Posted by
Candy
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2025/12/heated-rivalry-season-1-episode-4-recap-its-the-tuna-meltdown/
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?p=164402
Hello, butts I mean sports fans!
Episode 5 of Heated Rivalry is nigh, and you know what would be fun?
Reliving the trauma of episode 4 together!
Here’s a handy-dandy recap of all the major events of the previous episode, just in case you, unlike me, haven’t rewatched this episode every day until you’ve had every agonized expression memorized.
Here’s my recap of episode 4 of Heated Rivalry:
God these stupid horny boys, they’re so fuckin’ awkward and so gone for each other, they’re trying their best I GUESS
Oh no they’re being too cute, they’re—ILYA why are you SAYING IT THAT WAY ugh, they—hrrmmm, okay, OH DAMN Shane you horny goblin
OK we’re going there, I didn’t think they were gonna show that on TV???????
all right all right okay oh boy FIRST NAMES, it’s about to go down, be cool BE COOL you remember the book you’ll be fine be cool be COOL
no no no oh god, nope NOPE NO I’M NOT FINE, NO COOL, COOL GONE, OH SHIT OH FUCK ARGH AFDLASDLALJFD;LKKJSFDKJLAKSJDFLKJAHFDSJLKNLBFLMV WHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTT oh my god OH NO oh god the LOOK on his FACE oh shit oh fuck oh NO OH NO OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Hollander he said Hollander aaagghhh
Aww Rose is super adorable actuall—oh shit oh no Marleau NO don’t—ah fuck fuck FUCK too late fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no noooooooooooooooo his FACE aahhh my baby, argh why is it getting worse whyyyyyy
Oh no the club, ugh pain, so much pai—wait what the fuck WHAT THE FUCK
YOU’RE USING THIS SONG
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL RIGHT NOW, THIS SONG????????????
AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH their faces
why are you hurting meeeeeeeeeeee
whuh
what
Jacob Tierney you’re really gonna do—
This shot is INSANE
WHAT
OH MY GOD that’s the end that’s
THAT’S THE END?????????
~ Fin ~
Ha ha just kidding, that’s not fin, and I’m not fine. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from the unfathomable amount of psychic damage this episode has inflicted on me. Because I’ve read the book twice, I thought I’d be braced for what would go down, except ha ha ha I wasn’t, I really really wasn’t. This episode goes unbelievably hard and I made noises like a dying whale the entire time.
For fans of the book, a few key events in Heated Rivalry have gained mythical significance. Invoking these events wields the same power as a magic incantation or a secret agent activation phrase. One of those is named after a goddamn sandwich. Whisper tuna melt, and watch people break down before your eyes.
So for those of you who are seeing the story for the first time—ha ha welcome to hell. Prepare to enter a heartbroken fugue every time you see a tuna melt on the menu—or hear “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u, but then again, that’s just the default state for queer folks who came of age in the 90s and 2000s.
Fine, Candy, you say, but you’re almost 400 words into an alleged review, and what we’ve had so far is mostly garbled screaming.
I’m trying, okay! Just. I’m still trying to scrape myself off the floor.
So. Fuck. Okay. *slapping cheeks briskly* When we last left Shane and Ilya, the boys were struggling; Ilya had ghosted Shane for six months before they reunite for a fraught hookup with scorchingly hot yet impersonal sex— this Reddit post has an incredible close read of that scene. In the elevator down from Ilya’s penthouse hotel suite, Shane types, then deletes, with agonizing slowness, “We didn’t even kiss.”
What a hell of a note to end on! Absolutely nobody was okay after episode 2!
Which makes me laugh now. Ah, how I long for the level of not-okay I was after episode 2. I think back to the me who had finished episode 2 and go oh, you baby. You sweet summer child. You had no concept of true suffering.
But I get ahead of myself.
Episode 4 picks up shortly after episode 2, in the summer of 2014, giving us a montage that covers two years. Were the events at the end of episode 2 addressed in any way? Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha. Like fuck. These two dingdongs don’t know how to talk! If you gave them a choice between talking honestly about their feelings and stepping barefoot on a hornet’s nest, well, have the Benadryl and cold compresses ready.
The montages in this show do a lot of work—they mark not only the passage of time, but the progression of Shane and Ilya’s relationship—and the montage in this episode is masterful. There are the flirty texts, which we’ve come to expect, but also shots of Ilya slamming Shane into the boards at a game that melt into Ilya slamming into Shane in bed.
This one is NSFW, so be ye careful.
The entire show, in a nutshell:
Their lives fall into the rhythms of the hockey season. They text, they hook up, they text some more. Shane captains the Metros to a cup victory, and Jacob Tierney, a comedian who understands the power of a good callback, shows Ilya witnessing Shane’s triumph with a soft smile on his face—a parallel to Shane’s face journey as he watches Ilya do the same in episode 2.
Shane watches Ilya hoisting the MLH cup in victory
And Ilya watching Shane doing the same
(Did you know, by the way, that when Ilya hoists the cup over the head, he’s screaming “For you, mom!” in Russian? Good luck feeling normal ever again! I’ve been lying on the floor weeping ever since I learned this two weeks ago. My spouse is beginning to worry about the water damage. It’s fine! It’s totally fine!)
They text and hook up and text some more. When the Metros win the cup again, we see Shane’s teammates going apeshit, jumping and laughing and spraying each other with champagne in the locker room, while Shane is…texting?
“Lucky” reads the text from Ilya.
“The luckiest 
” reads the text from Shane.
“WHARRRGARBL WE FUCKING WON!!!!” scream Shane’s teammates, or at least I’m assuming that’s what they’re screaming, because they’re normal dudes having a normal reaction.
They text more and more and more. In fact, they’re constantly on their phones. Working out? Gotta text. At the club? Gotta text. In fact, Ilya gives the go-the-fuck-away eyebrows at a hot girl who approaches him because he’s utterly enthralled by the most boring man in Canada.
Shane’s not doing any better. At the dinner table? Gotta text. Working an ad shoot? Gotta text. Shane Hollander, a man completely consumed by perfectionism, good manners, and an ironclad work ethic, is texting at work.
I think these guys might be, as the kids call it, down bad.
Shane and Ilya text each other so much that their friends notice. Svetlana probes Ilya about his years-long relationship with Jane; Hayden, who’s tried fruitlessly to hook Shane up with his wife’s friend, teases Shane about Lily.
“THIS MEANS NOTHING,” scream the two men for whom this years-long relationship means everything.
And then we get to the infamous tuna melts.
Tierney signals that we’re in danger from the very beginning. For one thing, the hookup that precedes the tuna melts is the first that takes place in the daytime, and the lighting is gorgeous. Everything looks warm; everything glows. It looks downright romantic.
For another thing, Shane shows up at Ilya’s house. Not a hotel, not the condo that Shane specifically bought for fucking Ilya. This isn’t neutral ground. Ilya has chosen to invite Shane into his inner sanctum, and Shane has chosen to accept.
They fuck (vigorously); Ilya asks Shane to stay the night (sincerely); Shane says yes (a little abashedly). This entire sequence is devastating. The golden light covering the two of them; the delighted look on Ilya’s face when Shane agrees to stay; the affectionate little kiss he gives him.
This is fine! We’re all fine!
They settle in for a cuddly little nap, then wake up and head downstairs for a snack. Ilya offers to make a tuna melt with studied casualness. (I want to know what Ilya’s backup plan would’ve been if Shane had been like, ew gross, I don’t like hot cheese on my tuna. Probably he would’ve made an Ilya-shaped hole in the wall as he took the most direct way out.)
Ok, Ilya.
Sure, Ilya, you were just gonna make yourself a snack, offering to make one for Shane has zero significance 
From this point on, Ilya is solicitous to the point of hilarity. He gives a ginger ale to Shane, and then asks him if it’s cold enough, which. Ilya. Babe. We all know the truth: you’ve had a twelve-pack of Shane’s favorite ginger ale sitting in your insanely expensive beverage fridge for weeks now. I get that you’re trying to play it cool and be like “oops just tossed it in the fridge when I remembered you were coming over, hope it’s cold enough!” but literally nobody is fooled except Shane, the most oblivious man in Canada.
When they move to the couch to wait for the tuna melts to finish, uh, melting, Ilya puts on a hockey game, and then proceeds to try and find out if a) Shane is gay, b) dating someone else, and c) whether he likes Ilya, because Ilya sure does like him. He does this in a very cool and suave manner, which consists of telling Shane about how much he loves Svetlana and how important she is to him, but you know, not like that, so, you know, he wants to look for someone who can give him something more. He sends a series of sultry and adoring looks at Shane to underscore this point.
The face of a man who has very normal feelings about his worst hockey rival
They do nothing. The looks bounce off Shane like bullets off Wonder Woman’s bracers.
(I could write a two thousand-word essay on this entire conversation and the way they sit, but this recap is already unhinged. That’s because I’m unhinged.)
And then the timer for the tuna melts goes off; when Shane moves to get up, Ilya says “Stay, stay,” in a tone that somehow sounds exactly like every Chinese auntie I’ve ever known.
“You’re a guest here,” Ilya says with every gesture. “I like you. Stay. With me. Please.”
Meanwhile, Shane is sitting there like the world’s politest little man, a slightly befuddled look on his face. I’m still on the floor, my puddle of tears growing with every excruciating moment.
Because it’s not just that Ilya is providing cover for himself by being roundabout—it’s that Shane has no ability to understand what Ilya is trying to get at. Above and beyond Shane being bad with subtext, he also has no context for the kind of queer friendship Ilya and Svetlana have. Nobody has ever shown him the type of radical acceptance Svetlana has for Ilya—a crucial piece to Ilya being as at ease with his bisexuality as he is, in my opinion—because it’s never occurred to Shane that it’s an option.
As wounded as Ilya is by the toxic perfectionism and shame and emotional abuse of his upbringing, he has someone who knows him for who he truly is, whereas Shane has been locked in a bariatric chamber labeled HOCKEY IS MY LIFE since he was a child.
As they finally eat their tuna sandwiches, Ilya attempts a direct question: does Shane like girls? Shane says yes with the enthusiasm of a kid being asked if they liked school today and know that there’s only one correct answer.
And then Ilya does it. He finally comes right out and says “I like you.” Sure, he precedes it with “I like girls” and follows up immediately with “not as a person, of course,” but he says it. He says the words. He lays it out there. Ilya makes eyes. Shane starts to make eyes back.
And then Ilya’s father calls.
Building tension thoroughly broken, only to be replaced by much worse, much less sexy tension, these horny idiots still manage to salvage everything after Ilya hangs up. They cuddle, except Shane, who is god’s own horniest gremlin, Starts Some Shit, and whoops, before you know it, they’re frotting—or, as Hudson Williams calls it, double-jerking.
I’m not especially prudish, but seeing this on TV, in the context of a love story, was startling. When Ilya spits into Shane’s palm—look, I don’t have pearls to clutch, but if I’d had some on hand, I would’ve clutched them so hard they would’ve broken. It’s so dirty and matter-of-fact and pornographic (highest compliment); sex scenes on TV are either glossy and gauzy (e.g., Bridgerton) or grimy “realistic” depictions of sexual assault (take your pick from a depressingly long list). This sex scene belongs in a completely different category.
It’s also the most intimate of the show yet. The two of them are bathed in golden light, and as the action heats up, the camera moves in closer and closer, until all we see are Shane and Ilya’s faces, panting and mouthing each other frantically. There are suggestive gestures and sounds that tell us what’s happening, but the focus is very much on the pleasure the characters are experiencing, and their loss of control.
And then it happens. Ilya calls Shane by his first name as he orgasms. And Shane calls Ilya by his.
The next few minutes would’ve been the most excruciating minutes of TV I’ve ever watched, except it’ll be thoroughly topped 20 minutes later, because Jacob Tierney is 
talented . Ilya is practically purring in bliss—like, fine, he accidentally laid all his cards on the table, but his beautiful oblivious boring man reciprocated the gesture…and then the other shoe drops. Shane develops a case of the cold feet—you can see the gay panic dawning in his eyes as he sits in Ilya’s lap, Hudson Williams does an incredible job here—and he jets. Connor Storrie does an equally incredible job with Ilya; the look on his face as he slowly realizes that Shane is running, he’s really for real literally running away, and there’s nothing Ilya can do, is devastating.
Never has anyone saying 'Hollander' induced a complete mental breakdown in me but here we are
At this point everyone watching is screaming, crying, throwing up, but don’t worry, it gets worse!
A few weeks later, Shane is invited to an after-hours event at a fancy restaurant where he meets Rose Landry, mega-star of the popular X-Squad (lol) franchise. They immediately hit it off. Shane is adorably star-struck. Rose, whose star power far exceeds his, is clearly into him. And like the deeply closeted bozo (affectionate, but also a little derogatory) that he is, he decides okay, yeah, here’s a woman he can date.
The press, of course, immediately finds out. Paparazzi snaps flood the gossip sites and airwaves. Ilya’s teammates immediately show him the pictures while making incredulous, derogatory remarks about Shane’s ability to pull such a hottie, probably expecting their captain to get some hits in.
Sorry, lads, Ilya can’t talk right now. His heart’s just been nuked from orbit.
TFW when your hookup of seven years says he likes keeping his love life private, and then you see his love life splashed all over Page Six
Months pass. Boston and Montreal play against each other again. Shane’s phone buzzes in the locker room pre-game, but instead of Ilya, it’s Rose. They have a cute exchange about meeting at a club after the game; when they’re done, Shane pulls up his Lily/Ilya chat, looks at it for a long, telling, heartbreaking moment, then closes it out.
The Metros barely squeak out a win. Shane and Ilya carefully avoid looking at each other; their tension is so palpable even the commentators note the lackluster performance from the two captains.
Things fall apart; the center(s) cannot hold. Back in his hotel room post-game, Ilya decides that he’s done with moping. He needs to get laid! Put away that room service menu, loser, we’re going dancing!
I’m sure you’re going to be shocked to learn which club Ilya ends up choosing.
This entire sequence is an exercise in tension and agony, all made worse by Tierney’s choice to use t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.” We’ve been completely flattened already from the pain; why not finish us off by smacking us with the gay pining anthem of the early 2000s?
I’m in serious shit, I feel totally lost
If I’m asking for help, it’s only because
Being with you has opened my eyes
Could I ever believe such a perfect surprise?
Killing us would’ve been kinder, probably.
Shane and Rose hit the dance floor. Any viewer with an ounce of genre awareness is sweating heavily, waiting for Shane and Ilya to spot each other. And then it happens: Ilya bellies up to the bar, where he recognizes Miles, Rose’s friend and castmate for X-Squad, and slowly realizes they’re in the club together. Ilya, refusing to be one-upped, finds a hot girl and begins to make out with her.
Shane, in the meanwhile, spots Marleau and Ilya’s other teammates, and experiences the same needle drop. As he makes his excuses and walks away from Rose, he finds Ilya. Their eyes meet. They stand across the room and watch each other as the music throbs and the lights flash, frozen and unable to bridge the gulf that’s cracked open between them.
It’s a nightmare mirror of the “Clearest Blue” scene from Heartstopper. You see your beloved across the dance floor and have a revelation, except instead of happiness and hearts opening up, this is nothing but pain and heartbreak.
The camera begins cutting between Shane and Ilya gazing (gayzing?) at each other wordlessly across the dance floor with two post-club scenes: Shane and Rose having sex, and Ilya masturbating in a glass-walled shower. The most shocking moment of the show happens now, when Ilya turns around, slams a forearm against the shower wall, and with the camera tight on his face—looks right at us. There’s so much fury and longing on Ilya’s face that it’s genuinely hard to watch; I only made it through this scene by peeking between my fingers.
We cut to Shane in an almost identical shot: his face takes up the entire screen, and he’s staring into the camera, too, his expression hazy, dissociated. We flip rapidly between Shane and Ilya in this posture as they approach orgasm, and then…
The episode ends.
Anyway if you heard a bellowing right around 9:45 PM Pacific / 12:45 AM last Friday, that was everyone watching the new episode collectively losing our minds.
With every episode of this show I become more impressed—and terrified, frankly—of Jacob Tierney’s prowess. He continues to refuse to spoonfeed the audience, and is willing to use every single tool at his disposal to externalize the internal in clever ways. He does so much with the way he positions the characters, and with parallels. Early on in the opening montage, for example, we see Shane and Ilya making out at the bottom of a staircase, unable to take their hands off each other.
Shane: This is your brain on sarcastic Russian men
Contrast this with how Shane behaves with Rose at the end of the episode: she shrugs off her dress before walking up the steps naked except for a thong, and you can see Shane visibly steeling himself.
Shane: This is your brain on compulsory heterosexuality
And the closing shots—I’m still thinking about the closing shots. They’re so clever. Tierney can’t put little thought bubbles above these two idiots’ heads to show us that they need to think about each other in order to come, so what he does instead is have the two actors stare into the camera with unnerving intensity as he alternates them. And right as they climax—end scene.
I won’t even go into the endless amount of detail lavished on this show: the way Shane never gets a ginger ale this episode except at Ilya’s; the massive array of parallels, not just within the episode, but between different ones (Ilya makes a joke about how he’s lazy and Shane tells him he doesn’t see that at all, which stands in stark contrast to Ilya’s father in episode 1); the way Rose’s leopard print dress when she first meets Shane is echoed by Ilya’s shirt in the club scene. Every time I re-watch, I spot something new.
It continues to tickle me that this show is directed by the Letterkenny guy, but then I thought it through, and you know what? It makes sense. Who better understands the value of tension, buildup, and catharsis than a comedian? Also, moving from slapstick, which is all about timing your action perfectly, to sex, which is much the same thing, is a smaller step than you’d think. Like, it doesn’t seem like it, but the ability to build tension and the sense of timing that gave you the “yes yes yes yes YESSSS” scene in Letterkenny is absolutely what you need to direct a romance adaptation full of yearning and sex.
The Director of Photography, Jackson Parell, also deserves immense props. The show is shot thoughtfully and stylishly; every scene is framed to show us where Shane and Ilya stand in relation to each other, or to other people. In the sex scenes, they’re as close as it’s possible to get; in this episode’s dance floor scenes, they’re so far apart the camera can’t capture them in the same frame. These visual cues communicate a wealth of emotional detail to the audience: warmth, distance, longing.
And of course, the actors. I’ve already sung my praises of Storrie and Williams’ performances in detail; each episode only makes me more and more impressed. The attention to detail Storrie pays to Ilya’s Russian roots continues to floor me—the way he counts to two in the tuna melt scene (he starts with his pinkie!), the way he gestures with his hands when he’s talking to his father on the phone. Whoever does the Russian culture consulting for this show deserves an award.
Heated Rivalry is one of the best TV shows I’ve watched this year, and it’s far and away my favorite. I still can’t believe that a romance novel adaptation is this good; it shows you what can be achieved when the showrunners respect the material, stay true to the story, and commit to the bit. I cannot wait for episode 5.
Big massive thanks to Candy for yet another wallbanger (lol). You can stream Heated Rivalry on HBO Max and on Crave.
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2025/12/heated-rivalry-season-1-episode-4-recap-its-the-tuna-meltdown/
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?p=164402
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This week we are talking with Shana, Sue, and Rhonda about book recs and wishes, plus fantasy and magical bureaucracy, grief in romance, schtupping by volume, and inventions for readers to find even MORE books.
Happy Wednesday!
