Review: Heartstopper, "Promise" & "Challenge" | Season 2, Episodes 3 & 4
Alice Oseman resets the plot to land the much-anticipated Paris trip in line with the comic
By the time we reach “Promise,” Nick’s coming out journey has been mostly a positive experience: outside of his brother, everyone’s been fairly supportive, and Heartstopper has created a culture of authority figures like Ms. Singh who are clearly not going to accept any type of harassment should he experience it.
However, that doesn’t make it easy in the way that Nick imagines it might be. He spends the entire episode struggling to tell his rugby mates—well, his rugby mates that have stopped being friends with Harry—the truth about him and Charlie, again unaware that they already know and are just waiting for him to tell them about it. Nick and Charlie are hardly being subtle, but when the second one of the trio suggests they’re “really good mates,” it activates the defense mechanisms Nick naturally reverts to, painful as they might be. Because while he might not owe the truth about his sexuality to anyone, he believes that he has promised Charlie that he would come out o…