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Mild spoilers for the second season of Sex Education below.
Towards the end of the second episode of Sex Education’s sophomore season, Adam, a former bully who was revealed to be bisexual at the tail end of the show’s first season, faces a difficult decision. Now a student at a boys military school, he finds himself facing expulsion when a bag of weed is found underneath his pillow. In reality, the drugs were not his; as he quickly explains, they actually belonged to the two boys standing next to his bed, who planted them there to set him up. But when asked why they would have done such a thing, Adam chokes up. He knows exactly why: mere hours before, he caught them jerking off together, and though he promised to keep their secret safe, he knew they still wanted to get rid of him to protect their reputations.
In the moment, rather than betray their secret, he chooses to keep it. It’s a surprising choice for a bully who spent the entire first season of this show terrorizing its main gay character, Eric, but it’s also perfectly in line with the fact that he had been doing so for the most immature reason in the book: because he had a crush on him. As he’s forced to reckon with the reality of his own queer sexuality, Adam clearly found it hard to inflict that same cruelty onto others — even if the consequences could ultimately prove dire.
It’s a layered depiction of how one’s sense of their own queerness develops, and the effects it can have on our worldviews. But it’s one that, in its second season, Sex Education seems uniquely qualified (and willing) to tackle — and it does so, again and again and again.
In its first season, Sex Education successfully delivered on its titular premise. Following awkward high schooler Otis (Asa Butterfield) in his efforts to offer paid sex advice to his hormonal classmates, the series quickly became a hit by treating teen sex with the same frank irreverence that has turned Big Mouth into the type of crowdpleaser that notoriously risk-averse Netflix can feel confident renewing for three seasons at a time. Even then, Sex Education was willing to probe into the most obscure and uncomfortable of topics — remember Lily’s vaginismus? — but in its second season, the series seeks to dive even deeper into the travails that accompany adolescent sexuality.
Take the new season’s first episode, which wastes no time plunging headfirst into the heat of what students at Moordale Secondary believe to be a rampant, campus-wide chlamydia outbreak. The episode expertly weaves together a variety of reactions to the news, with several students taking unnecessarily drastic measures to protect themselves from the infection; one girl in particular is unjustly ostracized from the school acapella group because her teammates have decided that she’s Patient Zero. “I think this is a classic case of mass hysteria,” says Otis, expressing skepticism that there really is an “outbreak” at all. Because the student body hasn’t been properly educated on how STIs are transmitted, no one is sure how to properly respond. (“There’s a plague! Don’t let them breathe on you,” one unnamed character shouts as he panickedly runs through the hallways.)
But the show really shines in matters of queerness. This is most clearly seen through Otis’ best friend, Eric (the wildly talented Ncuti Gatwa), who is thankfully pushed to the foreground after being sidelined for the majority of the show’s first season. While the eccentric style icon spent much of last season dealing with bullies and homophobic attacks, season two grants him a much more compelling storyline as he finds himself caught in the middle of a love triangle that is equal parts titilating and challenging. An engaging, bubbly personality who’s confident in all manners of life except those of love and sex, Eric proves to be the ideal conduit for examining the ways we define love. As Eric wrestles with a whole host of complicated, conflicting emotions, we’re forced to challenge our own preconceived notions: Is love something we can control? Who deserves our love and when? Is it smart to follow our hearts, even if they are leading us away from the exact thing our brains are telling us is best?
