It’s easy to get swept up in Heated Rivalry’s chemistry, drama and very memorable sex scenes, but once you take a step back, there’s a pretty big plot hole in Scott and Kip’s story that doesn’t fully add up, and one of the show’s own stars has now admitted it.
The problem lies with Scott Hunter and Kip’s storyline. And more specifically, how much time is meant to have passed between their breakup and their reunion.
Heated Rivalry relies heavily on time jumps, often skipping months or even years between scenes. Most of the time, it works fine. But in Scott and Kip’s case, those jumps end up creating confusion.
In the show, it looks like Scott and Kip split up around 2013 or 2014, before eventually reuniting on the ice in 2017. That suggests they’ve been apart for roughly three years. This already feels a bit strange given how emotional their reunion is.
And according to François Arnaud, who plays Scott, that gap wasn’t actually meant to be that long.
François Arnaud admits the timeline was messed up
via HBO
Speaking on SiriusXM’s Smith Sisters Live, François Arnaud was asked about the confusing timeline in Heated Rivalry. He said, “In the way that we shot it, there was a f*ck-up in the timeline.”
Basically, when the scenes were filmed, the cast believed only about six months had passed between Kip’s birthday and the Stanley Cup moment. But once the episodes were edited together, that gap accidentally turned into three years.
According to François, the issue came from how the two storylines were cut together. “The juxtaposition of the two storylines, they didn’t really know how they were going to cut from one to the other,” he explained.
The show nearly made the mistake even worse
Things almost got even messier. François revealed that there was originally a line in episode six that would have made the timeline error impossible to ignore.
He explained that during Scott’s MLH MVP speech, there was a line where he said, “Fear is a powerful thing, but this year I found the one thing that is more powerful.”
The problem is that if three years had passed, it couldn’t possibly be “this year”.
“So, we had to change it,” François said. He explained that the line was altered using ADR to remove the timing reference. “I watched it and it works.”
So, technically, the show avoids becoming a full-on plot hole thanks to that last-minute fix. But it does leave Scott and Kip’s relationship timeline feeling a bit off. Waiting three whole years to move on makes their reunion harder to believe, especially when the story clearly wasn’t written with that length of time in mind.
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