Review: Heartstopper, "Together" & "Apart" | Season 3, Episodes 7-8

Taken on its own merit, the endpoint of Heartstopper season four makes sense. The Summer-Fete celebration creates an excuse for all the characters to come together, Charlie’s performance is a stepping stone in his mental health journey, and Nick and the girls’ college tour solidifies the all-important fact that there are big changes on the horizon for everyone to navigate. The final scene, with Charlie finally breaking down the barrier around his body and allowing Nick to take off his shirt, is also an “animated leaves” moment if ever there was one.

However, it’s hard to argue that these are the climaxes for any character’s story in the season as a whole. Charlie’s day-to-day management of his mental health is realistic, but his emotional breakthrough was earlier in the season. Similarly, while Nick’s inability to embrace his true hopes for a college experience from within his sense of responsibility to Charlie is a logical evolution of their relationship, that theme was really addressed by his Aunt in Menorca. “Together” and “Apart” represent a thematic summation of the season, and have some effective moments, but there’s no question the season’s highlights happened much earlier for the central characters.

Some of this was perhaps unavoidable once Oseman committed to adapting Volumes 4 and 5 of her comic together, given the intense change of pace I’ve discussed in previous reviews. It’s not abnormal for a high school show to burn through a full school year, but those shows usually have more than eight episodes. There’s not enough time here for the accumulation of narrative development—the show doesn’t have any egregious gaps in logic or anything, but when considering the season as a whole it registers as thematically connected moments rather than a clean narrative arc across the season. There’s also the issue of how “Winter” really splits the season into two parts, and I’m wondering if this season would have been improved if they had actually divided it into two parts like Netflix has done for some of its most popular series: five episodes concluding with “Winter,” and then some extra time to flesh out stories like Darcy’s gender journey, Tara’s burnout, and Tori and Michael’s relationship in shifting the back three episodes into five.