Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 5: I'll Believe in Anything) / 2025 [TV series]

everything changes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Tierney (screenwriter and director, based on the novel Game Changers by Rachel Reid) Heated Rivalry / 2025 [TV series]

 

Season 1, Episode 5 “I’ll Believe in Anything”

 

If we might have been a bit let down by Episode 4 of this now truly “heated” competition between the two men in love, Episode 5 contains all we have been waiting for and reveals entirely new dimensions of this work in several ways.

    First of all, after another unhappy experience in bed, Shane meets with Rose, a girl with a long experience of gay men given her role as an actor, who in a dinner engagement, arranged by Shane, finally confronts him about whether he is really interested in sex with her, or, to put it more bluntly, challenges him about whether or not he might not prefer boys.

    Actually, she is more discreet in her questions, first mentioning how cute she finds Shane (who doesn’t find him to be cute?) before mentioning that her co-star Miles is really envious. At first Shane is so taken aback that he doesn’t even comprehend the question, wondering why Miles but be envious of him, which she quickly corrects, explaining that he is envious of her, reiterating that her co-actor is gay.

    She attempts to bring up the question again by explaining that she really likes to be with Shane; he agreeing feels that the same way, although admitting what we already know in one of the very first lines of this work, “About last night,” that their sex is not going well. She suggests that perhaps the problem is that she might not be the right person for him, that perhaps their relationship is like “a square peg in a round hole.”. Finally, Shane begins to comprehend her unfortunate metaphors, repeating that he truly likes her. Her next question puts it differently. “Are there any gay guys in hockey? I mean openly gay men?”

     Shane Hollander, the honest man, admits that there aren’t any. And from there she smoothly manipulates the conversation to nicely challenge him by asking it he might have feelings like for someone like Miles, or more clearly, “Can I ask if you’ve ever been with another guy?” Shane calls up the image of Ilya, and for the first time perhaps in his life, speaks or at least nods toward the truth. “Have you ever told anyone that before?”  Shane nods in the negative.

     Her next question is the most important question that Shane must face with regard to his sexuality. “Is it different with a guy?” We witness another clip out of the past of Shane kissing Ilya. The time he verbally agrees. And when she asks whether it was better, he almost breaks down in affirming the truth.  This time he goes even further: “The thing is, I kind of prefer being the hole rather than the peg.”

     This is a momentous moment. After hundreds and hundreds of gays coming out in gay movies to basically gay audiences, this figure has just come out to a heterosexual woman in front of a basically mixed gay and heterosexual female audience with what he have to presume are thousands of straight males peering over their shoulders. Shane has come out, simultaneously admitting that he’s a bottom, not only to his highly publicly perceived girlfriend, but to himself. And that will change everything going forward, providing him with a sense of empowerment over the self-denying Ilya.

    I simultaneously remembered that after I had come out to myself, the first person I shared the revelation with was also a woman who I had been dating with the expectation of marriage. I don’t think I even realized how brave I was in revealing the self in such a vulnerable situation. So many men, so I’ve since discovered, have cowered at the very moment and in so doing trapped themselves into situations so destructive to their later wives and families.

    We have just been shown how brave and truly honest Shane is, a worthy companion for the more troubled Ilya.

    But perhaps even more importantly, Rose has shown herself to be one of the strongest of women who not only senses the inappropriateness of the relationship she might have wished for, but demonstrated how necessary such strong women are to sexually questioning males. We now only have to look back at the episodes wherein Svetlana has pushed Ilya toward other men. And, without our having recognized it at the time, just how crucial Maria Villaneuva (Bianca Nugara), Kip’s co-worker at his smoothie shop, has been towards his relationship with hockey player Scott Hunter. Women are an essential part of this series, the forces behind the frightened male figures who they love and support. Coming out, we suddenly realize, is not an all-male thing, but generally involves enlightened females as well. In short, gay coming-out tales, at least since the 1970s, are not isolated homosexual experiences, but also heterosexual affairs involving friends and family, which explains precisely the difference between what I have long described as the two versions of “coming out” films, the early version of the 1940-1960s, and the later version coming into fruition in the late 1980s.  In first version, when there was no one to come to, it was a private male affair; but later it necessarily included the straight world.

     Finally, as this film certifies, males and females can truly be friends. Rose states the obvious: “I have a feeling there’s not a lot of people you can talk to; I mean about the other things and stuff.” Shane’s response sums up his dilemma: “Things and stuff can be tricky for me.”

      I now know that I have always depended upon the kindness of women. And I mean this more profoundly than it sounds in my coy imitation of the Tennessee Williams quote.

     Even Svetlana, soon after, gets Ilya to agree that Shane is “beautiful.”

    This episode moves forward with a renewed interchange between Shane and Ilya as they both play closely on the same team in the 2017 All-Star Game. Meeting up in Tampa, Shane admits to Ilya in a semi-secret meeting that the reason he looks so good is that he’s hired a stylist, implying that he now has someone for who he wants to look stylish; and more importantly, that he and Rose are no longer “compatible.”

     Their relationship shifts not only in the public eye, as they win together as team mates. But their sexual relations also deepen, despite the fact that Ilya still has very serious problems. Shane goes even further in his gay confessions by finally coming out even to Ilya, telling him that he not only gay, but that his reasons for even admitting it has to do with his love for him. Ilya may cry out that it doesn’t really matter, but Shane insists that he can no longer go on pretending that he doesn’t love his so-called rival. “I think I might like you a little too much.” Ilya refuses to believe that they might actually be a couple, and finally revealing a deeper sense of himself to Shane, he breaks

down in tears in Shane’s arms, admitting that Russia and his family would never accept them as a couple, the most political aspect of this series. “My father is police, my brother is police.” “And your mother?” asks Shane. “Dead.” For Ilya Russia is the patriarchal horror that has fortunately escaped.

    When Ilya’s father dies and he is forced to return to Moscow for the funeral, suddenly cut off for all communication with Shane. What further struggles must a closeted hockey player suffer, now not even able to phone his lover?

     Ilya’s now seething anger finally results in a major action. But even before that we realize that for Ilya too, hiding is no longer a choice. When he finally phones Shane, he demands he put on his glasses—in which he has never previously seen him—and take off his clothes. This is not just a sexual tryst; it has become a passion for the other, satisfied even in a kind of voyeuristic appreciation of the moment. This goes way beyond their earlier releases of sexual energy and moves into a world of passion. In a strange way, this and the following scene, is premonition of Ilya’s coming out, an admission of something he has never admitted even to himself.

     Meanwhile, at the funeral supper, Ilya’s brother Alexi, speaking in Russian with no subtitles appears again to be trying to hit him up for yet further money and sacrifice; but this time the now American sportsman refuses, denying any further relationship with his brother, despite the attempted calming waters of Svetlana. Even though we cannot comprehend their interchange, we sense this as crucial transformation in Ilya’s life, a cutting of Russian ties that removes him not only from his family life but the possibility or even need to return to his home country. Without perhaps even knowing it, he has suddenly released himself from his years of secret imprisonment. He has, at last, exited from one deep closet; whether or not he can escape the other, is left to the narrative pulls of the plot.

    Ilya calls Shane, and his response to Shane’s “How are you?” says it all. “Okay. Not good. Probably bad.” When Shane asks about his family, his friend answers: “At their worst. My brother is, I don’t know, scared. It makes him terrible.” But he recognizes that perhaps he is upset by the wrong thing. “I wish it could be different. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

    Shane, now wiser than he has been ever before, perhaps on account of the fact that he now truly knows his feelings for Ilya and trusts his love, asks Ilya to tell him everything that’s on his mind but in English but his native Russian.

    This truly brilliant and utterly unpredictable narrative twist allows Ilya the freedom to say what he would never be able to express to Shane face-to-face in English. If we felt a bit frustrated a few moments previously when an entire scene between Ilya and his brother was played out in untranslated Russian (actor Connor Storrie, who had studied some Russian, is  totally convincing in his Russian language passages—so much so that the native Russian speakers in the scene attempted to communicate afterwards with him in Russian, unsuccessfully, Storie admits, since it was all a superficial understanding of the language) we are now able to enter Ilya’s previously closed-off world, as we participating in the translation which Shane cannot:

 

“I’ll never be back here. I hate everything here. And they hate me. I’ll pay for everything….And all I hear is not. I want more Ilya, I need more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more….I gave them everything. I feel like I’m empty. …Look at me and see either a bank or an enemy. Or I don’t know who. My brother…He always hated me. …And it kills me. I was not here. …Still I paid for everything. And it means that now I have no money. …I don’t have anyone. I have a secret, Svetlana, she loves me. And I love her. But it’s not like, it’s not like I love you. And here’s the thing. I want only you. Not always only you. I love you so much and I don’t know what to do with it. Okay I’m done.”

 

    What brilliance! To have Ilya express his love and literally come out to Shane without the other being able to understand a word of it, but in allowing him to express it on his own terms, in another language, makes it clear that Shane not only accepts the other for who he is, but, in good faith, imagines that his beloved might be expressing his love.* There is no better way to convey the complete acceptance of the other than by the acceptance of another language in which that love might be conveyed. Otherness is the issue here, both in terms of culture and sexuality. Shane abandons himself to both, and Ilya unwittingly or perhaps very knowledgably fills the gap. This tele-conversation expresses not only Ilya’s coming out, but represents a true marriage of sorts, language transforming itself it an abstract vision of what one imagines and expects of the other. And at the same time, we, as representatives yet another variation of lovers in our rose as sexual voyeurs, know a truth which the fictional lover must accept on faith.

     You don’t get many cinematic examples of irony better than this one.

     Yet this episode has far more amazing narrative twists in store to entertain us. If abandoning oneself to the rhythms of a foreign tongue were not enough—a common theme in romance fictions (how many English/German/Dutch/Swedish speaking men and women have been seduced by another figure speaking in the dulcet tones of French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian?) —Shane soon after gets literally knocked unconscious in a Boston vs. Montreal game by a hit from an offense player, symbolically speaking, swooning over the unknowable and seemingly unresolvable events of his life. Ilya, now a committed lover, visits his rival in secret in his hospital bed, from where the still slightly delirious Shane insists he come spend the summer with him at his remote and somewhat isolated cottage.

     In the still frozen isolation of the hockey world, however, such a thaw of secret love may still be impossible.

     That is until…. This episode finally astounds us with the long ago backstory concerning Scott Hunter, who has been moving up as a winning player for the New York Admirals but is hardly expected to win, until he suddenly does. Shane’s mother, described by her husband as a witch, predicts that it’s his turn to win.

    Momentarily celebrating with trophy in hand, Hunter suddenly does something so unexpected that no one, not the broadcaster nor Shane watching his TV, and certainly not Ilya, also catching the last moments of the event might have expected. Hunter, after a victory lap, to suddenly pull apart from his fellow players to signal someone from the stands to the rink.

     It is Kip, Hunter’s lover. But even we, privy to their secret love, can only wonder why is this hockey player calling him to the floor in front of all the news broadcasts, to which now Shane and his parents, and Ilya have grown understandably even more attentive.

     This relationship, unlike that of Shane’s and Ilya’s is a much more traditional gay relationship, with the celebrity having met up with an openly gay man who understandably is impatient for his lover to come out. Obviously, Kip has nothing to lose, and he realizes that, while Hunter has his entire career on the line. But love has found a way, mostly through Kip’s sacrifices, and at that moment everyone is there to witness Hunter’s public outing, his acceptance of his love with open kisses in front of the entire world. Yes, Rose, there is now an out hockey player, a man proud to have found such a beautiful man such as pretty faced-Kip, muscles rippling as if he should have himself been in sports. If nothing else, the “smoothie guy” has talked, kissed, and loved his way into sports history.

      Ilya texts Shane. It’s time for a meet-up at the cottage. Everything has changed.

 

*Since it occurred on the very weekend that I was writing this piece, I cannot help but mention this work in comparison with the fabulous Bad Bunny half-time performance in the 2026 Superbowl. Bad Bunny performed a remarkable medley of hip-hop imbued tableaux vivants of Puerto Rican life entirely in a Spanish-language broadcast the US market, most of whom are English-language speakers, while approximately 13-14% of the population speak Spanish. The remarkable montage of events involving numerous performers, Lady Gaga (who sang in English), Ricky Martin, and the numerous other real-time figures might have easily been translated into English. But Bad Buddy understood that it was a far more significant statement to play it out only in Spanish, forcing US citizens to decide on which side of the divide they stood: people who wished they had the Spanish language skills and felt, nonetheless, in thrall to the imagery and vitality of the work or resentful conservatives angry for even having to bother with facing a language which made them feel like the outsiders the immigrant population has long been forced to perceive themselves. Bad Bunny’s view of America was the total Caribbean and South American universe as opposed to the hostile and singular US States. In this performance the translation was quite purposely withheld for great effect as it was earlier in the scene I’m talking about in Heated Rivalry. The later personal love between individuals, however, was translated but oddly enough only for the general audience, not for the lover himself. The purposeful distancing of language is the theme in both works. What does it mean when communication is withheld? The various feelings of frustration and wonderment is what every US immigrant has had to encounter when entering US shores.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).