Review: Heated Rivalry, "I'll Believe In Anything" | Season 1, Episode 5
An electric turning point raises questions a six-episode season can't answer
Screeners can, at times, be something of an occupational hazard for a critic.
Over the course of the past week, my social feeds have continued to be dominated by Heated Rivalry content, as is likely the case for other chronically online viewers of the show. And as the show approaches the end of the season, speculation has been rampant about how Jacob Tierney would manage to fit the rest of Rachel Reid’s book into only two episodes. Fans have pored over the available information—the episode titles, snippets from interviews, etc.—wondering how the novel’s final act could be changed, with multiple creators producing detailed breakdowns of how the story could be broken down.
The hazard is that I saw all this conversation after I had already watched “I’ll Believe in Anything,” meaning that I had to contain myself from answering their hypotheticals. I don’t believe in doing this, and generally think it’s gauche for critics with screeners to vague post about what they’ve seen so as to rile up fans of a particular show. My one exception this week was when I saw a Reddit thread speculating that the episode could be 120 minutes long based on a random listing, because it felt like a needed fact check before speculation snowballed (and hilariously became an entire discourse on Twitter verifying I was a viable source). But generally, I had to sit back and watch fans have a conversation I was dying to have but couldn’t participate in, because I have the privilege of being a week ahead.
The fans weren’t wrong that there’s a lot to cram in, because the end of “I’ll Believe in Anything” was never in doubt. Reid’s book is divided into “parts,” and the end of Part Three is the turning point in Shane and Ilya’s story. They’ve spent the past year struggling to imagine how the relationship they have can ever be anything more than it is, despite both clearly wanting it to be. Part Three ends with Shane and Ilya sit watching the New York Admirals winning the Stanley Cup (it’s the actual NHL in the book) while texting each other back and forth, Shane’s invitation for Ilya to spend the summer with him hanging in the air. And when a celebrating Scott Hunter calls Kip down onto the ice and kisses him for everyone to see, it is an electric shock that makes them believe. Shane texts Ilya in disbelief, but Ilya doesn’t text back. He calls Shane, and as soon as the call starts he says the five words that change their lives:
“I’m coming to the cottage.”
It is one of the iconic moments of Heated Rivalry, and it comes to life with aplomb. The camera spins around Scott and Kip at center ice, and then spins back around Shane and Ilya having their brains rewired by what’s in front of them. As a reader of the books, it’s a perfect recreation of a banger of a chapter ending, and a catapult into the next act of Shane and Ilya’s story.
However, as a viewer of this television series, this ending was also incredibly confounding. When Jacob Tierney chose to introduce roughly ¾ of Game Changer into the season’s third episode, I knew it was so this moment would resonate more with viewers. The idea has merit, as it promises to marry the climax of one book with a pivotal turning point of the other. What if the audience saw Scott and Kip get their happy ending at the same time that Shane and Ilya start to believe they might have even a sliver of hope of having one of their own? It sounds like an emotional overload, and I’m not going to disagree that it’s a powerful moment.
The problem is that it’s a powerful moment missing a massive piece of context: what the hell happened between Scott and Kip in the literal three years since we last saw them. And while as a book reader I know the basics of that story, the changes to the show’s timeline create new questions, and the show just…doesn’t seem concerned. It’s an absence that allows “I’ll Believe In Anything” to hit the important beats in Shane and Ilya’s story leading up to this pivotal moment, but ultimately leaves me wondering what this season would have looked like with an extra episode to keep this from feeling trapped between the two books being adapted.
