User blog comment:XHappilyNeverAfterx3/There's a difference between like and love....and Freddie finally realized that/@comment-4402317-20111013031300/@comment-4196911-20111013110753

Believe me, if I were a Creddier, i would have really enjoyed that dance, too. I get it. No question.

The problem with looking at it as a big romantic moment is the fact that there was zero follow-up. I know Dan is hamstrung by the fact that episodes mostly need to be self-contained, but to have Carly and Freddie act like nothing happened after that, tells me that it wasn't a major deal for either of them. She puts the moves on him later in iSYL, but it took life-or-death trauma for her to do so, and they abandoned the idea in the same episode.

Nearly everybody with a romantic history has been in a situation of an unexpected hook-up or almost-hook-up, where the stars align and you have some kind of intimacy with another person that you weren't expecting. What you DON'T do after that (if it means something) is just pretend it never happened. But that's what Carly and Freddie do after dancing together, without so much as a single smidge of talk about what it might have meant. They don't say a thing to each other, and they aren't romantically closer after that episode. So what was the deal?

Everything went back to "normal" after iKiss too, but the difference is Sam and Freddie had a verbal agreement to do so, and everyone could tell something was happening underneath.

Speaking as a writer, the clear "hook" for the iSD scene is Sam's reaction. If I'm writing the scene, I probably don't have Carly and Freddie appear to be intimate at all unless I have Sam coming in to see it. That's its main purpose. If on the other hand my purpose is to show Carly and Freddie getting closer to each other, I treat the whole thing differently, and follow-up on the scene instead of ignoring it, like Dan did.