, is that with the Otis-Maeve dynamic on the backburner, season two leaves room for the secondary cast to absolutely shine. Special praise has to be paid to Kedar Williams-Stirling and Amiee Lou Wood in particular, who portray Jackson and Amiee respectively. In the first season, both of these characters were fairly one dimensional, with Amiee playing a stereotypical bubbly blonde, while Jackson was characterised as a charismatic foil to Otis’ pleas for Maeve’s affections. In season two, we get to find out what these characters mean outside of Maeve and Otis, while also getting a deeper insight into their home lives. Jackson’s storyline about the pressure placed upon him by his parents and trying to find his own passion outside of those expectations is, arguably, one of the main emphases of the season. Amiee, on the other hand, becomes the victim of a sexual assault, and over the course of the season, her character undergoes a heart-breaking transformation.
Considering Sex Education is, for the most part, a light and fluffy show about teenagers and aimed at teenagers, I really do have to applaud the writers for meeting a real-world issue like this head-on, and attempting to initiate an open conversation on the topic of what constitutes sexual assault.