stay afraid, but do it anyway

His potential becomes something that can be possessed and used by others, for their own benefit. At some point I imagine Ilya became aware that his talent is not his own. It belonged to his family, his family’s name, their social rank and how others view them. The pedestal that he is paraded upon is also the cage that keeps him from being able to truly separate himself from his family, even from far away (and I’ll get to distance + co-dependency later on); any mistake he makes is detrimental to his family and their name. Side-stepping the Shane Hollander Walks Ilya Rozanov like a dog tag fully for a moment: his potential / talent is harnessed by a leash, and the leash is a metaphor for shame. I’ve read some great meta about Ilya’s dominant psychosexual preference in relation to the submissive position he is forced into within his family; shame acts as an enforcement mechanism to keep him submissive.

This is made explicitly clear when Grigori says:

Image text: “The real shame is squandering the promise you showed when you were young.”

What breaks my heart about this specifically is the suggestion that Ilya’s personhood as a young man (he was what, 22 years old during Sochi?) is collapsed entirely into his early potential; his ‘peak’ has already passed, and he did not live up to it. So now he exists in a world where everything he could ever do is either fulfilment of a past (non-existent) self, or a waste of a past (non-existent) promised self. Ilya is thus always compared to his child-self, further compounded by the fact that Grigori has dementia. I imagine as the disease worsened, his father could only recall memories the past and memories of a younger Ilya more frequently, which is confirmed (to me, at least) when he is on the phone with Alexei and says,

Image text: “On the phone yesterday, he asked me to bring home some bread.”

I think one take that I’ve not seen all that often is how tight knit Ilya’s family actually is, even though they are far from being loving or even tolerant of each other. Given the context of him being born the literal year of the collapse of the soviet union, Ilya’s childhood was likely to be framed by immense social, economic, and national insecurity. Your family is as quite literally all you had. Even if Grigori was of middle-rank as an officer or a police commander, there is no suggestion that they had much money, and even if they did, it looked different from what we think of now after decades of Western capitalism and Russian Oligarchy.

But I don’t think they did. I imagine that after a long career Grigori was probably respected, but I can’t imagine he was particularly cash-rich. Alexei constantly asking Ilya for money was not just an exercise of domination and financial abuse, but also a real need (even if he blew it on drugs or spent it irresponsibly). Irina marrying a much older man, possibly for security or protection or status makes me think she grew up in poverty, too. 

Throughout the season, when Ilya is on the phone with either his father or brother, it is implied that they speak often, maybe even weekly (though I imagine that there are periods when the calls are frequent and then there’s stretches of time when they are not); in episode four, nearly five years after the scene above, Ilya says:

Image text: “Yes, I got your message. I did answer you, father. We spoke yesterday.”

This family isn't shown as being kind to each other and openly expresses their disdain for one another, and yet, its implied they speak somewhat often. While on paper this seems like a contradiction (and, well, it is), playing out in real life, it makes a lot of sense when thinking about the geography of Ilya’s guilt (and the leash of shame woven so artfully by his family and their expectations). I’m taking a lot from my own experience here, but I identify Ilya’s inability to ignore (for long, at least) his brother and father’s calls, even though they are actively harmful to his mental and emotional being. He is probably aware of this, especially when he’s older, but while he might procrastinate dealing with his brother and father, he cannot fully ignore or refuse them.

The reason I think Ilya cannot cut them off is not only due to his father’s illness, but also because distance does not actually absolve someone - and let’s be real, Ilya’s not merely someone, he’s the gifted child - of their role in the family structure. 

By Ilya leaving (and while I want to acknowledge the symbolism of a post-soviet family allowing their “promised one” to leave for the United States, I do not think I’m the best person to talk at length about this) to play hockey in the US, he is not able to show up for his family anymore, he is the one who has “left.”

So the family structure adjusts his role to be centred around money. You cannot come to the table, so you must at the very least pay for the table: it’s compensation in its purest form. Throughout the entire season, we see Ilya send money whenever they ask, and it’s a given that Ilya will. 

This is why Alexei can continue to treat him the way he does, and go as far to demand a ‘plan’ in the middle of a funeral that his younger brother has paid for. Because the dynamic that Ilya is part of and plays a role in is one where he’s done something wrong (the perceived abandonment) and he accepts this as a true (by continuing to financially support them). It’s Ilya’s responsibility, (or penance, if you will) to make up for his absence. The remittance then becomes an admission of his guilt.  Ada Limon said it better, of course:

This is the crux of the saw-trap I see Ilya in. The irony is that both the remittance and the geographical distance are false boundaries. If anything, every wire signaled availability, making it harder to refuse each time he gave in (and he will give in, he knows it). He is literally on-call to manage crisis after crisis, be that financial or emotional, to absorb the distress of whatever is happening back home, to manage it or make it go away. Ilya is left with the emotional weight of needing to fulfil his family’s expectations and respond to their needs. The distance compounds the anxiety of not being able to know exactly what is the problem or how to fix it: Alexei retains what little control he has over Ilya by keeping him in the dark about his father’s condition. There is no way for Ilya to verify what is actually going on, so he must pay. 

Eventually, Grigori is no longer reliable as a witness to his own life as we see in Episode Four. Dementia is a devastating illness that I experienced first-hand, as the primary financial support and the one to arrange the care of my family member, all while living on a different continent. Your imagination of what could happen is a cycle of torment, and even though it is equally tormenting to answer the phone to whatever problem (or abuse) will be sent your way, there is no option to refuse entirely; to just not answer to their calls. Especially if there’s always this insidious hope that it won’t be as bad news, or at least as bad as whatever’s been cooked up by your worst fears. With this in mind, I picture Ilya probably calling his father more in 2014-2016 than in 2008-2013. Because even if it means staring the deterioration of  Grigori’s mental state in face, at least then he could assure himself that everything, at least for the moment, was okay (and by that, I mean, nothing was okay, but nothing was level-10 crisis)

These phone calls become repeated sites of trauma for an entirely new reason aside from the emotional abuse / humiliation ritual, in that dementia erodes the person and who they are. Ilya's losing his father in pieces instead of all at once. Ocean Vuong's peom Someday I'll love Ocean captures this feeling succinctly:

It is a compounded type of grief, and it is frustrating because it becomes impossible to hold that person accountable for things they did or how they treat you. Even if Ilya resents his family, hates their treatment and expectations of him, recognises that it is unfair, he still laments his inability to take care of his father himself:

Image text: “And it kills me that he took care of my father and I didn’t.” He is held hostage by the guilt and shame that rest on the laurels of his talent and promise. I imagine Ilya hates his father but loves him too. I think this complexity was expressed beautifully through Connor Storrie’s acting and Tierney’s writing, particularly the way in which he expanded the Russia/Family scenes. There are a lot of dynamics packed into a handful of moments. 

I digress. Back to the saw trap. The damaging and co-dependent nature of Ilya’s relationship to family is a important plot point throughout the season and a crucial influence on how Ilya perceives himself in other places outside of his family: his team, the world at large, his relationship with Shane. Even though he left Russia and his family physically, he was never fully allowed to leave, and importantly, though he achieved fame, money, and greatness, he was never in control. 

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