The Big Picture
- Lily Iglehart became the face of Sex Education over three seasons, embodying the show’s essence with her quirky personality and unique storyline.
- Despite being a fan favorite, showrunner Laurie Nunn decided to exclude Lily from Season 4, which was a drastic and potentially harmful decision.
- Lily deserved a happy goodbye after Season 3, and her absence in Season 4 leaves a significant void in the show’s personality and overall impact.
The fourth season of Sex Education dropped on Netflix with a myriad of new characters for viewers to love and hate. From Aisha (Alexandra James) to Beau (Reda Elazouar), Cavendish College is full of interesting new personalities for us to enjoy and dissect, not to mention some old faces in completely new contexts. Yes, we’re talking about you, Isaac (George Robinson). However, the change in scenery also came with pretty notable absences. With the end of Moordale Secondary and the sudden shift in Jean’s (Gillian Anderson) plot, many beloved characters had to be kicked out of the show, leaving huge people-shaped holes in fans’ hearts. And while Olivia (Simone Ashley) and Anwar’s (Chaneil Kular) absence isn’t that much of an issue considering the secondary roles both of them played in the series, Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt) and Ola’s (Patricia Allison) off-screen goodbye is definitely painful. But there is one character whose presence is missed most of all in Sex Education Season 4, a character whose identity is tied to the show’s very essence. We are speaking, of course, of Lily Iglehart (Tanya Reynolds).
More than just a regular fan favorite, Lily Iglehart became the first thing many people think of when they hear the name Sex Education. There are many good reasons for that. From her quirky personality to her story-inside-a-story of Glenoxi, F***lord of the Universe, she became a walking, talking summary of everything that the series wanted to tell us, from the complexities of sexuality to the normality of various forms of desire to our societal need to be more open about intimate topics. Not to mention the fact that Reynolds embodied the character with such charm and ease that she basically steals every scene she is in just by standing there. Still, when the time came to write Season 4, showrunner Laurie Nunn decided it was best to keep Lily out of it. Such a drastic decision has its reasons, but that doesn’t mean it was the correct course of action. In the end, Lily’s absence went far from unnoticed and was even a little harmful to Sex Education’s final run.
Lily Iglehart Became the Face of ‘Sex Education’ Over Three Seasons
Lily is introduced in Season 1 of Sex Education both as a tragic character and a sort of comic relief — that is, if a show as funny as Sex Education can even have a comic relief. On one hand, the clash of her intense sex drive and sense of urgency with her vaginismus diagnosis is a painful reminder of the complexities of the human sexual experience, a clear-cut example of how our minds and our bodies can be detached from one another when it comes to such matters. Thankfully, the story also has a happy ending, as it concludes with Lily realizing that she has no interest in boys. However, Lily’s presence is also there to make us laugh at how inappropriate she is with her obsession with horny aliens and getting into someone’s — anyone’s — pants. She is quite frequently the butt of the joke.
This didn’t stop her from becoming the most beloved thing about the series, though. Through the combination of the show’s writing and Reynolds’ incredibly charismatic performance, Lily became the very face of Sex Education, and Season 2 sees a considerable increase in her role and screen time. Not only does she get a relationship with Ola, she also reaches her creative climax when her talents are recognized by the school in a live performance of her much smuttier and alien-y version of Romeo and Juliet. By Season 3, fans were getting an entire animated sequence based on Lily’s Glenoxi, F***lord of the Universe, and said sequence was such a blast and became so integral to the show’s personality that it’s hard to believe it only ever happened once.
Lily Deserved a Happy Goodbye After ‘Sex Education’ Season 3
But Season 3 of Sex Education is also incredibly hard on Lily. Not only is her relationship threatened by the fact that Ola doesn’t believe in aliens, she is also humiliated by Moordale Secondary’s new headmistress, Hope Haddon (Jemima Kirke). Publicly shamed for having one of her sexy stories published in a local newspaper, something that should’ve been a cause for celebration, Lily is so traumatized that she stops going to school and tries to suppress her entire personality. She’s broken to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Still, she bounces back with Otis’ (Asa Butterfield) help, and she and Ola eventually agree to stay together even though they might have opposing views on life outside of Earth.
For showrunner Laurie Nunn, this was a perfect conclusion for the character. In an interview with LADBible, Nunn stated: “Those storylines felt like they had just come to a really lovely ending in series three, and I felt like the characters of Lily and Ola just really felt like they ended in a really happy place. Particularly because they’re a lesbian couple, I wanted them to not have any more pain or trauma, and just be left happy together. So that felt like a very organic place to leave them.”
That’s some fine reasoning right there, but was getting rid of Lily really the right call? Lily’s Season 4 storyline didn’t have to be about pain or trauma. As a matter of fact, after all the humiliation that the character endured in Season 3, it would be preferable if she had a plot devoted to her thriving and becoming her own self — a plot similar to her Season 2 story, or to what Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) got in Season 4. It wouldn’t feel redundant or repetitive, considering Lily’s idiosyncrasies and the show’s change of setting. There’s no knowing just how far Glenoxi could go in a school as accepting of its students’ particularities and personal projects as Cavendish College. Much like Maeve (Emma Mackey), Lily is an incredibly talented writer, though her area of expertise is a little less on the realistic side of things. Perhaps her arc could have something to do with someone besides her peers finally acknowledging her genius. As for Ola, she could have easily been included as an off-screen girlfriend.
This is, of course, just a possibility, the mad ramblings of a fan. Still, no matter what plot the writers would have chosen to give her, it would have been much more fitting for Sex Education to say goodbye to its viewers with one of its central characters still in the cast. Because, let’s face it, cutting Lily off from the show is akin to cutting off Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) or even Otis himself. She’s part of what made Sex Education what it currently is, and, without her (and Glenoxi), the show loses a huge chunk of its personality.
