Review: Heated Rivalry, "The Cottage" | Season 1, Episode 6

Hey free subscribers—hope you are in the midst of a restful holiday, with perhaps a trip to a cottage in order. Here’s a preview of our finale coverage of this fall’s unexpected viral hit, as Shane and Ilya take Heated Rivalry into the next phase of their story—become a free subscriber to join the conversation.

“This is real though, right?”

The end of Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry is designed to be a fantasy. After spending nearly a decade of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov stealing moments as their lives allow, Scott Hunter’s bravery inspires Ilya to accept Shane’s invitation to his cottage, where they have two weeks of uninterrupted time. The cottage is Shane’s sanctuary, but it quickly becomes their shared escape from the rest of the world, a space where they can explore their relationship outside of the boundaries they’ve relied on all those years. 

The end of Jacob Tierney’s Heated Rivalry is effectively the same story, continuing the series’ remarkably faithful adaptation. There are small distinctions, of course: in the book, for example, Shane bought an investment property for hookups with Ilya to create greater separation, which made Ilya’s presence in his “home” slightly more significant. But “The Cottage” is still serving the same story function of creating the space Shane and Ilya need to see what audiences have known since episode one: they are in love with each other, a problem that neither of them wants to solve but a problem nonetheless.

There is a distinction, though, one that comes back to my ongoing analysis of the season. In both stories, the cottage represents a space separate from the hockey world they normally occupy, but in the books that world feels like an antagonist in their story. It’s not that there is a direct villain operating against them—that comes in later books—but rather that Shane and Ilya are fighting against a narrative of who they are to each other, and who they are as individuals. And while the show established this narrative—mostly through the all-star games throughout their careers—and Shane briefly talked about how he can’t continue to “pretend” to hate Ilya, there was never quite the same contrast between their day-to-day lives and their stolen moments. What Shane and Ilya find in “The Cottage” is transformative, but the world they’ll need to return to eventually feels vague and underdefined.

The result is a finale that works better as a climax than as an inflection point in a larger story, a byproduct of the fact that Tierney had no idea if he was ever going to get to return to Shane and Ilya’s story. In the book, what they achieve at “The Cottage” feels like an impossible dream, the world opening up to them in a way they couldn’t imagine before, and which will be a long journey—a long game, you could say—after. In the show, so focused on bringing their moments of intimacy to life and absent the self-doubt of their inner monologues and the pressures of their professional world, “The Cottage” feels like an inevitable climax, the only possible place this story could land.

Emotionally, it’s a slam dunk. Narratively, it raises a lot of questions for how Shane and Ilya’s story will continue into the second season and beyond.