Heartstopper Season 2 Review: Heartstopper returns with fantastical, disarming queer joy

4.5/5

Story: Nick and Charlie navigate their new relationship, which is encumbered by Nick’s struggles to publicly come out. Tao and Elle negotiate the possibility of romance while Tara and Darcy confront new challenges. There are exams, a Paris trip and prom, while the group goes through various phases of life, friendship and love.

Review: I’ll admit I walked into the second season of Heartstopper with some degree of cynicism and dread. These might seem strange words to associate with a show such as this, but there were plenty of reasons that warranted my caution. In its first season, the show pulled off a miracle of a tightrope. In a digital landscape saturated with teenage angst and dramatic turbulence, it confidently held onto a stubbornly sunny tone, while managing to tap the sweet spot between emotional earnestness and almost unattainably disarming purity. The show made breakout stars of its leads, Kit Connor and Joe Locke. I worried if they’d be able to re-conjure that sense of gorgeous innocence. Would the upliftingness start to look more consciously manufactured than organic?

I’m thrilled and happy to report that the Alice Oseman-created show makes a magnificent return. It retains the air of an impossibly idyllic dream world for queer viewers, but in its very fantastical, near incredulous heights of pleasure, Oseman grants us the reprieve and the joy we ache for. From the minute the new season opens, Oseman dials up the sheer mush by several notches. Charlie and Nick are head over heels in love; they can barely stop themselves from bursting into affectionate gestures. The new exam term at Truham School keeps them apart for the day. But Charlie keeps finding ways to edge close and constantly to Nick and be around him as much as he can. Charlie is obsessed and always sneaks out of his house to meet Nick and hang out. Their inseparability is in tension with Nick’s closeted bisexual identity. Aside from their friends, everyone sees the two as best buddies. The show never misses making an ample playful riff on the best-pal-boyfriend conflation, most memorably delivered by Charlie himself in a scene. Nick, however, is desperate to come out and have everyone enable his public embrace of Charlie as his boyfriend. The great tentativeness,fear, and the entire juggernaut of feelings that precede the zillion coming-out moments in every queer person’s life underpin Nick’s dilemma for most of this season. Oseman, who has herself written this adaptation of her bestselling graphic novels, and director Euros Lyn handle these scenes with exquisite gentleness and emotional restraint. Their command over the precise beats of the mildest emotional undercurrents that run through such moments keeps the show sailing. Kit Connor delivers an outstanding, richly sensitive, and unerringly attentive performance that continually rewards the impulse of withholding with the much-needed complex, larger mapping.

“Why is it so hard to say it?” Nick asks Charlie. The show weighs this, what is held as a canon event in queer life, and wrenches out of it all our expectations, vacillating attitudes. terror and the enormity of a seemingly mandatory burden that we feel compelled to carry. It considers with depth the varied layers in coming out, based on to whom we are coming out. The show’s decision to keep expanding on the meaning and implications of the coming-out moment through the entirety of its season, developing it with due care and respect, is just another index to gauge how sincerely it takes the inner journeys one has to make, realisations that must be accepted, beneath all that swoony, glossy exterior. Through this, the show nudges and reminds the queers, both inside its world and outside it, that we don’t owe anyone the information about our sexual preferences, steadfastly upholding the value and essence of the relationship, prioritising the candour and honest dialogue among ourselves. Only then can it even ease the path to talking openly and publicly about our desires, if and when we want to.

The gravity ascribed to the coming out builds on further in the light of an impending school trip to Paris. Nick wants to tell his former rugby friends about his relationship with Charlie so that they won’t have to keep it clandestine in Paris and enjoy themselves as a couple. Paris becomes the season’s fulcrum, as it reorients characters with each other, including people who are struggling to make sense of their relationships as well as those hoping to rekindle the older friendship after a failed attempt at couple-like behaviour. One of this season’s biggest triumphs is the Tao-Elle track, a delightful, singularly genuine Will Gao anchoring and running away with every scene he is in. Gao endows his arc with physical and emotional specificity. Gao is hilarious in channelling Tao’s awkwardness in trying on the mantle of being Elle’s boyfriend, getting a haircut and taking her out to a film he hates but which is her favourite, Moonrise Kingdom. The ensuing embarrassment and despair after a blunder at flirtation is pitch-perfect in Gao’s performance. After this misfire, he comes around to be his older self, who Elle knows and loves. The warmth that grows in Elle for Tao and vice versa is evoked with a real, captivating sweetness. It’s also lovely to see Elle (Yasmin Finney) blooming into a confident woman, capable of knowing what she wants and wise enough not to let her heart be continually frayed because of another person’s indecisiveness.

Amidst the romance, Heartstopper also concedes with generous, subtle dignity space to experiences outside that orbit, individuals who do not quite feel the same way. Through Isaac’s (Tobie Donovan) patiently etched arc in discovering his asexuality, the show acknowledges the emotional journey such individuals have to undergo, their loneliness of being surrounded by a popular culture that privileges a desire for romance and sex as the normative, fundamental desire undergirding teenage experience, the subsequent double bind of confusion and uncertainty in terms of understanding one’s own identity. The show constantly reassures us that it is just enough to be content with what we are feeling, insisting they remain valid, without being bulldozed by the need for having everything, our desires figured out, our fears rooted out in order to claim growth and wisdom.

Heartstopper balances its cheesiness with tenderly probing the efforts behind making a relationship appear perfect and happy all the time. It approaches this through both the Charlie-Nick and Tara-Darcy tracks. While Darcy (Kizzy Edgell) had the enviable appearance of what Tara (Corinna Brown) calls a ‘confident lesbian’, this season traces her dismissal of honest conversations in a deflection to constant perky fun, as well as Tara’s exasperation in what had looked like such an ideal relationship in the last season. While Charlie is more forthcoming about his feelings regarding his relationship with Nick, he has completely buried his past bullying and trauma, reflected in his eating disorder, without resolving and coming to terms with it. Even Tao, his oldest friend, barely knows anything about what he had gone through. Charlie’s past propels him to shield Nick even doubly. With a quiet understanding, both Kit Connor and Joe Locke deftly navigate their characters’ coming together to heal and be there for each other, no matter how much time it takes, helping the other bear the saddle.

Verdict: Brimming with buoyant energy and armed with a banger of a soundtrack, Heartstopper Season Two is consistently dazzling. Creator Alice Oseman and director Euros Lyn hone the need for affirmation and validation as a measure of self-worth with a compassion that welcomes every character into its enchanting embrace. The textures are as always incandescent and sparkling, filled with colour. Editor Sofie Alonzie lets the scenes fly and twirl with an immediately winning, sprightly touch, that can put a spring in the step of any viewer. It swept me off my feet and within the preciousness of its constructed world, I felt a headrush of giddy belonging. For a brief while, in Oseman’s loving gaze, the queers are allowed a chance to be alright and perfect and happy. It’s a monumental, spellbinding achievement.