Culture: This season kicks off on October first. The new school year started in late August, and all the characters have moved up a year and are now second-year students. All the third-year students have graduated, and a horde of new first-year students have started high school, upsetting the balance and social hierarchy. A bit more than a month has passed since school started, which is enough time for new friendships to have formed, and for everyone to have formed an opinion on the new students. Magnus’ opinion, for example, is that every single first-year girl is fuckable…



Subtext: The dialogue-less montage at the start actually contains a funny little scene illustrating Vilde’s personality. A bunch of pretty, blonde, first-year girls have appeared at Eva’s party uninvited, and that threatens The System, because if they’re there and stealing all the cute guys, who will Vilde hook up with then? If you close your eyes you can just hear her ask Eva “What are they doing here?”



Eva, meanwhile, doesn’t give a shit that her house party is spiraling out of control, she’s more interested in making sure that P-Chris stays focused on her, not the new arrivals.



Subtext: The reason Isak picks Emma when pressed to name one girl he’s interested in, is because he’s betting that she will be completely uninterested in him. She’s good-looking, has had an older boyfriend, why would she care about Isak? He’s hoping that if the guys continue to press him on why he doesn’t have a girlfriend, he can pretend to only have eyes for Emma.



Subtext: Mahdi says he doesn’t really know Isak, while Jonas protests, which gives us a couple of hints about how this boy squad got together. The most likely scenario is that Isak brought in Magnus, while Jonas brought in Mahdi, and the four of them have spent the first month of the school year bonding over smoking weed.



Blink and you miss it: When Emma enters the bathroom, Isak looks really, really scared for a moment. Because she is the last person he actually wants to interact with, and now he has to pretend to be interested in her.



Subtext: Emma knows that she looks like Natalie Portman, and both her and her friend have heard it over and over again from guys trying to pick her up, so she’s super tired of hearing it, and just wants to shut down yet another boring pick-up attempt from yet another boring guy.



Cinematography: When Isak exits the hedge and starts walking left, the camera pans to follow him, but just like Isak is yanked backed by the police officer, so does the camera yank to the right, so that we the audience experience the same motion as Isak, and are as surprised as him.



Blink and you miss it: In case the sound of a blister pack opening when Isak pulled out his ‘drugs’ to give to Emma wasn’t a strong enough hint that he didn’t actually have any drugs other than weed, here we quickly see him pulling out the small packet of Ibuprofen that he used to impress Emma.



Lost in translation: Kosegruppa is just completely untranslatable into English, and since none of the previously existing subtitles for this show translated it either, I just left it in as is.



You can however translate it perfectly into either Swedish or Danish, in which case it would be either trivselgruppen or hyggegruppen. Yes, all three languages have a specific word for the same concept, and yes, each language has a completely different word for it. Great minds think alike!



Blink and you miss it: Both Isak and Sana react to the shitty casual racism coming from the Biology teacher.



Blink and you miss it: Following the brain-dead conversation the boy squad had about clitorises and girls with cat tongues earlier in the week, someone renamed their Messenger group chat to “The cat-hooker and his friends”.



Culture: The Revue™ continues being a thing year after year, and since a third of the students graduated, new people have to take their places and do all the work that needs to be done. It seems that one of the groups needed new leadership, and Vilde of course jumped at the opportunity in order to increase her social status. Unlike the external-facing groups like PR, stage, acting, or dance, kosegruppa is an internal group who acts as a kind of ground support for all the other groups, making sure everyone else has a good time.



Blink and you miss it: When Vilde mentions that not everyone is good at spreading love, she stares at Sana.



Culture: I explained how classes work in Norwegian high school back in the very first post in this series, so go back and refresh yourselves if you’ve forgotten. Given that, it’s easy to decode Even’s class, 3STB. He’s a third-year student, doing college prep, and he’s in the second class of third-year college prep students.



Although we don’t know for sure, Isak is probably in 2STD at this point in time, same as Jonas and Eva.



Blink and you miss it: If you watch all of the credits, they cut the end song just after its first word, which is “Threesome!”

