EPISODE 3: HUNTER
SYNOPSIS: New York Guardians captain Scott Hunter — who we have met in passing at the first MLH Awards, the all-star game, and the Sochi Olympics — is having a streak of bad luck. A smoothie bought from a cutie named Kip breaks that streak, so Scott keeps coming back. Scott gives Kip hockey tickets. Kip literally runs into Scott while cater-waitering a gala. The next thing you know, these two are shacked up and in love, until Kip’s badass pal Elena tells them both that they deserve sunshine. Scott can’t come out right now. So Kip goes home to his awesome dad, then gets a full ride to grad school.
This episode is the series’ double-LP concept album, having to jam an entire book into one hour.
I’LL BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
The first hallmark cut of the soundtrack.** This 2005 Wolf Parade track, a.k.a. “You Need Sunshine,” would have been nearly a decade old during Scott and Kip’s story arc but recent zeitgeist has declared it timeless. My spouse calls Wolf Parade “stomp clap music.” I call this one of the best 20-year-old songs of 2025–26. Jacob Tierney told Rolling Stone that he wanted to clear its usage before they even began filming Season 1: “I wanted to make it like Scott’s subconscious. It’s just this big, romantic, beautiful song. That’s what I want for him and Kip. And I just love a love song. Needle drops, to me, are so important because they do trigger a subconscious reaction. I mean, music in general, right? For me, if I can make three people feel the way I feel when I hear this song, then I’ll have accomplished what I want to share.”
NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS
When Scott first meets Kip, it’s set to a slice of glitter pop from Alvin Stardust, aka Shane Fenton and Pete Shelley (yes! that Pete Shelley) who had some Brit hits in the 70s and 80s. It is the crucially sweet shimmer in the background of this meet-cute, and though, as a native New Yorker, I have never believed that anything about this episode doesn’t take place in Canada (I’ll believe in anything, but I won’t do that) it does track that a smoothie shop in NYC would be playing this obscure cut.
TROPICANA/ LOVERS LAND
Kip makes Scott’s first smoothie to Rose Marie Cameron’s “Tropicana” (2006) and serves it to him to “Lovers Land” by classic-era rockabilly singer and songwriter Margaret Lewis — the sunny frisson of attraction poured into a straight-up romantic glass and handed the fuck over. This is what sunlight looks like in this story — like a smoothie shop with an excellent soundtrack.
HUNGRY LIKE A TIGER/DREAM OF YOU/YOUR BODY/HALF ON A CO./NO BRAKE$/STAY UP LATE
The next few scenes switch quickly back and forth from the Kingfisher to the smoothie shop and back and forth again, with song tones shifting appropriately between dim bar light and daylit shop. I appreciate the quick cuts between scenes and songs — unlike the rest of the series, which gets to stretch a single book out over five episodes, this episode must accomplish all of the Game Changers book in one hour. So the snippets of background music have to do a fat bag of subtle emotional lifting.
LUMIERE
This song was also released in Spanish, titled “Luz.” Both names mean “light,” and this is the track that plays during Skip’s falling-in-love montage, which is as happy and sweeping as Alfa Rococo’s synths and vocals. The French version was released in 2014, so it would have been a pop hit in Quebec. “I’ll Believe in Anything” gets all the attention, but this track and the closing Dury one bracket the rise and fall of Kip and Scott’s romance with devastating clarity.
WALL OF LOVE
In between, there’s Elena getting real with Kip in the Kingfisher. The appropriately moody track by Montreal’s Night Lunch came out in 2020, so it’s certainly anachronistic. But again, it gets the job done. It’s almost a drippy shadow of Wanda Jackson’s classic “Funnel of Love,” calling back to the Margaret Lewis rockabilly cut earlier in the episode, but with the drag of reality pulling downward.
LIPS
Scott is left alone in his apartment. Kip and Elena listen to Scott’s speech. Kip walks brokenhearted through the streets of “Manhattan,” then comes home to his dad. Scott stands outside the Kingfisher, gazing inside at the birthday party. Scott covers up his banana socks in Sochi. All the while, this sad track by Baxter Dury (Ian Dury’s son!) starts with a pneumatic beat like NIN’s “Closer” but falls apart into cockney melancholy shortly thereafter. The sad-girl backup singers do nothing to lighten the mood load. “What’s the price of being young/ Tie me up for dark love/ Shiver down my empty spine/ What’s the price of being young.” The lyrics go on with what feels like a late-night memory and then the wish for sugar in someone absent’s tea. Skip seems over. Both men are left with memories for now — and I know this feeling. I know this memorialized heartbreak trapped in amber.
Scotty Taylor and Jacob Tierney are no blockheads.
** Watch me try not to say “iconic” too many times.
