NeuroDivine

✨ Reflection on Watching the Waterloo Road Series 17 Finale

Watching the finale, I found myself quietly unsurprised when Luca’s sexuality was finally acknowledged. Long before the script made it explicit, something in his story — the emotional timbre, the way he moved through the world, the subtle sense of difference layered on difference — had already signalled it to me. This happens often when I watch television: a kind of intuitive recognition, not rooted in stereotype but in the small, human details that writers and actors weave into a character.

People sometimes call it “gaydar,” but that word feels too glib for what’s really happening. It’s more like a sensitivity to narrative patterns and emotional textures, a familiarity with the ways queer characters are framed, coded, or gently foreshadowed. Perhaps it’s also a recognition born of lived experience—the ability to see the quiet hints because you’ve learned, over time, to read them.

In Luca’s case, the intersection of being deaf and being queer added a depth that felt both tender and overdue. His story wasn’t reduced to either identity, yet both shaped the way he navigated the world. Seeing that complexity affirmed on screen felt quietly significant.

As the credits rolled, I realised that what I’d sensed all along wasn’t just a plot twist waiting to happen. It was the echo of a familiar truth: that queer stories often reveal themselves first in the margins, in the glances and silences, long before the dialogue catches up.