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How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future
The revenants of Star Trek’s past inform where it’s going — and that might be a good thing.
Published on February 18, 2026
Credit: Paramount+
Credit: Paramount+
Grab your raktajinos, activate your spoiler warnings, and take your seats, cadets; class is now in session! What class, you ask? Maybe Advanced Subspace Geometry? Perhaps Xenolinguistics? No, it’s something even more exciting… Cultural Criticism! Specifically that of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his notion of hauntology. Admittedly Derrida can be a tough read but, broadly speaking, hauntology (which is a pun: “haunting” + “ontology”, the latter being, well, the study of being) offers a framework for understanding how big and transformative ideas, though they may seem defeated, never really go away.
Hauntology is the kind of philosophy—or cultural/literary criticism more broadly—which can often sound like science fiction (ontological shock at disharmonic anachrony, anyone? Wasn’t that an episode of Voyager?!). It comes complete with its own technobabble, canon of texts, and occasional reboots or retcons, as well as its own very niche, very passionate fandom. These days it is often interpreted as an inability to imagine a future (partly but not exclusively on account of how influential British academic Mark Fisher deployed the term) but that reading is more applicable to, say, a prequel series such as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
In the case of Starfleet Academy, however, we find something which is both much closer to Derrida’s original conception of hauntology as well serving as a toolkit to help us unlock the deeper themes behind the show: a series of metaphorical ghosts which emphasize vital connections between the past, the present, and the future.
Essential to this is how Starfleet Academy takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known as The Burn, a disaster which has disarticulated the narrative of the franchise’s storyworld. The Burn is a literal historical rupture which has left time, to quote Derrida quoting Shakespeare, “out of joint” (for Derrida, “time” here broadly encompasses “history” among other things). In fact, spacetime itself has been left out of joint after The Burn in a manner extensively explored on Star Trek: Discovery.
On that series, the largely collapsed Federation is reintroduced as a specter without a body, a quasi-secret concealed behind a distortion field whose representatives are rare and frequently intangible (consider the holographic Starfleet officers glimpsed via recordings in the episode “Su’Kal”). After The Burn, the myth of progress and forward momentum (particularly that of the Federation) has been left askew. The galaxy is thus haunted in this era. It is haunted by the lost idea of the United Federation of Planets (something we see throughout Discovery’s third season in particular, especially through the eyes of characters such as Aditya Sahil).
However, if much of Discovery was about mourning the Federation, Starfleet Academy is about rebuilding it (that’s right there in the imagery of the opening credits). Because here the revolutionary idea of the Federation comes back. Though of course it has, technically, already come back by the end of Discovery, so Starfleet Academy essentially begins with this specter returning again (which is very Derrida; it’s a notion he derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
As such, the narrative gestures of Starfleet Academy are largely resurrectional in nature. The most obvious example is how the USS Athena’s arrival at Earth—and so the institution’s physical return to its old campus in San Francisco for the first time in over a century—is depicted as a significant moment of rebirth (as, for that matter, is the emergence of new Academy buildings from the ground in the title sequence). But, more than these visual cues, it is among the teaching staff of Starfleet Academy that we see the greatest hauntological energy.
Here we find a preponderance of specters in the Derridean sense, what the philosopher calls “revenants” (a term which he borrows from folklore and meaning a returned spirit or resurrected corpse). And while we could get bogged down in differentiating specters from spirits or from ghosts (in any event, all true Star Trek fans know that ghosts live in candles), that’s not strictly necessary to appreciate what’s going on here. It is perhaps more illustrative to picture Derrida’s go-to example of a revenant in literature, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the kind of urging figure which, as academic Kathy Shaw says, “confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation.” Which is to say that such characters, and Academy has an abundance of them, typically call on protagonists to put things right.
Doing this, Derrida says, asks characters not just to “learn to live with ghosts” (a reasonable description of the post-Burn era), but to speak of them, to them, and with them. This is something which Starfleet Academy cleverly literalizes by marshalling a variety of common science fiction tropes—the alien, the time traveler, the hologram, and even the ascended being—in order to depict multiple avatars of the Federation’s golden age (as well as some of the franchise’s most significant iterations), all without the concept becoming repetitive.
We can in fact arrange the show’s characters on a spectrum of revenants in fascinating fashion. On the most straightforward level, Captain Ake is a 420-year-old educator who was there centuries earlier when Starfleet was “at its best” and who still remembers how the Federation used to be (this is, in fact, why she is tasked with the role of Academy chancellor). Half-Lanthanite, Ake is said to experience time differently from other humanoid species. She begins the series by coming back to Starfleet (again we see the Derridean return) after leaving the organization for fifteen years on a matter of conscience.
While she may not be of the show’s present (or, at least, not entirely of the show’s present), Ake actively shapes those who are about to come of age in that present (with her cadets further symbolic of the future-to-come). She is, to take a big hit of Derrida, a “disjointure in the very presence of the present, [a] sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself.” As such, Ake embodies what academics such as Shaw see as the “dual directions of hauntology”: both the presence of the past and the anticipation of the future. The perspective which this provides the character is crucial in setting the tenor of the Academy. Her resulting idiosyncrasies grant permission for the next generation to live life joyfully and messily (#TeachableMoments).
Next on our hauntological spectrum we find Commander Jett Reno, who jumped almost a thousand years into the future aboard the USS Discovery in that series, and so is a revenant who begins by physically/temporally coming back from the past (“I should not be here,” as she says in her introduction). Entirely in keeping with the franchise’s tone, she attributes her return to the laws of physics rather than something supernatural as in Derrida’s examples (that said, she almost immediately asks cadet Caleb if he’s ever seen a ghost, flagging up more traditional conceptions of haunting). Reno so, in addition to supplying deadpan humor, brings to the Academy a lived experience of the Federation’s early years.
Further along the spectrum again we come to The Doctor. This character’s return is more metafictional in nature (and more substantially so than, say, Reno’s): a return to the franchise after his time on Star Trek: Voyager in the late 1990s (and a return rehearsed more recently on the second season of the frankly wonderful Star Trek: Prodigy). On Starfleet Academy, The Doctor serves as a witness to seven hundred years of galactic history. As a hologram, he already exhibits a spectral incorporeality (Caleb’s hand passes through his arm in their first encounter) but he doubles down on that here with a tendency to “pop in now and then” by appearing out of nowhere (or, if you prefer to see him in the fashion of the Derridean revenant, “one cannot control [his] comings and goings”!) Where Reno lived through the first century of the Federation and Ake lived through its collapse, The Doctor represents a broader experience of its ups and downs throughout a great sward of the human calendar’s third millennium.
Nonetheless (and please remember your spoiler warning!), Starfleet Academy’s truest revenant must be Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko. In the episode “Series Acclimation Mil,” Sisko appears but does not appear. He is both present and absent. He is simultaneously dead (in the Fire Caves of Bajor) and alive (assumed into the Celestial Temple). Though not a member of the teaching staff, the character is a tangible influence on cadet SAM in particular (“completely changed me, my whole life,” she says). Sisko further displays the paternal quality of the revenant which Derrida draws from Hamlet. He is the avatar of the father, or the “Anslem,” that being the Bajoran word for “father.” This is of course literal in the case of his son Jake—who here manifests in revenant-adjacent holographic form—but also, metaphorically, in the case of the equally holographic SAM who looks up to the elder Sisko as a role model.
Yet what further elevates Sisko on the revenant spectrum is the unreality of his presence (helped, perhaps counterintuitively, by Avery Brooks’s retirement from acting). Sisko’s image is prominently displayed on the screens in the Academy classroom as one of the unexplainable mysteries of the last thousand years, however, as with Hamlet’s father, we never see his face. This is a rights issue, surely, but it is used smartly by the show’s creators. By essentially shrouding Sisko’s face in shadows, the character appears to look out from the screen at SAM (and, to an extent, at the audience) without himself being seen in much the same way the ghost of Hamlet’s father looks out from behind the visor of his armor. The revenant therefore observes without being observed in a way which prefigures the spectral suggestion of Sisko’s face in the clouds over San Francisco at the end of the episode.
Of course, in Derridean fashion, the ultimate revenant requires a scholar—as Marcellus calls for in the opening scene of Hamlet—in order to interpret the specter. But, crucially, Derrida maintained that the scholar, who he characterized primarily as an observer or a recorder of events, may not the best person to speak to the specter (“It is offended,” Marcellus remarks of Horatio’s failed attempt to speak to the ghost; “’Tis gone and will not answer”). Thus Illa Dax, the Academy’s professor of the unexplainable, literal witness to Sisko’s life, and another candidate for revenant (on the spectrum somewhere between Ake and The Doctor) is able to guide SAM in her investigation; however, it is only SAM herself who can successfully speak to Sisko as she is revealed to be doing in the episode’s final moments.
In this way, Illa Dax is emblematic of how, together, the Derridean “radical untimeliness” of Starfleet Academy’s various revenants challenges the cadets to understand the Federation’s past as a stepping stone to imagining a new version of its post-Burn future. The show’s young characters are thus called upon, as Derrida and any number of temporal agents might have it, “to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history.” The show’s rhetorical strategy is to tackle this in a manner which, in the best spirit of science fiction, prompts audience reflection upon the ills of our own world. In such a light, Ake’s assertion that democracy “lives in continuous action” certainly hits home in the present moment.
Hauntology therefore reveals itself as a powerful theme for Starfleet Academy, one particularly apt in this year of Star Trek’s 60th anniversary (the new celebratory intro which debuted at the start of Academy episodes is just one signifier of this). It is obviously not the only way to interpret the series, but watching Starfleet Academy through this lens makes visible deeply embedded storytelling elements and techniques which, in the longstanding tradition of Star Trek, resonate with our real world (such as how The Burn serves as a stand-in for any number of hugely disruptive twenty-first century events).
Applying some of Derrida’s ideas to Starfleet Academy is thus both a fun thought experiment and an unexpected means of appreciating the decisions behind why many of the show’s characters were chosen to begin with. Fittingly, it also asks questions of us, the viewers and fans, about how we see the connective narrative tissue between the past and the future. It offers a different way of thinking about a different type of Star Trek, one which has been created to reflect the anxieties which haunt our present day. Indeed, just maybe, it is an illustration of why Starfleet Academy is the Star Trek we need right now.[end-mark]
The post How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future appeared first on Reactor.
seattle, wa
Edited by Sam Thielman
I THOUGHT IT would happen after the next round of scheduled talks and Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio's announced trip to Israel. I woke up to learn that I fell for the ruse.
To say the first thing first: This is dying-empire behavior. The bellicosity of the late-phase Ottoman Empire comes to mind. But we're in no danger from breakaway territory, nor have we missed out on a leap in military technology, though the economic foundations of the country display atrophy. Dying is not the same as dead. I'm not trying to predict where we are on a trajectory of historical collapse. I'm only pointing out that launching an unprovoked war to overthrow a longstanding enemy under cover of negotiation to resolve a pretextual crisis is the sort of aggression typical of empires in, at a minimum, steep decline.
Overthrowing the Islamic Republic addresses none of the compounding social and economic crises the United States faces. Accordingly, from a certain rot-at-the-heart-of-decisionmaking perspective, such a war looks like an opportunity, in the sense that it defers addressing such crises.
The next thing to say: This is an unambiguous aggression by the United States and Israel. Trump spoke of "imminent threats from the Iranian regime." There were none. Out of one side of the warmongers' mouths comes the satisfaction that Iran has difficulty projecting power after the 2024 Israeli decimation of the Resistance Axis and the 2025 Twelve-Day War. Out of the other side, this claim of imminence that no one believes and no one, certainly not Trump, devotes much effort to presenting as believable. Already the Israelis have bombed a girls' elementary school—not the only school they hit today—and killed dozens. That's not what you do when you face an imminent threat. That's what you do when you want to seize a sick opportunity.
While the bombs fall on the regime and its opponents alike, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu say that they come as liberators. Only they won't be the ones who do the dirty work. "The time has come for all sections of the people in Iran… to remove the yoke of tyranny… and bring a free and peace-loving Iran," al-Jazeera quotes a statement from Netanyahu. "Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands."
In 1991, as the First Gulf War entered its terminal phase, President George H.W. Bush told the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When they did, Bush realized he would be stuck occupying Iraq if he aided them, so he didn't, and the regime held on through massacres.
This morning, Trump sounded even less concerned with the fate of the people he was encouraging to join his war (even as his allies bombed their children's schools). He told the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the rest of the Iranian security apparatus it could have "complete immunity" if it puts up no resistance—a contradiction, as this is the regime's apparatus of domestic repression; but more like a tell that the Iranian people's desires are irrelevant.
"To the great, proud people of Iran: I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand… Bombs will be falling everywhere. When we finish, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations," Trump said. "No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. Let's see how you respond."
Let's see how you respond.
The U.S. and Israel may have started this war in Iran but already the war is regional. Reprisal attacks are hitting everywhere from Bahrain to Kuwait, targeting at first the U.S. military presence in the region, and will likely spread to Iraq. My older daughter spoke this morning with a friend in the region. The little one was heading into a bomb shelter.
Congress did nothing here. There was supposed to be a vote on the Ro Khanna-Thomas Massie War Powers Resolution next week. Congressional lethargy, which conceals political comfort with the war, provided time for Trump to ignore Congress entirely. I am not making a process critique. I am pointing out that this march to war was deliberate enough for politicians to have attempted to obstruct it and they did not. That is yet another sign of a necrotic political system and symptom of a dying empire. It's a sick joke that Dario Amodei speaks about America's democratic values and its authoritarian enemies.
So, congratulations to generations of American and Israeli warmongers. You worked tirelessly to seed the bed for today. You made sure Bush's son in 2002 rejected Iranian pledges of assistance with the War on Terror. You demanded time and time again that the U.S. military expand the Iraq occupation to attack the Iranians who exploited it to facilitate attacks on U.S. troops. You ginned up crisis after crisis over Iran's nuclear program, and then rejected the 2015 diplomacy that verifiably ended it. You pretended that Iran was not the ground force that kicked ISIS out of Iraq under American air cover. You lied relentlessly and unconvincingly when insisting that you did not desire war. You did the same sort of thing the last time you got the war you wanted, which was Iraq, and which was an epochal disaster—the sort of epochal disaster that many people figured would spell your political marginalization.
But because there were never any consequences for it, we are right back here, only worse now. Will there be consequences for the warmongers this time?
WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! IRON MAN VOL. 1: THE STARK-ROXXON WAR, the first five issues, is now collected in trade paperback! Signed copies of that are at Bulletproof, too! And IRON MAN VOL. 2: THE INSURGENT IRON MAN is available here!
No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.
And you can pre-order Friend of FOREVER WARS Colin Asher's new book, The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, at this link!
seattle, wa
Transgender residents of Kansas have received letters informing them that a new state law requires them to forfeit their driver’s licenses if they include a gender marking that doesn’t match the sex identity they were assigned at birth. Kansas House Substitute Bill 244 changes the state definition of “gender” to mean a person’s “biological sex at birth,” a definition that is rejected by many…
absolutely horrifying
seattle, wa
After I made some fun of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for putting his two twentysomething sons in charge of financial behemoth Cantor Fitzgerald, Andrew Gelman and Mark Palko reminded me that they have been waging a lonely fight against the whole theoretical concept of “meritocracy” for many years now.
Back in 2007, Gelman noted that James Flynn — the discoverer of the Flynn effect in re IQ scores — had pointed out why the concept is itself practically incoherent:
[Flynn] summarizes some data showing that America has not been getting more meritocratic over time. He then presents the killer theoretical argument:
[quoting Flynn]: The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
Gelman translates this into straightforward practical/political terms:
Basically, “meritocracy” means that individuals with more merit get the goodies. From the American Heritage dictionary: “A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.” As Flynn points out, this leads to a contradiction: to the extent that people with merit get higher status, one would expect they would use that status to help their friends, children, etc, giving them a leg up beyond what would be expected based on their merit alone.
In other words, a class-based society in which merit is the defining characteristic of class status is ultimately an oxymoron, practically speaking. Individuals may have to a greater or lesser extent themselves “earned” their power and privilege via their own “merit,” but they inevitably use their power and privilege to favor their families in particular, and their friends and fellow network members more generally, because that’s the whole point of having power and privilege in a hierarchically stratified, aka class-based, society.
Twelve years ago Palko pointed to what I’m going to call “soft” nepotism, which is probably much more prevalent than the crude nepotism of for example Donald Trump’s imbecile sons being rich and famous people:
The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there’s one paragraph I’d like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.
[Quoting TNR] After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.
The soft nepotism here is that there’s no reason to doubt that that this prodigy of successful networking is talented and hard-working, aka Full of Merit:
You’ll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being “ambitious and hard-working,” and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.
Soft nepotism is absolutely endemic to the American version of meritocracy. Basically it works like this: almost everybody who goes to HYPS these days or similar (Williams, Swarthmore etc.) is very smart and very hard working. You do still get occasional instances of crude nepotism, like Charles Kushner straight up bribing the Harvard Corporation to allow Little Jared to attend its college, but for the most part entrance into these places is quite meritocratic, in the sense that the relevant filters are for ability rather than familial status. But the problem is that those filters themselves are reflections of the ability of people from the Right Families to manipulate the system, so that Connor and Maddie can get in, via their individual “merit,” that has been excruciatingly cultivated from birth by their parents. Lauren Rivera’s great bookPedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is a fascinating ethnography of exactly how this kind of “merit” works, and work it does.
This is all related to what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” The idea that talented and hardworking people are scarce is just facially preposterous if you say it out loud, which is why people generally don’t. An exception that I find particularly amusing is The Atlantic magazine’s EIC, Jeffrey Goldberg, who had this to say a few years ago when he was trying to explain/rationalize why so few Atlantic cover articles were written by women:
It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
Goldberg’s job, as he sees or at least saw it, is to nurture the extraordinarily rare woman journalist who can be transformed into someone who has The Necessities (h/t Al Campanis) to do something like create a unified field theory of physics write an Atlantic cover story. As I commented at the time:
The merit myth exists to justify the maintenance of extremely hierarchical anti-egalitarian social structures. If there are 10 or 100 or 1000 times as many people who have the ability and desire to, say, write cover stories for prestigious magazines, or to attend hyper-elite colleges, or to be captains or at least lieutenants of industry, or to be good Supreme Court justices, or to star in a Hollywood movie, or to write the Great American novel, as there are social slots available for people to fill these roles (and there are), then you’ve got to create sorting mechanisms that give the impression that these slots aren’t being handed out arbitrarily, or worse yet on the basis of pre-existing social privilege.
That’s where Jeffrey Goldberg and his search for ultra-rare gynecological journalistic muscles comes in.
Goldberg’s mission, as he understands it, is to perform the extraordinarily difficult job of finding people who can write good Atlantic cover stories. He thinks this job is hard because there are so few such people. It is a hard job — but for exactly the opposite reason. There are enormous numbers of extremely gifted hard-working creative etc. American journalists out there, many of them working for nothing or close to it, for reasons that are too obvious to belabor.
All this applies equally to actors, writers, aspiring disrupters of the market for whatever, potential HYPS undergraduates, and so forth.
It’s a big country. So what to do? The answer is you come up with a bunch of largely phony metrics for sorting out sheep of supposedly unicorn-like rarity from the vast multitudes of goats.
These include things like whether somebody has a degree or preferably degrees from super-elite educational institutions; whether somebody is related to somebody already in the business; whether somebody seems “polished” enough to make clients comfortable, etc.
The merit myth is critical to the maintenance of our phony meritocracy. Gelman’s and Palko’s related points is that meritocracies must inevitably be phony, at least on their own ideologically self-justifying terms, given the way that social power and privilege actually work.
And the underlying historical irony here is that, before it became a term of approbation, “meritocracy” was coined by academics who were using it derisively for pretty much these very reasons.
The post The varieties of nepotistic experience appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Take the Fire Out From the Wire: Imagining a Future in Heated Rivalry
How can we find a path forward after the cottage?
Published on February 23, 2026
Credit: Sabrina Lantos / HBO
Credit: Sabrina Lantos / HBO
“I’m coming to the cottage”
Five words that broke the internet when spoken by Connor Storrie’s Ilya Rosanov at the end of Heated Rivalry’s immaculate fifth episode. Spoilers for the first season follow: After years of fighting the deeper feelings underneath his sexual relationship with hockey arch-rival Shane Hollander, Ilya’s decision to accept Shane’s invitation to his cottage is a definitive moment of hope for what might be possible between them in the future.
Suffice it to say that since Canadian showrunner Jacob Tierney brought the characters from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers romance series to screen, the concept of the “the cottage” has sustained its fan base through the tumultuous weeks at the start of 2026. I can definitely confirm my mental health is hanging by the thin thread of a group chat named “Stupid Canadian Wolf Birds.” I will also confess I’ve taken no shortage of delight from scandalizing students at the college where I am chaplain when they hear that the priest is obsessed with the “gay hockey show.” Far from being a guilty pleasure, however, I honestly believe Heated Rivalry is a piece of media we desperately need right now, and one which resonates deeply with my own faith.
As an avid romance reader, one of the things I have appreciated about Tierney’s approach to the source material of Heated Rivalry is the respect shown to romance as a genre. Tierney understands romance as, essentially, a kind of fantasy. It is a credit to Tierney’s writing that he does not dismiss the female fans of romance (including of M/M romance, which is a larger and nuanced conversation). At its core, the idea of “the cottage” serves as a metaphor for that escapist fantasy. Such escapism has a place, certainly, within genre fiction. We might ask though, if such fantastical escapism is all the cottage has to offer us? What if we view “the cottage” not just as representing idealized escape from the world, but as defiant hope for what the world might become?
It is worth noting that the promise of escape and a fantasy where he and Shane can be hidden from the world is not initially enough to get Ilya to accept the temptation of “the cottage.” Shane in his delightfully drug-induced state (as we have no doubt seen enacted by stuffed animals and household objects thanks to the wonders of TikTok) tries to lure Ilya not to return to Russia for the summer but come to his secluded cottage: “We’ll have so much fun. It’s so private. No one will know … We could have a week or even two. Completely alone. Together!” While Storrie portrays Ilya’s hesitation quite clearly, the book is able to go deeper into Ilya’s fear of accepting Shane’s invitation. Up until this point, Ilya and Shane have stolen only moments together. Ilya has at long last accepted the depth of his feelings (even confessing them to Shane, albeit in his native Russian). Despite this, Ilya does not believe any real future with Shane is possible. He hesitates to accept the prospect of this extended time together because he does not know how to return to the scarcity of what they can have moving forward. Ilya is actually prepared to end his relationship with Shane altogether because the pain of a clean break feels more endurable to him than the pain of longing for an impossible future.
So what gets Ilya to the cottage? The original “Game Changer,” Scott Hunter. Without a doubt one of the best scenes in the show happens after Scott wins the 2017 Stanley Cup for the New York Admirals. At this point, Scott has been in a secret relationship with his boyfriend Kip for years (in the show’s timeline). After hoisting the long-desired cup over his head, Scott watches—alone—as his teammates’ wives and children pour onto the ice in celebration from the stands. Meanwhile, the love of Scott’s life sits far removed among the crowds. Scott realizes that hiding his love from the world is no longer enough for him. He calls Kip down onto the ice, where they share a kiss that can only be described as triumphant defiance. As Scott and Kip embrace, the camera circles them, cutting away to show Ilya and Shane each watching from their homes in wonder and confusion. Caught up in this moment, Ilya calls Shane with his declaration of coming to the cottage.
The background musical sections throughout Heated Rivalry are worth a whole separate series of reflections. Setting Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything” to underscore this moment, however, was a particularly inspired move by Teirney. Choosing to believe the world can be different than what it is in itself is often a leap of faith. Acting on that hope—and indeed believing we deserve that better world—is where change happens. Ilya’s decision to accept Shane’s invitation to the cottage is not about realizing he loves Shane or he is willing to risk two weeks of privacy. Accepting that invitation—declaring “I’m coming to the cottage”—means that Ilya is willing to risk that the world might be different than he has let himself believe.
The defiant hope that ends Heated Rivalry’s episode 5 is inarguably inspiring. Hope is not an abstract ideal, though. Living into hope does much more than giving us as individuals the courage to seize opportunities for ourselves we had not thought possible. Living into hope is transformational in a way that we might call contagious. Scott declares his love for Kip and kisses him in front of thousands of people because he has decided for himself that he is tired of living in the shadows and that he does, in fact, deserve sunshine. That choice, however, catches on. Unknown to himself, Scott inspires Ilya to hope for more in his own relationship and seize the opportunity before him. Book readers of the Game Changers series will know that Ilya goes on to become something of a Nick Fury for other queer players in the NHL. He makes appearances throughout the other books, encouraging others to pursue relationships and, eventually, recruiting other players to coach at the charity hockey camp he and Shane run in the summers. While Unrivaled, the final book of Rachel Reid’s series, is not yet out, the synopsis certainly suggests we will see this community come together to withstand the bigotry and homophobia of the hockey world. The series is called “Game Changers” for a reason.
It is important to note that Jacob Tierney is a gay man who has adapted a work written about gay male characters originally written by a woman. Without doubt, his identity impacts the hopeful vision of what the world might look like in his TV adaptation. Speaking of triumphant and emotionally cathartic kiss between Scott and Kip, Tierney noted in a recent interview: “I mean, this was—you know—this was the point. This was to give people this moment that you don’t get when you’re a kid. You don’t get this.” Indeed, we might argue that far from simply being “smutty” the explicit content in Heated Rivalry serves as an unapologetic, defiant embrace of sexuality and intimacy on behalf of the queer community.
One of the most impactful added scenes in the series takes place between Shane and his mother after Shane’s parents discover his romantic relationship with Ilya. While Shane is racked with guilt over years of hiding and lies about his secret relationship, it is Shane’s mother who tearfully apologizes: “I’m sorry I didn’t make you feel like you could tell me.” Tierney’s vision of how a parent should react to discovering an adult child’s closeted sexuality may be idealized compared to how such a situation all too often plays out. At the same time, isn’t that idealized conversation what we want the world to be? Isn’t that how a parent should respond?
Similarly, we might look at how Tierney strengthens several of the side characters from the source material (notably the women). While Rose’s role in both the book and the series is largely responsible for Shane finally embracing and coming to terms with his sexuality, Tierney gives significantly more agency to Svetlana, who goes from being a semi-regular friend with benefits situationship with Ilya in Boston to a childhood friend from Russia. Svetlana perceptively notes Ilya’s long-term texting relationship with “Jane”, and she clearly indicates she is aware of “Jane’s” true gender. Svetlana pushes Ilya to take steps forward in emotional intimacy with “Jane”/Shane, first in the ill-fated tuna melt encounter, and later in nudging Ilya to acknowledge the depth of his feelings. In another critical moment, Scott Hunter finds himself challenged by Kip’s friend Elena who confronts him about hiding Kip away as a “dirty little secret.” There is a fair criticism to be made of Elena’s challenge to Scott on Kip’s behalf – no one should be pressured to come out before they are ready. No doubt, though, Teirney intended the words he wrote (which differ slightly from the book) to carry the very true, hopeful message that Kip “deserves sunshine … and so do you.”
Tierney is quite intentional in linking the sunshine we all deserve to the themes of hope and possibility of the cottage itself. Numerous commentators have rightly pointed out the contrast in lighting between the first episodes of the series and the finale at the cottage. Shane and Ilya share their first hook-up in a darkened hotel room. When they finally reunite in Shane’s cottage, Ilya makes a point of opening the blinds to Shane’s bedroom, allowing themselves to experience sexual intimacy in open daylight. The fact that Tierney so blocks both scenes almost identically allows the contrast in lighting to be even more apparent. While the cottage constitutes removal from the distractions and barriers to their relationship, the cottage is also where Shane and Ilya are able to embrace concrete possibilities for their future. Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his ten-year plan for how they might one day be in a relationship. Ilya takes the risk of confessing his love for Shane—in English this time! Once Shane and Ilya have acknowledged their feelings, Tierney offers us the beautiful scene of the two of them by the lake as the sun rises in front of them. The light of the cottage is the light of one day no longer hiding but living in the sunshine.
Media like Heated Rivalry may be escapist fantasy at its core, but at its best it is a fantasy of the world that so many of us wish we were living in. Rather than lamenting the current state of the world, it’s worth asking: what is the world that we want to see? What is our role in bringing that world about—either by claiming defiant hope for ourselves or fighting for a better world for one another? We end season one of Heated Rivalry riding off into the future with Shane and Ilya, after they face the revelation of their relationship to Shane’s parents. The cottage has not magically solved their problems. They are still closeted publicly and their future will hold oncoming challenges. Nevertheless, the cottage has given them the courage of their love for one another—not to mention acceptance from Shane’s parents. The cottage has given them hope beyond the (perceived) security of secrecy.
As we move further into 2026 and away from the original air date of Heated Rivalry, a running joke among the fandom is how long we will stay in the collective Heated Rivalry psychosis. How long do we keep “re-heating” (a great term for just continuing to watch the series on repeat). When will it be time to leave the cottage and return to reality? Perhaps the answer is that we shouldn’t leave the cottage. Perhaps our job is actually to expand the cottage and work to make the world a place where the escape to the cottage is no longer necessary.[end-mark]
The post Take the Fire Out From the Wire: Imagining a Future in <em>Heated Rivalry</em> appeared first on Reactor.
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