It should be unfathomable—to imagine the unflappable Gillian Anderson knocked off balance, muttering awkwardly, red in the face and intimidated. She built a career on running down aliens, kooks, and bad men onscreen with the kind of steely, intelligent grace that made her an icon to a generation of sci-fi lovers. But in Sex Education, as a sex and relationship therapist, Anderson meets her match. They are formidable. They are chillingly unimpressed. They are a high-school assembly crowd of laughing teenagers, to whom she tries to talk about sex.
The sight of Anderson bumbling her way through the chorus of “Let’s Talk About Sex” in an airy English lilt—and at another point uttering, “Is my labia a normal length?” with reckless, earnest abandon, all in front of howling teenagers—is but one of Sex Education’s many surprises. Creator Laurie Nunn’s Netflix series, now streaming its second season, thrives on such sometimes mortifying, sometimes revelatory surprises, just like puberty itself.
The series holds the same allure as the ’80s teen dramas and comedies it’s indebted to: charismatic teens fall in and out of love, discover, disappoint, and grow, to a heart-swelling new wave-inspired soundtrack. Yet as familiar as its romantic beats and high-school milestones can feel, moments of startling honesty set the series apart. Sex Education brims with the sort of wisdom it takes most people a lifetime to work out. Lessons in how to connect and communicate effectively. What healthy relationships and emotional and sexual intimacy look like. (Plus, this season, an illustrated guide on how to douche.) With a diverse cast, storylines that foil expectations about whose inner lives are worth excavating, and a refreshing frankness about the beauty and weirdness of sex, Sex Education is really more mature than a lot of TV shows starring non-high schoolers.
It functions as both a reflection of the real world and a glimpse of what life could be, if only we more often used the right tools to handle the hardest parts of being human. And thankfully, its second season is just as strong as its first.
The series’ second outing picks up moments after its first, with Otis (Asa Butterfield, playing Anderson’s gangly nerd-son) mid-facial contortion, finally enjoying his first proper wank. He soon grows a bit addicted to it. In the car, on his bike, in school assemblies, in the shower—nowhere is unfit for a sudden erection and a half-crouched, embarrassed scramble out of the room. His relationship with Ola (Patricia Allison) is progressing sweetly, if a bit slowly, in part because despite his secondhand sex therapist’s expertise, Otis is still a 16-year-old virgin with zero idea of how to please a woman. Naturally, he does the common-sense thing: looks up “instructions” on the internet for how to finger a girl, then applies a laughably misguided technique that involves moving clockwise, spreading “the lips,” then going counterclockwise in a tragically rigid motion. Female pleasure is one of the season’s early fixations; here, it shows everyone what not to do.
Otis’s best friend Eric—played by the effervescent Ncuti Gatwa, the show’s best young find so far—meanwhile feels out what school life is like without the ever-present threat of bullying. (His tormentor Adam, the headmaster’s son played by Connor Swindells, was sent off to military school at the end of last season. His parting gift to Eric was a wallop of confusion: he gave Eric a blowjob before shipping out.) Rounding out the main trio, Maeve (Emma Mackey) comes back to school newly motivated not to let her cynicism and loneliness sabotage her academic potential. She joins a quiz team, but suffers one crushing setback after another, making it difficult for her to trust anyone.
Complicated new figures float into Eric’s and Maeve’s lives—for him, a French student with a killer smile named Rahim (Sami Outalbali), whom he describes as “the hottest boy I’ve ever seen.” To Eric’s absolute bafflement, Rahim is immediately drawn to him, asks him out, and proves the perfect boyfriend: beyond his looks, Rahim is kind, disarmingly forthright, and open-minded. Still, Eric can’t shake feelings for Adam, whose eventual return to Moordale marks the beginning of a half-formed redemption. (Adam often means well, and indeed tries his best in this season to reform himself, please his parents, and do no harm. But he harbors too much self-loathing and sadness he doesn’t know how to express to forge easy connections.) Maeve, meanwhile, is saddled with facing the source of her abandonment issues: her junkie mother, who returns with a three-year-old half-sister in tow. She’s wary of her mom’s renewed promises, but has a friend in the trailer park named Isaac (George Robinson) who is seemingly invested in watching her back.
Maeve and Isaac’s relationship becomes one of the strongest additions to the show. Isaac is wheelchair-bound and played by a disabled actor who could feign chemistry with a window curtain, he’s that charming. That Maeve is as prickly and dry with him as she is with everyone else forms the basis of an irresistible connection between the two. But Isaac is as flawed as every other character (except perhaps Rahim, whose perfection freaks everyone out a little). He frequently acts out of a sense of chivalry that oversteps his bounds in Maeve’s life. His final act in this season is well-intentioned, but invasive and motivated by jealousy; I’m curious to see where Nunn and her writers take him next season.
Otis, Maeve, and Eric’s stories are the meat of this season, but the most compelling threads emerge when the show grants unexpected complexity to characters in the periphery. Headmaster Groff’s wife (Samantha Spiro) is the sort of meek, long-suffering wife whose miserable sighs and worried glances are usually relegated to the background, used to illustrate her husband’s coldness rather than tell us much about her. In this season, as a welcome surprise, the character gets her due. She comes to Jean (Anderson) for advice, opening up about her unhappiness for what seems like the first time in years. She takes control of her own pleasure again, divorces her husband, gets drunk and goes dancing, and is allowed to live happily, without regretting her sudden bid for independence.
All-star athlete Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling) suffers from anxiety over the notion of letting his life be consumed by a sport he now loathes, and the ridicule he faces for trying something new: acting. It’s his friendship with his tutor, Viv (Chinenye Ezeudu)—who voices her own desires and insecurities throughout the season, refusing to make herself invisible despite how “guys like you never see girls like me”—that saves him. Ola comes to her senses about Otis (who is obviously not over Maeve anyway) and dumps him, freeing herself to explore her own pansexuality. She realizes she has feelings for her best friend, Lily (Tanya Reynolds), who is like a weirder, more intimidating Luna Lovegood, but from space.
And there is Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood), Maeve’s endearingly batty and bubbly best friend, whose story this season is among its most visceral. Aimee is riding the bus to school on Maeve’s birthday when a man behind her smiles and she politely smiles back. When she turns around, she realizes he’s masturbating on her. She tries to expose him to fellow passengers but no one seems to care. All she’s left to do is totter off the bus, juggling a birthday cake for Maeve in her arms, wipe the stranger’s ejaculate stains off her favorite pair of jeans, and walk the rest of the way to school.
The episode, written and directed by Sophie Goodhart, plays the moment ambiguously. Aimee often provides comic relief; her wide-eyed, indignant delivery of the line “He wanked on me!” at first seems to invite a laugh. Indeed, when Aimee arrives at school, she doesn’t yet fully comprehend what has happened to her. It’s Maeve who first labels the incident “sexual assault” and takes it seriously, demanding that Aimee file a police report. Aimee is reluctant and brushes it off as no big deal; she wasn’t physically hurt, after all, she’d only be wasting the police’s time. But Maeve insists, so she does, though it’s only in the weeks ahead that Aimee begins to understand the impact that stranger had on her.
Throughout the season, Aimee finds herself unexpectedly wracked with the anxious after-effects of unwanted sexual contact. She can’t board the bus any longer. She starts walking all the way to school, which means she can no longer wear the heels she loves and has always made part of her persona. At parties or in crowds, she seizes up, convinced she’s seeing her attacker again. Whenever the incident comes up, she continues to fixate on her lost pair of jeans, as if in an attempt to be casual about it. But they mean more to her than that: her perfect pair of boot-cut jeans (“You know how hard those are to find?” she chirps at one point) become a material symbol of what she’s lost. Her sense of safety, of “before.” Now there is only “after.”
The plot unfolds with the sensitivity that comes from firsthand experience. (Nunn has said the incident is drawn from her own life and from the experiences of women she knows.) Aimee’s inability to get on the bus any longer, her change of shoes, her sudden discomfort in public or around her boyfriend—it all reflects the dozens of small-scale infringements on women’s everyday lives caused by strangers like the one on the bus. The ones who suffer none of the consequences. In the season’s most cathartic moment, we see how common such violations (and the small joys they robbed) are among women who might otherwise have nothing in common.
When other girls (from disparate cliques, who normally disdain each other) vent similar frustrations and band together to ride the bus with Aimee, it’s a moment as triumphant and indelible as any fist pump or first kiss in a John Hughes movie. It also highlights the vitality of the show’s conversations around communication, consent, and emotional honesty. (Not to mention the enormous asset of having a writer’s room full of women.) For a series as joyful and funny as Sex Education, the nuance with which it handles moments that are all too real might be surprising. Then again, surprises are what this show does best.
