#but apparently earning fake woke points this season was more important than telling a good story

[lovecolibri]

I don't necessarily agree that there was no build up for 3x08 it's just that we got so used to the big Alex/Michael/Malex scenes in the previous seasons never having any positive impact on their future and everything being meaningless that it's now very confusing that so much of their previous growth as a couple and as individuals suddenly had a big payoff in one episode after so much stalling. We've seen Alex open up to Michael a bunch of times before about his feelings/what Michael means to him. 3x08 wasn't new. 1x09, 1x13 and 2x04 were all huge only for the show to immediately undermine them by Michael misunderstanding things for no reason/having no real response/reaction to it after and putting them back to square one over and over again. Now we got a whole episode with them talking from Michael clearly communicating his hurt about Alex shutting him down to them compromising about Deep Sky and the show subverted all of our expectations with Malex actually taking a step forward instead of everything once again turning to shit for more drama. We could have gotten the same exact development a season and a half ago and it wouldn't have been weird at all. It was the show we were originally promised. Now that they put Malex on the same page for the first time ever fingers crossed we get more emotional consistency in storytelling going forward.

The major issue I have is what a lot of people including Tyler and Vlamis expressed, is that the show wrote itself into a corner of it both being absolutely far too long to justifiably have Malex not be together, but also not showing us this season in scenes or dialogue where Malex are at with each other because the show committed to that year long time jump after a season that ended with Michael walking out on Alex's song, and Alex kissing another man and starting the season a year later, still kissing that same man. Yeah, we've had two previous seasons of "build up" but we need more context for right now because based on context clues it seems like Michael and Alex have had no contact for this whole year, not that the show has even bothered to give us that much information. 🙄 So why is Michael hopeful now as opposed to last season when Alex was pouring out his love in a song about Michael? What changed? Who knows! Not us, that's for sure. And Alex is telling he he joined deep sky for Michael, and it's like, bitch where?! When? When he was crying while watching Forrest leave a WEEK ago after talking about exclusivity with him? When he was telling Kyle he considered not joining Deep Sky at all and leaving with Forrest but decided to stay because he needs to know more? But now suddenly it’s because he wants to build a better world for Michael to not be afraid.

It's not that Alex and Michael haven't had the build up for this reunion as characters, it's that we the audience are missing seeing steps or even being TOLD about them and are being expected to fill in the blanks, which is incredibly insulting because it comes across like Malex and their journey isn't an important story to tell because the fans just want them to be together and see them kiss and that's all that matters. Which isn't true! Their journey back to each other matter and fans want to see it. Tyler and Vlamis want to show it! It's a captivating story that deserved to be seen, not just throwing all their romance into one episode and expecting the fans to do ALL the heavy lifting on how they got her based on previous seasons. Little things that wouldn't have taken that much time could have solved so much of this issue too, which makes it even more frustrating! I've talked about this before but things like, Kyle and/or Alex brining up Michael when talking about Alex joining Deep Sky. Alex and Greg talking about Michael when Alex mentions getting out of the military and his new endeavors and talking about Jesse's death of which Michael was a part and Greg was about to take a bullet for him because of how important he knew Michael was to Alex. We got a scene with Kyle, Greg, and Michael and their single connecting thread, Alex, wasn't even mentioned?! Ridiculous. Alex looking at a picture of Michael before going into Deep Sky for the interview. Seeing literally anything from Alex's POV would have been helpful because again, we are getting Malex in a bubble where they only exist for each other when they are together, or when someone else is brining up (or throwing in their face) that they know about Malex's "secret" relationship. And it shouldn't be like that. And yeah, Alex is a "private" character, but he's just that, a character. So we can only ever know what the show tells or shows us, so if Alex isn't allowed to talk to anyone or even have a private moment where we see him thinking about Michael and their relationship, then how do we know what's going on in his head?

And you're absolutely right about their previous interactions not holding weight or carrying over and that's part of the issue as well. We're so used to things happening in a bubble or happening and then not mattering later, but as I said, it's been a year in the show since any of those events, and they aren't even being allowed to talk about them this season either! There's still been no mention of that song Alex sang, or of f*rlex or m*luca and how either of them really felt about that, or addressing those people as the reasons they weren't together before now. I'm hopeful we will get them talking more this season but given what we've seen so far and the show's absolute refusal to hold m*ria accountable for anything, I doubt we will get any real closure on what took so long for them to get together. And because the show won't address the m*ria issue, it's impossible to address the Michael issue and how he picked someone else, who wasn't even nice or kind or helpful or supportive of him, over Alex (who was being all of those things) over, and over, and over. That needs to be addressed in order to heal and move forward but that can't happen as long as m*ria has never done anything wrong ever, or if it IS addressed before the end of the season it will all fall on Michael as entirely his fault and will probably be twisted in some way to prop her up even more as the kind of woman they both want and wish they could have if only they weren't so unfortunately stuck with their cosmic connection to each other.

So yeah, Alex and Michael's story has simultaneously taken 84 unjustifiable years to get to this point, while also not giving us nearly enough present-day information after a year-long time jump to explain how they suddenly are all in and ready to be together now, as opposed to where they were at the end of season 2. By not allowing them to interact or talk to anyone else about what they have been thinking about the other for the entire year time jump and what conclusions they have come to about what and who they want and why, and if they have hope of getting that and why, it feels like their journey this season has been rushed or steps have been skipped. Because there was really no reason for them not to be together at the end of season 2 but that's what c*rina gave us and instead of working to fix that, they've just decided to pretend last season and this year long time jump, and m*ria keeping them apart just...doesn't exist for Alex and Michael. I absolutely do not believe in that "the characters need to earn being together" crap, but the writing absolutely does have to earn the payoff of them getting together. There are emotional beats that needed to be set up, and a build within this season to get to that point and have it mean something. And by benching Malex all season we didn't get the build up of seeing both of them being clowns on the same page of the book called "I want to be with him but he no longer wants to be with me", and without that tension, the big "release" doesn't feel satisfying. And I don't think it's wrong to ask for more from the show that just two pretty guys kissing. Their love story is one for the ages and deserves to be told (actually their Romeo/Juliet warring families set up makes them the most interesting and they should have been the focal point of the show all along but I digress), not just shoehorned in for ratings boosts. It's insulting, not just to the fans or to the Malex story, but also to the actors bringing the story to life who WANT to do more, who are BEGGING to do more with their characters and this story.

[csykora]

After ‘84, Igor felt the pieces were beginning to fall off the Red Machine. 

He hated being called a robot as much as he hated being called a soldier. He didn’t know what the world wanted the Green Unit to do on the ice or off it, how they had to behave, before someone would believe they had feelings. On the worst days they were too tired and numb to feel anything else.  

When he’d met Bobby Clarke, who he thought looked like a hockey angel with a blond halo and no teeth, Bobby commented about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Igor didn’t know how to say that he’d definitely never been allowed to go to Afghanistan, and under the uniform he didn’t deserve to be a soldier, for good or bad. The national team was a tool of the Soviet government: at the same time it was a comfort for ordinary people in cold little apartments in mining towns where the players grew up and also a prop in the illusions that kept everything how it was. 

The illusion went skin deep: every time they left Russia, Igor was issued a snappy winter coat and brand-name Western clothes, so no one would think the Soviets looked poor.

[A black and white photo of the Green Unit posing, smiling except for Igor, in matching windbreakers with saddle shoulders and bold stripes. This was a hot look, about 10 years before the Soviet Union Costuming Department thought it was a hot look]

Underneath the coat or the beautiful red sweater, everything was a mess. At one point, at a tournament in Canada, a Canadian player would hit Igor from behind. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the Soviet management hadn’t provided enough hockey pads. Igor was wearing a partial set he’d borrowed from a high school team that played in the host arena earlier that day. (Across Europe and Canada I bet there are grown men, still hockey fans now, who have no idea they once owned game-worn gear from the world’s top scorers. To Igor’s fans those pieces might be worth as much as he ever earned in his CSKA career.) He would play the rest of that tournament with broken ribs.

The only outsider he’d met who seemed to understand, however briefly, was their friend Vanya. Asked what it was like playing against those Russian robots, Wayne said, 

“Robots don’t hurt when they lose.”

By June 1985, Slava was recovering from that knee injury that had sidelined him for half the last season. He and his little brother Tolya, now a CSKA rookie, drove back for the start of training. Their car was hit, and Tolya was killed. Slava thought about leaving that season, but their parents told him to keep going, and just try to live for two people.

In November, the players at Arkhangel heard a rumor: someone had written an article, in a Soviet paper, that criticized the hockey program. Anything that wasn’t awe was criticism. Someone got their hands on a copy, and Igor, Vova, Sergei, and Slava huddled around their usual table that evening, hiding each other as they read it in turns. Igor reread it twice. He’d read Canadian and American papers that dragged the Soviet system, but never something like this, that got it--almost--right. It didn’t have all the details to understand the illusion--how they trained, how Tikhonov acted behind Arkhangel’s walls--but it guessed some.

Glasnost was beginning, a long rustling cracking thaw opening new streams of information and communication like Igor had dreamed. The Canucks drafted him that year, and then Vova. The Devils had dibsed Slava and Lyosha a few years before, and the Flames wanted Sergei. There was a place for them, waiting, if they could ever get to the NHL. But there wouldn’t be any thaw in Arkhangel as long as Tikhonov ruled it.

The ’85 World Championships were held in Prague, and ’86 in Moscow. Igor played both, and nothing else. For two years, no one saw him outside the Soviet Union. 

In December of ‘85, CSKA was supposed to tour North America. Igor was dressed and ready. Then he heard his passport, which he had used a hundred times before, had run into problems. Coach told him not to worry, but to stay behind in Russia and--how convenient--keep training for the championships in Moscow. Igor woke up at three in the morning to watch the games he was supposed to be playing. He learned that Canadian journalists were asking about him: apparently, he had tonsillitis. Igor wasn’t entirely sure where his tonsils were. 

Two months later CSKA played in Sweden. Strange, how his tonsils still weren’t better, and his passport was still missing. Two nights before they were set to leave Tikhonov called him into the office, in front of the team, and told him so. But the next evening Tretiak, now a more senior officer, came out to visit the barracks. He hugged Igor and promised him he would do what he could to get the passport by the time they were supposed to leave the next morning. Igor went to bed hoping. At 4:30 AM the coaches woke him just to tell him the passport wasn’t there yet, so the team really would be leaving without him. 

The third time it happened, he was told to go back to the passport office to file everything all over again--maybe he had fucked up his passport. He didn’t bother. Taking away travel had been one thing. But doing it in front of the team, in front of the Green Unit, so that he knew that they knew that he had let them down somehow, broke his heart. 

He was still allowed to play inside the Soviet Union. As long as he was with CSKA, the other Greens treated him the same as always. If they had known how bad things were going to get, Igor thought they would have done more sooner, but he knew that they didn’t understand what was happening. In between games, he spent his days in office buildings, being grilled about suspicious activities like listening to rock music, calling his mom too often, or kissing Canadians. 

“I was at fault all around. That I gladly gave interviews to journalists. That I liked the NHL...that I like rock music. That the living standard there impressed me. All this was raked up into a pile. I was the enemy. Because, you see, if I liked the American way of life, then in general I was an American by heart. All of this they said about me.

By nature, I am clearly a Russian. I do not like everything in America. It cannot be that somewhere is as in a fairytale, and somewhere else is total darkness.

Particularly, it seemed, my [friendliness] offended the preservers of government secrets….I also knew a little English. Therefore I had the possibility to rub elbows with whomever I might come in contact: hockey players, journalists and even immigrants. And, they assumed, to each of them I could give important information--everyone getting an equal share, no doubt, in order to be fair.”

He couldn’t talk to his friends from other countries, or his Russian friends either when they traveled without him. On the street outside between the rink and the party offices, none of his former fans would speak to him, except to ask or tell him their opinion if he really was a traitor.

He was wanted everywhere but home. Obviously, no other country believed that a 25 year-old athlete who had been the best in the world six months before had been brought down by tonsillitis multiple times in a row. There’s only so many tonsils a person can have. Obviously, every other country thought Igor must want to defect, the one thing he did not want and couldn’t convince anyone of. So each host on the international hockey circuit was bouncing on their toes, first Canada, then Sweden and so on, thinking maybe the Soviet Union would slip up and let him come to their tournament, he'd defect, and then they’d get to keep him. Obviously, the Soviets noticed that, and squeezed tighter.

Each time the team left on tour, he was told to spend his time alone training harder and hope. If he was good enough, maybe he’d make the next tournament. His body, always a battle-ground with Coach Tikhonov, became a hostage situation. The more Tikhonov told him to train, the less he ate. Eventually he was eating mostly fruit, and restricting his water intake. 

He stopped pretending to defer to anyone.  He used to be the sober one between his hot-head wingers, and now he egged every fight on. Sometimes he faked an American accent, calling Coach “Tikhonoff” the way American broadcasters had at the '81 Olympics.

One day at the rink he bumped into figure skater Lena Batanova, who “knew nothing about hockey and could not have cared less.” She had been through worse training than he had growing up, only to win two World Championships, and then be slighted from a third. They understood each other without having to say anything.

[Igor washing dishes in their Moscow apartment, turning to glance at Lena pressing up him.]

That summer he stayed up late talking with his friends, and realized he wanted to marry Lena. He asked her the next morning, and she said yes. Behind Igor’s back, Slava, Vova, Sergei, and Lyosha went to Coach Tikhonov’s office, and told him that they would play every other day of the year if they had to, but they would be going to Igor’s wedding. Coach wouldn’t allow the three days for a traditional Russian wedding, but he had to give Igor one.

Waking up the morning after the wedding, Igor checked the mail and found a summons to appear before the Central Committee of the Communist Party. His friends, who I imagine lying hungover on his and Lena’s new couch and floor, rushed for their unused books to help him study up on Communist doctrine, in case he got quizzed. This is presumably when Lena woke up, realized she’d married a whole line of hockey players for their one communal brain cell, and rolled back over. Igor reported the next morning, probably with flashcards Vova had made for him in his pocket.

The Party officials congratulated him on getting married and gave him the wedding gift they were sure no one else would have gotten: his passport. We have to guess the logic here, if there was one. It’s possible the Party thought he wouldn’t risk his wife, or that two years had just been enough to realize the team wasn’t working without him. 

But he was allowed to go to Canada for the Calgary Cup before the end of ‘86, and everyone had questions about his two years of tonsillitis. Igor, for the first time in his life, didn’t talk. But that just left the hockey world to gossip. Two months later it was announced he’d be in Quebec City for another tournament, and right before they arrived a Quebec newspaper printed a version of the night out with Gretzky--with quotes, they claimed, from Wayne. This time the tournament organizers called someone from every team up for a pregame presser. I imagine Igor shrugging at his KGB handlers and sliding away to the stage: nothing could stop him talking now.

Except the Canadian journalists. They wanted to interview Team Canada first. Igor stewed, and then looked up to see an oncoming Wayne. Someone had asked him about the alleged quotes in the article, which Igor had snagged a copy of to read the second they let him loose in Canada. Apparently Wayne hadn’t. 

“‘Believe me, Igor,’” Igor remembers Wayne blurting out. “‘I didn’t say what was printed in the paper. I’ll tell them it didn’t happen! But what is your position now?’”

“‘Do not worry,” Igor promised him. “‘Now, everything is okay.’”

“Oh, awesome,” (I’m assuming again) Wayne said. “So do you want to come over later and hang out in my mom’s basement?!”

“If the KGB pulls a gun, then call me.” --Wayne Gretzky

Weirdly, I’ve never seen this inspirational quote cross-stitched on someone’s wall. 

The next Canada Cup was held in August ‘87 in Hamilton, Ontario, which is like, basically next door to Wayne’s parents’ house. So the afternoon before the first game, Wayne sent his dad Walter to the hotel where the Soviet team was staying. Walter asked in Ukrainian if he could chat with Igor, who had to come down to the hotel lobby to meet him, since visitors were absolutely not allowed to wander up to players’ rooms. Walter invited his son’s friend over for dinner. Igor cut eyes at the KGB agent in the corner, and said he had to go upstairs and ask Coach. Tikhonov said no before Igor started talking.

Igor came back downstairs and apologized to Walter, who thought hard for a minute. He told Igor to ask what if the whole Green Unit went to Wayne’s house for team bonding? Coach Tikhonov considered, and said no, and Igor went back to Walter. 

Walter hitched up his suspenders, and announced to the KGB that he would talk go to Coach Tikhonov now.

He told Tikhonov he would be honored if Coach came to dinner at his house that evening, and if Coach felt like it, he might bring the boys over too. Tikhonov said he’d love to. 

Tikhonov, Igor, Vova, Sergei, Slava, Lyosha, and a KGB operative spent a delightful half hour packed in a car together driving to the Gretzkys' house, where Walter and Phyllis were throwing a cookout. Walter and some of his local buddies had barbecue and corn on the cob on the grill, and Phyllis had quizzed her son about his Moscow trip before throwing up her hands in despair and making a big batch of her mother’s Polish dumplings and sausage.

Nothing makes me happier than the image of Wayne Gretzky, beaming from ear to ear, handing famously fussy little Igor Larionov a piece of barbecued corn on the cob. Igor had to explain that yes, they had corn in Russia, but they ate it on a plate and not like squirrels. Walter offered him a beer, and Igor looked to Coach Tikhonov before saying no. Tikhonov allowed the players to have a soda.

Wayne started asking him how everything had been since the last time they hung out, and didn’t get why his friend wouldn’t talk to him at first. Igor might answer one question, and then act like he didn’t understand. Sergei and Vova really didn’t speak English, and kept elbowing Igor to explain what was going on and why Wayne was smiling at them like that, but Igor was still pretending he only spoke Russian and hesitated to translate for them. Finally Wayne realized Igor was clamming up every time Tikhonov got within earshot.

Wayne went to Walter to change the game plan. Walter would use his Ukrainian to ask Coach Tikhonov about his many amazing accomplishments, while Wayne told the whole party he wanted to show the other boys his medals, which were all down in the basement. Unfortunately the Gretzky family’s basement was very small, and housed Wayne’s many, many medals, so only two people could possibly fit down there at a time: one Gretzky, and one Russian. Tikhonov thought about it, decided he didn’t care about someone else’s medals, and gave the okay.

 Just in case, Wayne deputized his dad’s buddy Charlie, who did not speak Russian or anything like it but was somebody’s dad from suburban Ontario, to chat up the KGB agent.

So Wayne began to escort the Green Unit, one by one, down to his family’s basement. At the bottom of the stairs, he handed them a beer. The two of them chugged their beers together, trying not to take suspiciously long or laugh too loud, and then ran back up to change out for the next boy.

Nothing happened that night. It didn’t change anything, except that Tikhonov never found out. The Greens had been able to get one over on him, because they didn’t have to do it alone.

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