Shane Hollander and the Geometry of a Single Desire
Two things have to be said about Shane Hollander before any theory comes near him. He carries a tenderness that, for most of his life, has had nowhere to go. And he is brave. The work he undertakes across Rachel Reid’s books, and across Jacob Tierney’s adaptation for Crave, is the slow and frightening labour of building a self large enough to hold a love that arrived without asking permission. He is gentle about it. He is also tired. Anyone who has watched Hudson Williams play him knows how much it has cost him, and how rarely he lets Ilya, or anyone, see the cost.
The reading I want to set down for him, and stand behind without overclaiming, is this. Shane Hollander loves one person. He has only ever really loved one person. His body, his attention, his honour, and what we might once have called his soul, have organised themselves around a single Russian face. Reid has called Shane gay, and the word is true; he names himself so by the end. She has confirmed he is autistic, and that word is true too. She has not used the word demisexual. That one is the reader’s reaching, a way of naming something Reid puts on the page, Tierney has filmed, and Williams has made visible. The shape is there. The word is a contribution from outside. The rest of this essay is its defence, and a tribute to the people who made the shape visible.
Begin with the shower at the CCM photoshoot in episode one. Two rookies, two captains-in-waiting, alone with no protective frame around them. The camera holds on Williams’ face as Shane looks at Ilya for what is plainly the first time, and what registers there is not lust. It is closer to recognition. Williams has spoken in interviews about wanting specificity in everything he did with Shane; he used that exact word with CNN. The shower is where the specificity begins to pay out. The face does no flashy work. It is alert, attentive, almost frightened by what is in front of it. When Ilya asks for his hotel room number, Shane gives it: 1410. The composition reads less like conquest than like a door number remembered in advance.
The autism reading sits underneath all of this and deserves an honest paragraph of its own. Reid has confirmed it on the Heated Rivalry subreddit and in interviews since. Williams has confirmed it from the actor’s side, telling Glamour that he could see Shane’s neurodivergence in the script before it had been named, in the dialogue and in how Shane moved through a room. He pushed back, in the same conversation, on the broad signals television tends to use for autistic characters, and described instead a flat affect, a body that takes ten seconds to move because the gesture has not yet been parsed. He has spoken in interviews about his own father, who has told him that he relates more to Vulcans than to humans, and about taking a page out of his life with that father into the work. The autism reading and the demi reading are not parallel claims about Shane. They are the same observation made in different registers. Autistic attention is often patterned by depth rather than breadth, by saturation rather than survey, by long attention paid to one particular thing. The word demisexual, when one reaches for it, is reaching for the same shape in the language of desire. Shane’s body, in Williams’ hands, does not skim. It stays.
Tierney’s adaptation makes the case more boldly than the books do, because television has to commit visually, and he has committed. He has said the show lives and dies on the relationship between Shane and Ilya, and he means it as an instruction about what to film. The Las Vegas sex scene in “Olympians” was shot on the first day of production, alongside the Tampa hotel conversation that had been part of Williams and Connor Storrie’s audition. Williams filmed the Vegas scene without protective padding and hurt himself doing it, because he and the show had decided, before anything else was in the can, that bodies meeting bodies was where the meaning would live. Tierney has described sex on this show as character development rather than incidental decoration. The phrase has been quoted everywhere, but it only means something if the actor is doing the development. Williams is.
What proves the case is not what gets filmed. It is what the show declines to film with anything like the same attention. Reid grants Shane two further sexual encounters with men during the long secret years, one in Mexico and one in Los Angeles, and neither is rendered. The condo Shane secretly buys for the hookups, an abandoned-looking building in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal which the books call his “weird hideout building,” is also absent; the scenes were relocated to Shane’s Westmount apartment for budgetary reasons, though the consolidation has its own clarifying effect. The camera knows one bed. The camera knows one face. Other rooms exist in the world of the books, but neither Shane’s heart nor Williams’ performance has built any reason to visit them.
Episode four, “Rose,” is where the case lands most beautifully and most painfully. After a panicked night at Ilya’s apartment, where Shane realises he has stepped inside the sphere of Ilya’s actual life and likes it, he flees. The episode then mounts what one recap rightly called an erotic horror disguised as a romantic comedy, a multi-year montage in which Williams plays Shane drifting through endorsement work in less and less clothing while Ilya, across the world from him, wears himself out on women whose names neither he nor the show bothers to keep. Shane has not stopped loving Ilya. He has stopped properly existing without him, and you see it in Williams’ shoulders before you see it in the writing. He begins dating the actress Rose Landry, played by Sophie Nélisse, a kind, smart woman whom the show takes seriously. She is not a foil; she is a real person whom Shane likes. He still abandons her on a dance floor to stare across the club at Ilya, because his attention has nowhere else to go. Williams’ eyes during that stare go quiet, the way an animal goes quiet when it sees something it knows.
Episode five, “I’ll Believe in Anything,” sharpens the case for Shane. Rose, the kindest woman in the season, gently asks Shane whether he has ever said aloud that he prefers being with men, and Williams plays the moment with tears in Shane’s eyes because Shane has had no one before her to confide in. The scene does something quietly radical. It does not let Shane name himself as gay-in-general and then move him through a procession of other men. It lets him name a preference, sits with him in the weeping, and immediately returns him to Ilya. Within the same hour of television, separated by an ocean, Ilya rings Shane from his father’s funeral and delivers a four-page monologue in Russian. Tierney used all of it, after his dialect coach told him every word should stay. The labour behind that monologue is Storrie’s, and it matters here for Shane’s sake. Storrie was Texas-born, with no Russian and no skating when he was cast; he did four-hour Russian lessons every day for six weeks to get Ilya’s voice into his mouth. He gave Shane a voice worth not understanding. Shane comprehends none of the words. Williams plays the listening as if his life depends on it, which in some quiet sense it does. Two men learn the shape of each other through breath and cadence and the willingness to be heard in a language one of them does not speak.
Then “The Cottage.” Two weeks alone, finally. Tierney made the writerly decision to end the season at the cottage rather than at the news conference Reid uses to close the book. He has said in interviews what he wanted for them. He wanted them, in his own words, to get to be in love. Watch what gets filmed inside that simplicity. Two men with their phones on a couch, showing each other things. A loon on the lake that Ilya finds bewildering. A whispered confession of love in Russian, then again in English, with no music swelling underneath.
The scene that holds the most weight does not exist in the book. Tierney wrote it. Shane apologises to his mother, Yuna, outside the cottage, for having tried so hard to be different and not being able to help himself. Williams has spoken about it as the most personal scene of the season for him. He grew up in an Asian family in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Christina Chang’s response as Yuna gave him a release he had not expected while filming. The apology is the Asian-Canadian thread of the show finally surfacing where it can be felt. Shane has been carrying a double burden across all six episodes, queer and half-Japanese inside one of the whitest sports in the world. Tierney told Teen Vogue he could not let Shane be whitewashed in the audience’s brain just because his surname is Hollander, and the apology pulls the unspoken weight of that into one moment. Shane is apologising for being gay. He is also apologising for being his mother’s particular son, the one she shaped and worried over and pushed. Williams plays it not as confession but as release. He has been faithful to one person for a decade, and the cost has been every other version of himself the family and the league were waiting for him to perform. Chang holds him through the moment with the kind of grace that flattens you.
What Tierney refuses at the cottage matters as much as what he gives us. There is no montage of Shane finally free and exploring. There is no gesture at unfinished business with other men. There is a fifty-minute episode in which Shane Hollander, in his cable-knit, stays up overnight to draft a plan. Ilya will move to Ottawa. They will found a charity in his mother’s name. They will slowly reframe the public story until the world is ready for them. Honour, for Shane, is not a private moral system. It is a willingness to organise an actual life around one person and one promise. Williams plays the planning with the same care he brings to the sex scenes, because the planning and the sex are the same project. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus that Tierney has lovingly adapted Reid’s books into a love fest of true queer intent is unusually exact. The intent is one love.
The Jungian thought worth holding here briefly is that Ilya is the shadow Shane has carried his whole life: appetite, ostentation, anger, the body that takes up its own space, public queerness without apology. By loving Ilya, Shane is loving back into himself the parts of him that the captain, the responsible son, the marketable face had been asked to put down. The casting helps the idea land. Williams plays Shane with the held, neurodivergent stillness he developed from a life with his father; Storrie meets him with a sprawling, loose-limbed swagger that gives Shane something solid to narrow toward. Together they look like two halves of a single person learning how to stand up. Tierney signed both actors for three seasons because the show is, strictly, the relationship between these two faces.
It would be wrong to convert any of this into a moral hierarchy in which Shane’s singular love stands above Ilya’s earlier, plural one. The books do not let us. The show does not let us. Ilya, hurt by Shane, sleeps with dozens of women in a few months trying to forget him, and the work grants him that without judgement because his way of moving through pain is his own. Monogamy is not nobler. Two different shapes of desire find each other and choose each other anyway. The meeting is the love story. The singularity belongs to Shane.
What we have been reaching toward with the word demisexual is, in the simpler language of the heart, Shane’s way of coming home to himself. He has spent his life unable to grant himself the warmth he extends to others. The only person in the whole narrative who looks at him reliably, without the careful scaffolding of captaincy and reputation, is Ilya, and Ilya’s gaze is the one mirror in which Shane’s own face becomes bearable. The fidelity is not a virtue practised against temptation. There is no other temptation. The honour is not a moral pose. It is integrity in the literal sense, the integration of a whole life around one recognised centre. The love for Ilya is not a deviation from the love of hockey. It is hockey at last acquiring a mouth, a temper, a difficult father, an unmade bed. The body, when it finally reaches the body, is only catching up to where the attention has been the whole time.
That all of this can be seen at all, and not only argued, is because Williams has decided it can. His face is the reading on screen. He prepared by studying a man he loves. He has gone into Glamour, The Hollywood Reporter, CNN, and Time, patiently and repeatedly, and made the case for Shane’s interior life with the seriousness of someone who knows what is at stake. He has called what Shane carries an anxiety four or ten times his own. He has called the work specificity. When he speaks about Shane he sounds like someone in love with the character. Reid’s verdict bears repeating. What Williams does with his face tells a whole story. You can see everything Shane is thinking and feeling.
The image to end on is small and concrete. After Shane and Ilya tell his parents that they have only ever loved each other, the four of them keep eating dinner, and Shane’s foot finds Ilya’s foot under the table. The world is not yet ready to see them. They reach for each other anyway, in the closest contact they can manage in front of family, and they hold the tap for a long beat while the evening goes on around them.
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