Review: Heartstopper, "Secret" | Season 1, Episode 4
With more runway to work with, the aftermath of a kiss becomes more complicated
The back of the first volume of Heartstopper is not worried about spoilers: “Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love.” It’s telling you that this is the story of Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson falling in love, and as a result the way it tells that story treats their relationship as an inevitability even though the first volume ends on a cliffhanger.
By comparison, though, a TV series needs a clearer “engine” to keep you moving from episode to episode, which requires a larger investment in conflict at the core of this story. Thus far, the changes to the story have primarily been about expanding its focus, bringing Elle & Tao and Tara & Darcy into second and third position—which shifts depending on the episode—from a narrative perspective. “Secret” is the first episode where the show leans into the idea that Elle and Tao are indeed the third central “relationship,” for example, as Elle watches Tara and Darcy’s PDA and immediately enters her text chain with her friend that could be something more. That’s all par for the course, and is really just moving forward dynamics that become more prominent starting with Volume 3.
“Secret,” though, is an episode made up primarily of new material, and is consciously delaying key elements of Nick’s self-discovery in order to foster uncertainty within the viewer that the books are largely uninterested in. When Nick shows up at Charlie’s door in the rain in the books, they have their initial download about what happened at Harry’s party, and Nick professes his feelings, but then they dive into a full conversation about it. Nick asks Charlie when he knew he was gay, and as Nick works through his feelings Charlie even raises the idea that he could be bisexual, something that so far the show has resisted. In contrast, the show cuts everything after the initial download, and is using the presence of Imogen to force Nick to actively and prominently realize the “gay crisis” that he acknowledges he’s having. It builds to the moment where he—under pressure from the rugby lads, and with Elle and Tao looking on—agrees to a date with Imogen just after having shared a romantic moment with Charlie in the nurse’s office.
As a critic, I understand why you’d make this choice. In adapting her own story, Oseman dials in on a detail that the books largely gloss over: that, in asking Charlie to keep their relationship a secret, Nick is treading dangerously close to the same situation Ben put Charlie in before. Now, Charlie himself knows that this doesn’t feel the same way, and that Nick is constantly showing how much he cares about Charlie and isn’t just in this for himself. But when Nick and Charlie meet in the art room, the former starts to realize the parallels he’s created, and you can sense how it weighs on him.
And yet there’s also a tremendous amount of pressure from Harry and the rugby team, and when he is literally trapped in the corridor of the stadium with Imogen blocking his path and the rugby lads looking on, he knows he’s doing the wrong thing but doesn’t understand who he is well enough to keep himself from doing it. This isn’t easy for Nick, and that means he’s going to make mistakes, even if we know that he is not like Ben, and even if we still feel—as the back of Volume 1 asserts—that this won’t stand in the way of the love they showed for each other standing in the rain under an umbrella.
However, as someone who relates to Nick in this story, I will say that this episode alarmed me in terms of how it backgrounds the idea of bisexuality and its place in this story. For a moment, I honestly even wondered if it was possible that the show was outright choosing to frame Nick as gay instead, which was an unfair jump to conclusions but one that I feel Love, Victor created for me. Watching that show as a person who identifies as bisexual was infuriating (I wrote about it here), as the show raised the notion of bisexuality but then never once returned to it as its central love triangle—a sexually confused teen, the straight girl he loves spending time with, the gay guy he’s obsessed with—played out in the first season. Bi erasure is a significant enough phenomenon that I could imagine a network note saying that the story would be simpler if they didn’t have to try to explain to people what bisexuality is.
Now, while I grounded myself in the fact that Oseman is adapting their own story and a change of that nature seems unlikely, I do ultimately have some hesitation about what Imogen’s introduction into this story does to the idea of bisexuality. Specifically, there’s this idea that in order for people to understand bisexuality, they need to see someone like Nick “trapped” between both a male and female love interest. One of the things I found refreshing about Nick’s bisexuality in the books is how Oseman doesn’t work overhard to “prove” he still likes girls by giving him someone to crush on. The fact that it never makes him “choose” between men and women allows for a more nuanced discussion of what bisexuality means, without the need for external conflict to drive it. In the books, Charlie and Nick’s “secret” relationship faces challenges as they explore how different their friend groups are, but Nick is mostly able to come to an understanding of his sexuality through self-reflection and his intimacy with Charlie, and not in a manifestation of his “gay crisis” in the form of Imogen and the social pressures around her.
Obviously, the reality of sexuality broadly is that every person’s experience is different, and it’s not like what Nick is experiencing is unrealistic, or that people who are in his situation—read: 16-year old me, should this have existed at the time—won’t be able to see themselves in his story even as the artificial conflict is added for dramatic effect. But it points to how the shift in media carries different demands, and how in a story that deals with such personal issues small changes can nonetheless activate perceived pitfalls of how these stories are told. Imogen doesn’t mean that Nick’s Heartstopper story won’t be as meaningful as it is in the books, but she does mean it’s different, and that difference will be something the story has to navigate more as the plot moves forward.
Otherwise, “Secret” uses the pretense of Nick and Charlie’s rugby match to bring the Truham and Higgs students together for the first time. In a way, this is more structure than the books’ rugby stories ever had, pulling moments from the various rugby scenes but creating narrative elements—a sports-focused school of intense players, the friends looking on—to make it more episodic. It reframes the game as a space where the bubble Charlie and Nick experienced under that umbrella—with the yellow and blue mirroring the sun and rain intermingling in the sky—is absent, something that the books hint at but the show really nails home to emphasize the conflict outlined above. And while my reservations stand, I do think that can still fuel a successful television version of this story, albeit one that I’m hopeful can address the issues of Nick’s sexuality in a more grounded way than a forced love triangle.
Stray (Adaptation) Observations
So while Tara and Darcy aren’t immediately ostracized for making their relationship more public, Elle still overhears a bunch of girls talking about it, and Imogen stands in for the type of attention they weren’t seeking. It’s a stark contrast from how confident they are in the books, but better lets the show explore the varied experiences of coming out, and the long process of accepting the baseline of acceptance offered by different constituencies.
Interesting to see Oseman using what in the books is Tara’s pushing with Nick at the party—noting he’s been hanging around with Charlie, prodding a bit about whether they’re just friends—and instead gives it to Darcy as she teases Charlie, with Nick looking on as Charlie is forced to demure and say they’re just friends. It plays into how Tara and Darcy’s openness was so inspirational to Nick, and how pained he is to see Charlie be unable to do the same in that moment of queer friendship building.
The post-kiss morning was another instance where Charlie’s little brother entered into the story, so it feels safe to say that Oliver Spring does not exist in this version of Heartstopper unless he’s hiding really well. We do see Charlie’s mother, though, if only for a moment.
The most interesting stylistic choice in this episode for me was having Nick get to have another one of Charlie’s nightmare sequences, here imagining Charlie asking to keep their relationship a secret in the same words as he did. It’s a smart choice to sort of bring the two characters’ journeys to a similar stature, which admittedly was a huge part of what the second volume looked to accomplish given its primary interest in Nick’s “coming out” narrative.
Okay, so I was mostly joking when I made a big deal on social media about how the size differential from the books just isn’t possible given Connor and Locke’s respective builds, but I will say that it makes the adaptation of specific frames from the books sometimes seem silly if you don’t know what’s being referenced. The shot of Charlie’s gym socks lifting to his tiptoes during the kiss in his bedroom is an iconic moment in the books, but it makes less sense when we spend so much time watching them stare at each other and there’s nowhere near enough of a height differential to make that necessary. Again, this doesn’t destroy anything, but I do feel like the more the show pretends it’s still a thing, the more it bugs me. But this is, like many things, a me problem. (It’s still a lovely image).
Well, so much for steering around every obvious complication. But I guess the show has to have some conflict.
It looks like Tao and Elle are heading for a romance. That's fine, but I kind of wish they'd resist the urge to pair everyone off.