Hi and welcome to K Let's Talk, the podcast where we breakdown
storytelling across books, television and film with a
special love for book to screen adaptations.
Here we talk about craft, character arcs, structure,
dialogue, visual language, and the creative choices that shape
how a story lands. If you like thoughtful,
conversational, deep dives into the stories you can't stop
thinking about, you're in the right place.
Let's talk. Hello everyone, and welcome back
to the podcast. This week I'm so excited because
we are doing another heated rivalry Q&A and I have some
great questions this week to discuss with you all and talk
about in detail. So I'm just going to jump right
into it. There are a handful here.
I tried to lay the mountain away where we talk about them and it
flows into one another. There are a few hockey specific
ones. There are a few pertaining to
Season 2 and then another one that kind of ties into a greater
theme of Season 1. So lots to dive into, plenty to
sink our teeth into, and hopefully you'll have some
commentary around it. And leave me a comment because
I'd love to chat with everybody and get to hear their thoughts.
So without further ado, let's dive into this week's Heated
Rivalry Q&A. So this first question I was
very excited to talk about. I actually got Adm and I had a
discussion with this person person in the DMS and then I
asked if I could talk about it on the podcast in greater detail
and kind of flesh out my opinion so it says hi Kay, I've listened
to all your podcasts and I've enjoyed them so much.
Please keep them coming. I have a question.
Or maybe it's more of an observation.
It seems odd to me that when Shane proposed his plan to Ilya
about leaving Boston to play for Ottawa, at no time did they ever
have a conversation about what that would mean for Ilya's
career. They never discussed or even
simply acknowledged the fact that Ilya leaving Boston would
completely implode his career. We do not find out until the
long game just how bottom of the barrel at Ottawa is, but they
would know that. It seems that Shane might have
said, I realize what an astronomical sacrifice this
would be for you and that you would be giving up so much, but
at least we can be together. To me as a generational player
at the top of their game, this is something that they should
have acknowledged. It feels like a complete
omission that they didn't. Thoughts.
So I have lots of thoughts actually on this and I'm excited
to touch on it. So when I was breaking down my
answer to this, the biggest thing that I found to be the
crux of this argument or the angle that this person is coming
at is how hockey functions so differently in each of these
characters lives. So Ilya in particular, his
identity was never wrapped up fully in hockey.
It was very much a way for him to escape his dad and Russia,
but as a person he was never fully in love with hockey
emotionally. Like Shane.
I would say structurally though, his life is very much built
around hockey, but that's more because of the nature of the
sport itself, less so by choice. And that's not to say he doesn't
care about hockey, because we do see how him not winning wears on
him during the long game because he is a competitor and that
doesn't change when he goes to Ottawa.
But the way hockey is positioned in his life is entirely
different than how Shane views hockey in his own life because
Shane's identity is hockey. And that distinction leads to
this sort of how could they not understand each other moment
that we get to see play out in the long game.
For Shane, hockey is the framework through which he
understands himself. He learned what it means and
feels like to be legitimized through hockey and as a sport.
It also has taught him what it means to be disciplined, how to
belong, and it shaped his value system.
And so his entire life is built around his hockey achievements,
his hockey legacy, his consistency as a player and
obviously all of his accolades too, because those serve as
external proof for him. Because as an Asian player in a
sport that's predominantly white, he would have had to be
undeniable every step of his career.
And that would have been something that becomes
psychologically necessary for him.
Because for Shane, his statistics and the legacy and
the accolades that he has that protects him in a way from
racism, or at the very least provides him the feeling of
safety from it. And it also serves as evidence
of his legitimacy and belonging in a space and a sport that
typically does not allow space for him there because it is such
a predominantly white sport that is already heavy before you even
introduce him being gay. So you can understand why he has
such this interesting dichotomy between being a hockey player
and wanting to fit in. But then at the core of
everything, he knows he never will.
And it helps us understand why his sort of immortality within
hockey matters so deeply for him, because I think it's so
tied to his own self worth, because to him, his
accomplishments and his statistics are the only thing
that he has to justify all of the sacrifices that he's made.
To be a part of this sport that. Has long made him feel excluded.
Ilya didn't build himself in the same way.
He doesn't need hockey to exist. To him, the sport provided him
freedom and money and cars and the ability to move away from
Russia and his father and not have to depend on him for
anything anymore. But it also gave him Shane, and
he recognizes that too. So for him, he gets more
fulfillment out of his connections with people and less
so out of his accomplishments. And it's why we see him in the
other book of the series interacting with these other
characters. It's because Ilia likes people
and the connections he can build with them.
So in the long game, Ilia doesn't have hockey.
And he is sad, yes, but that's also because he doesn't have
Shane or a community or any outside connections.
And so we're most of the time the argument is made that Ilia's
unhappiness is framed around him being demoted to Ottawa.
I would say most of his sadness is actually over not having
Shane, being isolated from people and obviously his
undiagnosed depression. The hockey component is last on
that list. And it's not until he and Troy
and Harris start to build a friendship that we see things
start to shift for him. And then it shifts again when he
goes to therapy, and it shifts again when we see him starting
to connect with his team mates again in the locker room and be
a better captain. And so Ilya is often viewed as
someone who goes around identifying all these queer
characters and making connections with them because
they're queer. But Jacobs pointed out in an
interview that I think really encapsulates nicely Ilia is just
an empathetic person and he connects to people on an
emotional level and figures out what's troubling them as a
human. And when he connects with people
emotionally like that, it's largely over shared experiences
or traumas, like in the situation with Troy where they
are able to connect over their fathers.
And that trust that he builds with Troy over that leads to
Troy coming out to him on his own.
The same happens with Ryan Price and Ilya's ability to notice
that hockey doesn't make him happy anymore and creating that
safe environment for those people to open up to him.
The queer part is secondary to their human struggles and Ilya's
desire to help them with those. And so his connections always
supersede that person simply being a teammate or another
player. He wants to connect with people
on a deeper level, and we see that with Troy and it brings him
more fulfillment in his life. That fills the gaps when Shane
is not around him. And I think it's normal that
people are shocked that Shane is the one to suggest Ilya throw
his career away in the 1st place and that.
He would be. In denial over what he's asking
him to do. Because if the roles were
reversed, asking Shane to go to a lesser team would be
unfathomable to him. He would say no because he wants
to win cups and Shane thinks Ilya does too.
Because at that point in the story, they've still not talked
about how they truly feel about hockey.
It is a monumental thing to assume Ilya will agree to this
plan. Obviously people are wondering
how he could come to this conclusion and think it's fair
because if Ilya were to ask this of Shane, we all know he would
Mull over it and question why he would even ask him to do that in
the 1st place. And that does come up in the
long game when Ilya tells Shane that he had already chosen him
and it had not even registered to Shane yet.
What a huge sacrifice Ilya had made for them when he left
Boston and goes to Ottawa. I think Shane views this as a
practical decision and Ilya recognizes that it's quite
literally him rearranging his entire life for Shane.
But if you dropped Shane in Ottawa, he would not have the
same struggles as Ilya because he's from there.
He has a structural support system that he doesn't even
realize Ilya does not have. And Shane is not the social
person that Ilya is in Montreal. He does not have what Ilya has
in Boston. He would not languish in the
same way with that social isolation.
So Shane cannot conceptualize how hard it actually.
Would be for Ilya. And he's also unaware that Ilia
is struggling with depression and isolation because Ilia
doesn't tell him anything. Counterintuitively, hockey is
more important to Shane, but he does not thrive off of
recognition in the same way that Ilya does he Ilya thrives off of
personal connections more than career achievements.
Meanwhile, Shane can continue on and function better because he's
still in Montreal and he's sustained by his achievements in
hockey in a way that Ilya has never been sustained by hockey.
Shane wins his third cup in the year between heated rivalry in
the long game and Montreal is still winning all through the
long game. And so if his personal life with
Ilia feels like it's in shambles, he can still function
because his professional life is going well.
And so when this all transpires, I think Shane has tunnel vision
because on the couch he needs to find a solution to Ilio marrying
Svetlana. And so his tunnel is from the
couch to we'll figure something out.
And then he figures this out and then Ilia says yes.
So there isn't a lot of thinking about the big picture
implications in that moment. It's very much a matter of him
finding some sort of solution to their problem right then and
there. And he can't conceptualize that
there is more to this than just checking off that box, because
this, to him, is the the easiest and quickest way for the two of
them to see each other more, and that is his priority.
And now that they have both had a taste of what it feels like to
be together, Shane wants to find any solution he can to preserve.
It. In a lot of ways, Ilya leads
Shane to this plan because he tells him he wants to be on a
Canadian team. So that already narrows things
down to seven teams to choose from.
And then he eliminates Montreal right off the bat.
And they both know that they don't want it to be a Western
Conference team because that would mean that they would only
play each other twice a year instead of four times a year.
That's something that's more fleshed out in the books and not
brought up in the show. So essentially that leaves you
with Toronto or Ottawa, and Ottawa is closer and within
driving distance. So after Ilya spends all day,
and it's actually a few days in the books heavily implying what
he wants, Shane comes to the conclusion that he should play
for Ottawa. And that's not a stretch by any
means. He basically hands Shane this
decision on a platter, and then Ilya says, OK, so in reality,
it's kind of both of them coming to this conclusion, even though
it feels like it's Shane coming to this conclusion on his own,
laying awake all night thinking about how to solve their
problem. And I think the fact that Ilya
leads him to a very narrow option for them is such a huge
component of this argument. That Ilya truly does not care
because this is now 10 years in the making almost and.
Shane is all he wants emotionally.
So when Shane finally says that he wants to be together, I
think. Ilya would go literally anywhere
if it meant that he gets to have Shane and for him their.
Emotional connection is what he needs to survive more than he
needs hockey, so he will put himself in any position
necessary in order to facilitate that.
And that is what Ilia signs up for.
Because even at the table with Shane's parents, Ilia is not the
one saying that they're going to wait.
To come out after their careers are over.
So that is another piece of this part of his misery, which is
that Shane is still so restrictive after the fact.
Even when he moves to Ottawa and he's made the sacrifice and it's
made him more. Isolated than he was before, he
didn't realize that that was part of this gamble because all
he cared about was having Shane and there really aren't that
many real world examples of players leaving a team like
Boston and going to a lesser quality team.
I would say the only one I could come up with was Johnny Hockey
when he left Calgary and he went to.
Columbus because he wanted to be closer to his family and he
essentially downgraded teams in order to put his family in a
better. Position logistically and and he
liked that club, but. The difference being he didn't
stay in his own conference and. So I think it's like a really
interesting thing to think about a player like Sidney Crosby or
Alex Ovechkin leaving the Pens or the Capitals to go play for a
division rival, lesser team because the public opinion would
be so negative and confused. And again, there's not a lot of
modern examples I can think of where people are choosing to go
to. A-Team like this, a lot of the
times they're traded there, but it's it's not a choice like
this. And I also think about Brad
Marsh and when he was traded from the Bruins and he was our
captain. That was horrible.
As a Bruins fan, we were up in arms at our management and upper
management for that trade. And it was very much framed like
we were removing a limb from his body.
He did not want to leave Boston. That's sort of what it would
feel like in this scenario if Ilya Rosen of your captain.
Actively chose to not even do contract negotiations and stay
and went to a division rival and is playing against Boston 4 * a
year. It would just be very confusing
for everybody. And again, I think that it's
such a great literary device, as someone who understands hockey,
that she's put these characters in this position because it.
Really, really would be highly controversial for everybody
involved. I think this leads us really
effortlessly into the next question I got, which is, is it
normal for someone to become a captain so young because in the
book Shane and Ilya were teenagers?
Is it because they are centers? How does that work?
I I really liked this question as a hockey player myself
because I think this is a topic of conversation that has
actually come up quite often in the hockey world pertaining to
the ages of captains, because captains traditionally are
veteran players. But it's becoming more of a
trend that younger players are named as team captains.
And there's a lot of back and forth over this because being
named captain of your team is very important.
It's a hugely defining moment for a club because the selection
can have a direct effect on the team's performance.
And the captain is a reflection of the room.
And in many aspects, it's also a reflection of the franchise.
And so captains traditionally can be named by popular vote,
but sometimes they are chosen by management, or sometimes they
can be named because of seniority or loyalty to the
team. And those types of situations
you're sort of immortalized by being named captain.
But other times, the franchise will choose someone they see as
their franchise player, which is another way of calling someone
their star player or their player of the future for the
team. And a lot of times that person
is who they select in the draft. So when you select a draft pick
in the first round, that player sometimes can jump right up into
the NHL right away instead of going to the minors for a few
years to mature. Those players are often
considered generational talents, like Shane and Ilya are in the
book series. And it's very difficult to be 19
or 20 and play in the NHL, not only because of your relative
size playing against men, but also the speed of the game is
such a big transition for a lot of players and it takes a while
for them to become accustomed to the pace.
So when a team has a player like Shane or Ilya who is capable of
playing in the league right away, but then is also
successful right away, they've selected that player knowing
that they will be building their roster around that player for
years to come. And a player like that is
considered a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to trying
to win a Stanley Cup. So decisions for the team are
being made with that player in mind and putting players around
their star in order to give them the best chance of winning.
The closest example I thought might be easy for people to
understand, at least in the more modern era of hockey, is Connor
McDavid, who is actually one of the players that Hudson himself
has cited that he used as inspiration when building the
character of Shane. And Connor McDavid is the
youngest named captain in NHL history.
He was 19 years, 266 days old when he was named captain of the
Edmonton Oilers, and he is still the captain of the Edmonton
Oilers. And he is largely considered one
of the greatest players of all time.
So definitely a generational talent, much like Shane and Ilya
are depicted as. And if we use him as a means of
comparison, to put it in perspective, he was granted
what's called exceptional player status in 2012 by Hockey Canada,
and that actually allowed him to begin playing junior hockey at
age 15. And so that status basically
allows skilled underage hockey players to enter into the major
Junior League earlier than they naturally would.
But there's only been nine players as of 2024 who have been
granted that exceptional status and he's one of them.
Connor McDavid was selected first overall by the Edmonton
Oilers in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft and he joined the Oilers
in their 2015 sixteen season. He ended up getting hurt.
He was out for three months and he was still named to the NHL
All Rookie Team and was a finalist for the Calder Memorial
Trophy, which is the Rookie of the Year trophy.
When he signed in July of 2015, he signed a three-year entry
level contract with the team and the total for that deal was
$11.3 million and he had up to 3.75 million annually in bonus
incentives. So that's if you score this many
goals or have this many points, you get bonus incentives.
That next season he was 19 years old and the Oilers named him as
her captain. And like I said, he's been their
captain ever since. He had 100 points in his 201617
season. When he was aged 20, he became
the second youngest player to win the Art Ross Trophy, which
is the trophy you win when you lead the league in scoring.
He was also awarded the Heart Memorial Trophy, which is the
MVP of the regular season for the whole league.
He also won the Ted Lindsay Award, which is the MVP of the
league as voted by the NHL Players Association, and he was
also selected to the NHL First All Star team.
Does that sound familiar to anyone?
In terms of youngest players to ever be named captain, like I
said, Connor McDavid is the youngest at 19 years, 266 days.
The next one is Gabriel Landiscog.
He is from the Colorado Avalanche.
He was 19 years, 286 days old. Sidney Crosby was 19 years, 297
days old when he was named captain of the Pittsburgh
Penguins back in 2007. There's also Vincent Cavalier
and Jonathan Tapes. The youngest player to win the
Stanley Cup as captain was Sidney Crosby.
He was 21 when the Penguins won in 2009.
I would say that this new trend of young captains is more so
from the 2000s on. It was not this way in the 80s
or the 90s. Just to give you a little more
information on kind of the nature of captaincy in the NHL,
the captain is the only player allowed to speak with the
referees about rule interpretations if they're not
on the ice, though at the alternate captain can do that.
He's also the person that would convey any of the players
concerns to management. He is considered the
representative of the team to the general public.
They would often be associated with the team's social functions
or raising money, doing any sort of philanthropy work.
They are present for any sort of on ice or off ice functions that
the team puts on, award presentation, ceremonial, face
off, things of that nature. An example, I would say, of a
team building around their franchise player is Connor
Bedard, who plays for Chicago. He's someone who they threw all
their chips at and named him captain right away.
And that's a lot of responsibility to give someone
who's that young and doesn't necessarily have any experience
in the league. But we don't know how the rooms
are managed because I think there's this unspoken rule that
your captain is your leader, but there's also a lot of veteran
players that might not even have a letter that can be very
outspoken and lead in their own ways in the locker room.
This new trend, I think, is largely brought on by management
teams who really want to make these franchise player the face
of their team, and they flash that franchise player around to
make themselves more alluring and enticing for other players
to come and play on the left or the right side of the franchise
guy. But it also makes it so that the
guys who are alternate captains can be more leaders behind the
scenes. There's also situations like
what happened with Quinn Hughes, who was the captain of
Vancouver, and he actually left Vancouver even though he was
captain to go to Minnesota. So he left a team in the Pacific
and went to a team in the Central.
So again, different than what Ilya does.
He left his division. He's not playing in the same
division that he left as captain.
But a lot of times naming a player as captain, if they want
to leave, they'll find a way out of their contract.
And so management naming people as captain, it's not necessarily
a way to entice them to stay, even though it is considered a
really great honor to be the face of a franchise.
Those guys are going to go where they're wanted and they're going
to go where they're taken care of.
And so you can have captains leave a franchise if they're
unhappy. A lot of times you'll see teams
name the best player on their team as the captain because it's
sort of this unspoken rule. But I don't necessarily think
that should always be the case. In a lot of instances, it's
still what happens. It's not always the person who
has the most sway in the room or is the most heavily respected.
It kind of feels like this is very much just a new trend from
management teams. But on the flip side, of course,
it's a role that comes with a lot of responsibility and
pressure too. And we see that in the long game
for Ilya because he's the captain of a team that's losing.
But we also see it for Shane when he's leading Montreal his
whole career on a team that's winning.
There's a lot of things that come packaged into being a
captain and being a good captain that I don't think the general
public sees or would be aware of.
This next question is male hockey culture feels borderline
cruel given that Shane only gets two weeks off a year when player
plays through broken bones and plays injured in the playoffs,
that also feels cruel like how Ilya played through bruised
ribs. Is there any sort of physical
culture associated with hockey? So hockey is a notoriously tough
and physical culture, especially at the professional level, where
playing through injuries is often seen as part of the job or
even a badge of honor. During the playoffs in
particular, players routinely will compete through injuries
and pain, and it's like how we see Ilya playing with bruised
ribs in the show. In the NHL, many players play
with fractures, torn ligaments, they can dislocate things,
they'll get stitches, they are missing teeth.
And those stories are often celebrated publicly afterwards.
Once a teams eliminated from the playoffs, there's actually a big
reveal of all the injuries each player on the team had sustained
sustained during the series. At the same time, it does raise
fair questions about whether the culture can become unhealthy or
overly demanding. And this is reiterated in that
second part of the question, which pointed out that Shane was
given limited time off in the offseason by saying he gets two
weeks off per year. I think this is indicative of
the pressure players may feel to prioritize team success over
their own long term health, potentially.
There's definitely an ongoing conversation in sports around
where the line is between toughness, expectation and
player well-being. And hockey culture is kind of
its own beast, so I also don't think that players view it as
making a sacrifice in the same way that outsiders might in any
elite sport. But hockey, especially playing
through pain, is deeply embedded into the culture, and I
personally experienced that in women's hockey as well.
The mindset that you have is that you want to compete at the
highest level and win and you will do whatever you can to stay
on the ice. It's also another huge aspect of
hockey culture and example of how deeply team oriented the
sport is because hockey players are conditioned from a young age
to think about the group and the team first and not the
individual. So when guys play hurt, it's
often not because they feel exploited too, but because they
genuinely do not want to let their teammates down and they
want to contribute however they can.
In hockey especially, there's a mentality that everyone is
sacrificing something for the team, whether that's pain or
exhaustion or just your personal comfort level.
That mindset definitely feels like it's part of the identity
of the sport and I get that how to outsiders it can look very
extreme, but within the culture it feels like part of your
commitment and loyalty to your team and the expectation of
doing everything possible to help the group win.
That's a given. So that doesn't necessarily mean
the culture is always healthy. There are definitely
conversations now about long term player Wellness and whether
athletes are being pushed too far, but at the end of the day,
they do have team doctors and medical staff who evaluate
injuries. But if a player lies, or if the
player insists that they want to be out there, the doctors and
the trainers will do what they can to assist them in that.
So many players will get a cut on the ice, they'll go in the
locker room, get stitches and be out there the next shift.
That's not something that they're feeling forced to do
emotionally. It's genuinely a part of the
identity and mentality that they've grown up with from a
very young age. And As for the time off in the
show, Shane says he only gets two weeks off per year.
NHL players typically get three to four months of offseason,
which is, you know, mid-May to September depending on if you go
into the playoffs or not. But this is rarely true rest
because they still need to train daily.
They still need to stay in shape or get stronger or recover from
injury that they sustained in the regular season.
For characters like Shane though, he also has a lot of
obligations through his sponsorships and brand deals and
stuff. So when he talks about taking
those into account and only having two weeks off a year, I
would say that his work is not strictly training.
It also includes any sort of work with those brand deals.
Personally for me, while playing in college, we had our regular
season, then we would have one week off, and then we would
start our spring workouts. That week off was something we
were told we had, but it was sort of an unspoken expectation
that you shouldn't take it off. So we would train all spring
with our weightlifting workouts since the ice was taken out of
the rink. And then all summer we had our
lifting schedules and workout plans that we were expected to
maintain before we came back for testing in the fall.
A lot of this is not strictly enforced, but it's something you
uphold yourself because as a player, you know that in order
to be better the following season, you have to put in the
work during the offseason. And I would not say this is
exclusive to hockey, but really to any athletes at the
collegiate, semi pro or professional level who truly
want to be the best. They just know that that's what
it takes to get there, and your time is a sacrifice that you
make in order to be great. This next question made me
laugh. It says in episode 3 when Scott
and Shane talk. Scott spits on the ice and Shane
spits back. Is that a part of hockey
culture? So some things that look strange
or even gross to people who are outside of the sport, like
spitting on the ice. It makes me laugh because I
almost don't even notice it anymore.
And I'd say yes, this can be tied into the culture in a
similar way to baseball players chewing on gum or sunflower
seeds. They're often spitting on the
ice, spitting over the bench, spitting on the bench.
In that scene, they both spit onto the ice.
And while I can see how it may look like Scott spits at Shane,
I never read it that way myself. He's bent over very out of
breath, breathing heavy. When you skate like that and
play in a game like that and have a hard shift, a lot of
times your spit can get kind of heavy in your throat and I think
a lot of guys just spit it out. They also have half Shields on,
so that makes it easier to do that.
I personally never spit, but that's because I find it gross.
But I also had a full cage in front of my space so if I were
to spit it would probably hit the cage anyways and that's
disgusting. But yeah, just like any high
endurance sport when you're breathing heavy, a lot of people
find that they have a buildup of spit sometimes and they just
spit it out onto the ice. Especially since the rink is
cold. So imagine running outside in
cold air. Your body itself is never cold
because you're exerting so much energy and you're sweating, but
the air in your lungs is cold because of the temperature of
the rink. And there's also a lot of times
where players will squirt their water into their mouths and then
spit the water back out onto the ice.
I think sometimes it's because you don't want to drink too much
water and get a cramp, so you spit it out.
I've seen a lot of my teammates do that.
But sometimes it's also just to flush out your mouth.
So I don't think it's unique to hockey.
I think there are people. Who spit in a lot of sports?
But yeah, as someone who's played, I can understand how
players would get in the habit of doing it just given how your
throat can feel after a really long shift or a really long
game. Like, it totally makes sense to
me that there would be a build up of it.
All right, This question is, what are your thoughts on Jacob
announcing that a majority of an episode will feature Mozart's
Requiem? I can't wait to talk about this.
I was thrilled that he said this in an interview.
And I wanted to give a little bit of context into Mozart's
Requiem because it's actually a very fascinating piece of music.
And historically, there's a lot of really cool nuance facts
about it that I think people might be interested in.
So Mozart's Requiem and D minor is a really interesting piece of
history, mainly because of the circumstances surrounding the
piece itself. So in 1791, Mozart was
commissioned to write a Requiem mass for a nobleman, and
evidently the man that commissioned him was known for
paying the composers to write the music and then claiming the
music as his own later on. And at the time that Mozart was
commissioned for this piece, he was ill and he became very
consumed by the work once he began.
And according to his widow, he began to believe that he was
actually composing the music for his own funeral, which is very
ominous considering he died at age 35 before he was able to
finish it. The fact that it was unfinished
actually became part of the lore, and Mozart fully completed
only a few sections of the score and had left bits and pieces
like vocal lines and sketches for the rest of it.
And so he had a student named Franz who completed the piece
after Mozart's death, so that the man who commissioned it
would be able to pay Mozart's wife, Constance for it.
And to this day, there's still a lot of debate over exactly how
much of the final version was truly Mozart's work and how much
of it was his students, because Mozart did not complete the work
himself. A lot of historians actually
feel like the Requiem has a sort of haunted quality to it, not
only because of the the subject matter it's dealing with, which
is death, but listeners also know he died while writing it.
So that adds to that haunted quality.
The song that's probably the most famous is Lacrimosa, and
it's tied to that same sort of mythology because Mozart only
had completed the 1st 8 bars of that song before his death.
And that song sort of like haunts the narrative in many
ways over time. There was a lot of storytelling
behind the work that I think has become more romanticized in
large part through film and fiction.
A lot of people depict the story as though the work sort of
psychologically taunted Mozart into writing his own funeral
mass. That notion has been disproved.
But I think that stories and lore like that have very much
made the Requiem itself and each of the songs within it have this
very deep association with obsession and mortality and
doom. And it's a big reason why a lot
of film makers and television creators use it so often,
because it has an instant effect.
When you hear a lot of the songs from the Requiem and the notes
from it in particular, I think even audiences who don't know
classical music can feel through its sound that they're meant to
evoke certain emotions. While listening to the Requiem,
the notes used throughout it are often described as apocalyptic
or tragic or sacred. It's made of different sections.
All of them can be used in very different ways in film and TV,
so there's moments that can be used for depicting something
chaotic like a battle or a war scene, or even someone having a
mental break. Then there's songs like
Lacrimosa, which instantly bring you into the feeling of grief or
mourning. It feels more intimate, which
would make it ideal for using, in scenes that cover funerals or
heavy emotional moments, death. And then, you know, the opening
intuitus has this solemn, ritualistic feeling that can
make scenes feel kind of spiritually heavy were timeless.
And the beauty of using an instrumental piece of music,
like classical music in film and television, is that the music
itself can provide a really interesting contrast because
visually we are being shown something specific, but the
music can make us feel something we may not be seeing as clearly
on screen. So emotions in particular are
hard to show an audience without the character saying them
outright. But music, and in particular
classical music, can be the use to make the emotional undertones
clear in the absence of words. So a lot of the time songs like
the ones in the Requiem can draw a really beautiful parallel
between the beautiful and terrible parts of humanity.
And in this case, Mozart's music is described as elegant and
human and meant to celebrate parts of life that can be
beautiful, despite the subject matter being death itself.
Since it is a requiem, which is literally a composition Or
Catholic mass used to lay the souls of the dead to rest,
Knowing that this is the intention behind the music helps
to create a lot of tension, and it lets directors like Jacob use
it in multiple ways depending on the scene.
So even though in a literal sense it's a funeral
composition, it can be used by him sincerely or literally for
flashbacks of funerals, or it could be used ironically.
It can be used to depict spirituality or a heavy
emotional moment between characters, or even for a single
character on their own. It can be used in moments where
they're depicting dark and ugly moments of trauma and grief, or
even potentially satire in regards to heated rivalry and
Jacob saying he plans to use this for the majority of an
episode in season 2. I have a handful of moments I
feel this can. Slot into.
For me, chapters 22 through 24 of the long game feel like they
could be 1 episode, and the emotional core of those chapters
feels consistent with the themes of the Requiem, along with Jacob
creatively finding ways to intertwine Ilya's mother and
father wounds, or his therapy and his deepening depression.
So I think most people assign this news to the plane scene,
but I do not personally. If he uses it there, I wouldn't
be surprised per SE, but I do not think that's where it would
be the most impactful. Honestly.
The plane scene will make us feel those emotions visually
because it's an event and an action that is happening to
Ilya. But the music from the Requiem
would in my opinion be most effective in his moments of
solitude where nothing is happening to him per SE.
He is simply feeling and not speaking and we are meant to
enter into that pain alongside him and can have the music be an
entry point to that. This next question, I really
loved it says Ilya's father calls him lazy in episode 1 and
in the tuna melt scene Ilya calls himself lazy.
Does lazy represent something I might be missing?
I keep thinking about that. He is a professional.
Athlete and obviously not lazy as in lazy might be a
replacement for another word, like when Shane calls Ilya an
asshole or when Ilya calls Shane boring.
So I loved this topic. I really really liked writing
about this. In the book, Ilya's father does
not call Ilya lazy. So this is a show specific
edition and I find it absolutely brilliant because it creates
this really impactful narrative payoff in the tuna melt scene in
episode 4. The overarching theme in the
book though, is that Ilya's father shames him.
He belittles him, he puts him down in his presence.
Ilya describes himself as a trembling child who is awaiting
punishment, and so I interpret his father's choice of words as
connective tissue between Ilya and his mother, because his
father was very hard on his mother, who suffered from
depression, and I find it very likely he called her lazy too,
which Ilya would have heard. And so to be called lazy himself
when he's very clearly not would be exceptionally cutting for
him. I feel even more strongly about
that theory when I put it in context of Ilya's internal
dialogue in the long game, where he struggles to get out of bed
and recognizes that he's always tired.
And he thinks to himself that he may be depressed and plays it
off. Because it's not like he stays
in bed all day crying and remembers that neither did his
mother. So I think when he's talking
with Galena and therapy, he recalls his mother was often
resting. It doesn't feel like a stretch
for me to imagine that Gregory called her lazy.
Do I think he means it in a literal sense?
No, because clearly Ilya is not lazy.
But to Gregory, I think Ilya is representative of a lot of his
resentment. Perhaps Ilya being so similar to
his mother was the root of that resentment.
And so he spoke to him as he spoke to her.
And Lazy embodies a multitude of emotions like resentment and
bitterness and indignation, maybe, or envy, possibly.
I certainly think envy can be found in how Alexi speaks to
Ilya. And in both the book and the
show, there's an emphasis on how Shane is very serious about his
training, his diet, his performance.
And Ilya has a more LAX approach to hockey while he smokes and he
parties and he goes out during the summers, and he has a much
more LAX feeling towards hockey in general.
The low hanging fruit would be to associate his behavior with
being lazy, but we also rarely have a scene where we see Shane
training that isn't mirrored with Ilya training.
And so while he has this stereotype of being this cocky
Russian assigned to him, while Shane is described by Ilya
himself as everything the League wanted from their stars, is
aware of that discrepancy between the two of them.
He's aware and he knows that he is cocky.
He knows that he has painted as the bad boy to Shane's perfect
image. But there's also the reality I
think he's often blinded to because of the comparisons made
between them, which is that he works just as hard as Shane does
behind the scenes. So in the lead up to Ilya
calling himself lazy in the tuna melt scene, he says he thinks he
will find someone else, but he is lazy.
So to me, lazy read as one of those moments where he's saying
something emotionally honest without being able to fully say
it out loud yet. So what he means is, I actually
already found the person I want, I don't need to go out and find
someone else. Because at that point, Ilya's
already chosen Shane, whether he's consciously ready to admit
it or not, and because of that, he has no interest in looking
for someone else in Boston. But Shane only hears the part
where Ilya says he thinks he will find someone else, and
misses the subtext in the part about him being lazy preventing
him from finding that other person on purpose.
Framing it as laziness also becomes a way for Ilya to hide
the vulnerability of what he's actually confessing.
And the whole day and lead up to the tuna melt scene, Ilya is
terrified. So we see him walk up to the
edge of honesty multiple times but never fully jump over the
line until he says Shane's name out loud.
He wants Shane to understand that there is no one else for
him, but neither of them is emotionally ready to confront
that directly yet. And So what makes the scene even
more meaningful is how it opens the door for their relationship
to deepen emotionally. In a way Shane is actually
unaware of because in a moment of self deprecation Ilya uses a
word that has clearly been weaponized against him before by
his father for years. Lazy isn't just a throwaway
comment because for Ilya it's tied to his identity and also
the shame he feels within himself and hasn't fully dealt
with yet. So when Shane immediately
rejects that notion and doesn't accept him using the word lazy
in regards to himself, Shane is starting to actually dismantle
something within Ilya. And as viewers, we know that
Ilya has never been lazy when it comes to Shane, especially in
the way he pursues Shane and approaches their relationship.
He planned the commercial in Toronto in order to see him
right away. But it goes beyond the romance,
too, because Shane takes hockey and his career incredibly
seriously, so for him to say something like that to Ilia
carries a lot of weight. Shane sees him as someone who is
driven in every aspect of his life.
He's not lazy with his game. He's not passive when it comes
to things or people he wants. Ilya goes after what he wants
and takes initiative instead of waiting for things to happen.
And it becomes a really beautiful moment where Shane
unintentionally begins to reframe the meaning of the word
that Ilya has attached to himself negatively for most of
his life. So.
I'm going to end the. Podcast episode there.
I absolutely loved this spread of questions.
I think there was a good healthy combination of hockey ones
talking about season 2 to music and really insightful angles
that people are taking about Shane and Elias characters and
and what they are written like. And I love talking about that.
I think that's one of the things I love deep diving into the
most. So as always, if you sent in a
question, thank you so much. I appreciate it endlessly.
It's so much fun to discuss questions with people, and if
you want to send in a question, please feel free to leave me any
any question at all in my DMS or on any of my socials.
And as always, if you've made it to the end, thank you for
listening. I really appreciate it and I
look forward to our next chat together in an upcoming episode.