We gave the corresponding warning: Young Highnesses is simply a very good series and, if anyone wanted to catch up to see the outcome with the rest of the fans, they had to hurry. Now the final season is here, with the exception of the last episode, which Netflix intends to put in the catalog on March 18 to ensure that they create a television event and that the most voracious fans (that is, those willing to watch six episodes in a hurry and running on the morning of the opening) cannot spoil the experience for others.
The second season had ended with a bang (those who have not seen the series better not read). Well, perhaps the expression is wrong because it could be interpreted as the scriptwriters acting in an opportunistic and gratuitous way when Prince Wilhelm came out of the closet to the press and the entire Swedish nation. It was a logical conclusion to his dramatic arc, especially after the impossibility of living behind a facade as false as that of heterosexuality.
With director Lisa Farzaneh’s camera focused in close-up on the face of actor Edvin Ryding, who looked into the lens with a force similar to that of Jennifer Lawrence at the end of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the audience could expect an explicit intensity in this final stretch. And, at least in its cover letter, Young Highnesses prefers to be faithful to its narrative principles: feelings are never simple, nor obvious, nor are they expressed at the first opportunity in the first dialogue.
Wilhelm, for example, must navigate the new situation: he is running as the next monarch, an unusual situation for someone openly homosexual, and this storms the queen (Pernilla August), who was still dealing with the grief of losing her first-born. Simon, who asked Wilhelm so much to have an honest life, faces the media pressure of being the boyfriend of a prince.
Felice (Nikita Uggla), due to the scandals related to the school, has to ask herself an uncomfortable question: to what extent she is comfortable at Hillerska and if she is willing to be used as an example of diversity.
On the other hand, Sara (Frida Argento) and August (Malte Gårdinger) find themselves in their own particular purgatory: she feels that she deserves to be despised for what she did, without the necessary strength to come back, while Prince Wilhelm considers whether he should shoot the towel and assume the status of bad person that so many attribute to him.
In its last season, Lisa Ambjörn continues with that risky triple mortal that is to take an excessive adolescent premise (that is, a prince who falls in love with another boy at an elitist boarding school) and lower it to the earthly, intimate and almost traditional.
The sense of emotion is stripped of artifice. The text is designed so that the viewer can understand and empathize with characters of all kinds: aristocrats, humble people, on the autistic spectrum, with different racial profiles, regardless of the labels that are attached to them based on their definition. So that we understand each other, Wilhelm and Simon are more than “gay guys” like Felice is more than “black” or Sara more than “neurotypical”, even though these characteristics influence the characters.
And, with a direction that trusts in the views of such a young cast that expresses from the nuances (that “truth” that is so difficult to find) and that demystifies privilege (which is not represented from the material but from the attitude), Young Highnesses is that miracle that we can be grateful for.
It’s more than anyone could have expected from the synopsis and, while waiting for the icing on the cake, it’s hard to believe that it won’t enter the Olympus of great teen series.
