In episode three, the series expresses all the things Shane and Ilya can’t say to each other.
Photo: HBO Max
The third episode of the Crave/HBO Max series Heated Rivalry takes a sharp turn away from the sexual adventures of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, two young, closeted hockey rivals just trying to secretly hook up and definitely, definitely not fall in love. This week’s episode tells the story of one of Shane’s hockey peers, Scott Hunter, who starts flirting with hot smoothie-shop employee Kip and falls swiftly and madly in love. The only problem in their relationship is that Scott insists they remain a secret. There are no out gay players in the MLH, and Scott is terrified of what it would do to his career.
There are only six episodes in Heated Rivalry, and the decision to suddenly abandon the two central characters for an entire departure episode in the middle of the season is a dubious one. (Remember season one of The Last of Us, when the third episode was a gay love story that completely ignored the two central characters and everyone was totally relaxed and chill about it?) But Heated Rivalry’s third episode, “Hunter,” is a lovely stand-alone installment and stealthily a canny move for the series overall. It’s a very swoony, romantic speedrun through Scott Hunter’s backstory, but it’s just as effective as a way to reframe and contextualize the entire series, as well as a strategy for addressing Heated Rivalry’s biggest challenge: It’s a TV show with no interior monologue. We don’t know what Shane and Ilya are thinking, and for two very repressed, curt, highly physical hockey players who can barely rub two spoken sentences together under the best of circumstances, that’s a real problem.
Heated Rivalry did not invent Scott’s backstory for this episode. The arc is taken from Game Changers, the novel that precedes Heated Rivalry in Rachel Reid’s hockey romance book series. Scott and his boyfriend, Kip, play a crucial role in Shane and Ilya’s story in the Heated Rivalry novel, but the book stays entirely within Shane and Ilya’s point of view, dodging any of the details of Scott and Kip’s romance because there’s no need for it — the whole story already exists in the previous book. The only element of their relationship the Heated Rivalry novel needs to include is how their story affects Ilya and Shane, and Reid can go into that in great detail. The novel lives entirely inside Shane’s and Ilya’s heads, so every minute emotional shift and secret moment of lust they’re trying to bury from public view still gets to be on full display for the reader.
The problem for the Heated Rivalry TV show is that, absent any interiority, Ilya and Shane are less fully developed characters than they should be two episodes into a series. The sex scenes give them opportunities to express desire and inner conflict, but most scenes outside the bedroom (or locker room or hotel room or you get the idea) are stuck in angry, glowering mode. It’s less true for Ilya, who is both more transparent as a character and more capably performed by actor Connor Storrie. Even with two perfect performances, though, having zero access to these guys’ brains would still have been a challenge for this adaptation. Their entire arc is that they cannot let themselves express what they’re thinking or feeling — not to each other, not to their friends and families, and often not even privately to themselves. As a result, Heated Rivalry’s first two episodes are hot, and extremely sexual, but rely on external cues like cinematography, lighting, and music to convey when Shane and Ilya have moved beyond “we’re hooking up” into “we’re hooking up and we both secretly like each other but we will never, ever admit this.” In episode one, the sex scenes are shot in full body-length frames with few cuts. The edit emphasizes specific physical actions over emotional intimacy; by episode two, conversely, the cinematography introduces several fade-to-black cuts in the middle of a sex scene to give the sequence a breathless, overwhelmed quality.
Still, Ilya and Shane have few outlets for expressing their inner turmoil. They have no close friends. Shane writes and deletes one longing text message about kissing. Ilya looks disillusioned while being propositioned by other people. None of this is a sufficient substitute for the detail of the novel, which is mostly composed of two dudes absolutely spinning out whenever the other’s name is mentioned in a game recap playing on the TV across a crowded bar. Neither Shane nor Ilya can turn to a friend and say out loud, “I want him, but I can’t have him,” so all the camera can do is linger on their faces and hope that idea is communicated with enough vehemence to get it across.
But Scott and Kip? Those guys love to talk about their feelings. Within 15 minutes of episode three, they’ve basically moved into Scott’s apartment together, become fully devoted to supporting each other’s hopes and dreams, and produce elaborate loving meals as a way to demonstrate their domestic bliss. They are as emotionally open with one another as Ilya and Shane are not. The existence of their relationship in the broader context of Heated Rivalry suddenly infuses the rest of the series with all the longing and angst and full-throated declarations of lust that the first two episodes are unable to depict. They become the model for what Shane and Ilya want to be saying to one another but are too frightened to let themselves articulate, and they fill in a whole emotional range that Heated Rivalry otherwise lacks. Kip’s father is there to keep hugging Kip and say “I love you” over and over, because otherwise this series has none of the warm-and-fuzzy family energy until Shane and Ilya inevitably figure things out by the end. Kip’s co-worker Elena can confront Scott with all the good-supportive-friend dialogue that’s so often necessary for holding a romance genre together. Someone has to be the functional instigator who points out that you can’t stay secret forever. Someone needs to get the plot moving!
For Shane and Ilya, that moment has not yet arrived. But providing a meatier backstory for Scott and Kip builds Heated Rivalry’s world beyond these two hockey bros’ brooding stares and frantic hotel room fuck sessions, so that when it does arrive, their happy ending can feel earned instead of arriving out of nowhere. That’s what those two nice young men deserve, after all — a perfectly swoony promise to love one another with their whole hearts for the rest of their lives, before someone grunts “get on the bed” and starts rolling on a condom.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect Scott’s relationship to Shane.
