Do Otis and Maeve End Up Together in 'Sex Education'?
After two-and-a-half seasons of glorious yet agonizing will-they-won’t-they tension, Sex Education fans’ prayers were answered midway through Season 3, as Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Maeve (Emma Mackey) finally got together. Kind of. Within a few episodes of their climactic kiss, their future had been thrown into doubt once again by Maeve’s decision to go to America to attend a prestigious writing program.
So it’s no surprise that Season 4 begins with the couple still on somewhat uncertain footing. Trying to make a long-distance relationship work when you’ve barely even had a short-distance one yet is a tall order, and between their mutual sexual frustration and Otis’s irrational jealousy over Maeve’s friendship with a fellow American student (who turns out to be gay), things aren’t looking too promising. Otis isn’t entirely wrong to worry that Maeve may be leaving him behind. She seems to be truly flourishing in America, until the wind gets taken out of her sails by a prickly and overly critical professor (Dan Levy), who’s unimpressed by everything she writes and ultimately tells her she may not be cut out for the profession.
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Before she’s had time to recover from this experience, Maeve gets a much more devastating blow when her mom, Erin (Anne-Marie Duff), is hospitalized after a drug overdose. Maeve races back to Moordale, but by the time she arrives at the hospital, Erin is already dead. There’s nothing like a crisis to put a new relationship to the test, and after Erin’s death, Otis really steps up, supporting Maeve through her complicated grieving process alongside Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood).
That’s not to say it’s entirely smooth sailing between them. Maeve’s tough upbringing has taught her to be fiercely independent, relying only on herself and finding it hard to accept help. And her trust issues are exacerbated by the discovery that Otis spent a (platonic) night with his ex-girlfriend Ruby (Mimi Keene) while Maeve was in America. He blurts this out just as they’re about to have sex for the first time, in the abandoned Moordale Secondary bathroom where they first started their sex therapy clinic. His confession naturally puts a dampener on things, which is probably for the best considering how gross that bathroom had to be (nostalgia is no substitute for hygiene, guys).
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But here comes the true heartbreak for Otis/Maeve shippers. Throughout all of this, the bigger issue looming over their relationship is what Maeve wants her future to look like. The trauma of her mom’s sudden death, coupled with her professor’s harsh words, reignites all of her deepest insecurities and leaves her convinced that she should settle for a small, simple life in Moordale, the town she always longed to leave. But once she gets some much-needed maternal guidance from Jean, she makes the decision to go back to America—possibly for the long term.
“I feel so different there,” she admits to Otis. “I feel like the best version of me.” And although she floats the idea of staying together, long distance, Otis tells her he doesn’t want to hold her back. They say “I love you,” both knowing that they’re breaking up without being able to bring themselves to say it out loud, and then finally consummate their relationship, under the most bittersweet circumstances.
The next morning, as Maeve leaves for the airport, Otis closes his eyes so that he doesn’t have to watch her leave (same, tbh). It’s all pretty devastating, but it’s also an incredibly mature decision for two people as young as Otis and Maeve to make, and the fact that this breakup is so loving speaks to the strength of their bond. And the finale certainly leaves the door open for these two to reconnect, years down the line, once they’ve had the chance to develop apart for a while. In the final moments of the episode, Otis discovers an emotional note from Maeve in his bedroom, in which she credits him with helping her learn how to trust and be vulnerable.
“You have the rare ability to make people feel truly seen,” Maeve writes, in a tearjerking voiceover that closes out the show. For the first time in her life, after getting to know Otis, she didn’t feel alone, and that experience allowed her to start imagining bigger possibilities for herself. In other words, she might never have had the strength to follow her dreams in America if it weren’t for meeting him. “Meeting you cracked my heart open, and now it’s forever changed,” she writes. “And because of that, I will carry a part of you with me wherever I go. I think what I’m trying to say is: thanks for everything. Dickhead.” We’re not crying, you’re crying.
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