With each season of Heartstopper getting a mere eight half-hour episodes, we only get so much time to explore each character’s home life. This is a show that spends more time on chosen families than blood families, and we really haven’t gotten a strong sense of any of the parents, outside perhaps Nick’s mother (and that’s mostly because she’s Olivia Colman).
“Family†isn’t truly a parent-focused episode of this show, but we do get to see more of them than usual. The episode begins with a montage of parent-teacher conferences establishing that Charlie’s grades have been slipping since he and Nick started dating. It makes sense that Charlie would be neglecting schoolwork; he’s at an age where his relationship feels more important than anything else that has ever existed, and time alone with his textbook feels like time wasted. So when his mom bans him from seeing his boyfriend until his late history essay is in, it feels like the worst-case scenario. Later, when he sneaks out to comfort Nick about his bad math exam, he’s met with even worse consequences: He’s grounded for the rest of the term.
Still, these are just classic teen-and-strict-parents tiffs, and like Mr. Spring’s comment about hanky-panky in the first episode, they don’t necessarily feel connected to any negative feelings about their son’s sexuality. The Nelsons’ corner of the story, on the other hand, has everything to do with Nick’s continual coming-out journey. Sarah Nelson is a lot more outwardly affectionate and empathetic than Jane Spring, but it turns out she didn’t pass her progressiveness down to her eldest son, David. And with Nick’s little-referenced father also in the dark about his son’s recent discoveries, it feels like the people Nick needs to come out to are multiplying at an exponential rate.
While Nick’s brother and dad have been basically nonexistent in the narrative until now, their sudden appearance here (David in person; their dad in dialogue) nicely reflects their sudden reappearance in Nick’s world. It’s not that Nick actually craves his brother’s approval about whomever he dates. It’s that he knows David will resort to homophobia immediately if he finds out the truth, and he can’t deal with that right now; it’s hard enough coming out to someone you know will respond well. His dad, wherever he is, is an even bigger wild card. It’s unclear when they last saw each other, but it seems like he doesn’t know his son very well.
All of these tensions come out after David pops into Nick’s room and meets Charlie, whose name he remembers from a heart-filled text the other day. As expected, David has nothing remotely affirming or even mumblingly polite to say; he just mocks Nick’s bisexual label and tries to get him to admit he’s gay, mentioning their clueless dad to taunt him. Nick’s mom is there to pull David into the kitchen and give him a stern talking-to, but the damage is done.
There’s no real lesson or resolution to this scene, no apology from David or scene of Nick calling his dad to rip off that Band-Aid. Charlie tries to apologize to Nick for not standing up for him, but Nick correctly points out that this is just the way things are sometimes, and Charlie had no obligation to do anything about it — nor could he have really changed David’s mind. Nick assures Charlie that he can handle a few awful people. It comes with the territory.
But as the last scene of “Out†suggests, Charlie’s fierce protectiveness stems from not just how much he cares about Nick but his own direct experience with bullying. It’s clear there are still unresolved issues related to those memories, as illustrated in a particularly harrowing onscreen animation of three shadowy figures looming over Charlie’s bed and laughing at him.
That image is a real step up for Heartstopper’s use of illustrations, between the doodles borrowed from Alice Oseman’s comic and the 2-D animation work from Anna Peronetto. And it’s not the first time I was impressed by the animation in this episode; the words in Nick’s math exam turning into tangled, wiry strands is also very evocative, especially as the doodles begin to crowd around Nick’s head and envelop him. It’s good to see the show experiment with these touches without using them too liberally.
While much of “Family†is specifically about how Charlie’s and Nick’s respective families react to the reality of their relationship, we also get to spend some quality time with Tao’s mom, who offers her son some counsel in the midst of his Elle-related misery. After the last episode’s flirting failure, Elle is keeping her distance from Tao, trying to move on. At first, she has a great excuse to flake: an open evening at the Lambert School of Art for incoming sixth-form applicants. There, she meets Naomi and Felix, two other trans applicants who similarly long to study and make art somewhere where they aren’t reduced to their queerness. Tao, keeping tabs by watching Elle’s Instagram stories, clearly isn’t super-happy for her on her big day.
There are a couple of things going on here. First of all, the obvious: Tao has feelings for Elle, and he’s jealous of anybody new she hangs out with, especially if they’re draped all over her the whole day. But romance is only part of it. He also just can’t take the idea of losing his best friend. The carefree Elle he sees in those posts, tagging her new “friends for life,†already looks like she’s drifting away, out of his life. From his point of view, she barely seems to care about maintaining their friendship, especially with her continual flaking.
But Tao’s mom helps him realize he doesn’t need to just let Elle disappear. They share a kind of “perfect harmony†that she and Tao’s father shared while he was alive — a kind of love worth protecting at all costs. She tells Tao to fight to stay by Elle’s side, and it’s exactly what he needs to kick his ass into gear and be honest for once. Approaching Charlie and Isaac the next morning, he finally says what we knew was true: He likes Elle and needs to tell her, even if it ends up wrecking their friend-group dynamic forevermore. It’s a big decision, and he only got there because of his mom. We all deserve family who encourages us to love so fully.
Love Notes
• We briefly meet Sahar (Leila Khan), a new character taken from the comics who gets Tara’s and Darcy’s help with prom committee. Curious how she’ll fit into this friend group.
• Ben remains totally loathsome in a way that clearly reflects his own insecurities and jealousies. (He calls Charlie “desperate†after he pops by study hall to see Nick, using a pen as an excuse.) His taunt about Nick being “the same as him†continues to hold basically no weight, though, because we’ve seen that Nick has handled his relationship with Charlie (and with human beings in general) completely different. Case in point: Nick tries to tell Imogen that Ben is bad for her, but when she pushes him for specifics, he refrains from outing him, understanding that nobody deserves to be outed.
• I totally get the appeal of Lambert in theory, and it makes sense that Elle would want to spend more time with other trans people her age. But her transness really hasn’t been foregrounded in this series much outside a few mentions of transphobia at Truham, so I kind of wish we better understood why she specifically longs for a space like this.
• The episode makes a point of showing us Charlie turning down food from both Nick and his dad, so that’s something to look out for (and dread?).