Favorite Characters: Kieren Walker (In the Flesh)

In the Flesh would have been an engrossing drama anyway – incredibly smart and thoughtfully detailed, it uses its zombie backdrop to discuss real-world discrimination in masterful ways.  I’d have admired it, even with a different protagonist.  In Kieren, however, we get the show’s strongest emotional punch, as this vivid, stunningly honest character serves as our eyes into the post-post-apocalyptic world, of the series.  (Some character-centric spoilers.)

Eternally 18, undead Kieren has been through the wringer and then some.  He didn’t ask to come back from the dead, and he certainly didn’t ask to be a zombie, but now that he’s been treated and has regained his mind, he doesn’t know what to do with the new life he’s been given.  While the treatment center taught him mantras about not being to blame for the people he unknowingly killed during the Rising, he can’t see it that way.  He can’t shut out the flashbacks of the things he did when he was rabid, and these nightmare memories don’t feel absolved.  It seems impossible from looking at him, but this gentle boy killed people and ate their brains, and he knows that nothing he can do could ever take it back.

Guilt seems to follow Kieren everywhere.  In reacclimating to life with his family, the time he spent in his untreated state isn’t the only thing keeping them all at arm’s length.  Unlike other PDS folk we meet, Kieren didn’t die from a disease, accident, or war – he committed suicide.  His death itself was steeped in misplaced guilt, as he felt responsible for the death of the boy he loved, and it wasn’t something he meant to come back from.  He never expected having to explain it to his parents or sister, to tell them why he left them in such a brutal, decisive manner.  Other demons nip at his heels as well.  His second life is infected by fear, from the intolerant townsfolk who want him dead, to the way enclosed spaces now remind him of waking up in his coffin and clawing his way out.  More significantly, he allows other people’s hatred of him into his own heart.  At the treatment center, he’s taught how vital it is to look like one of the living, so they have less cause to fear him, but Kieren internalizes this implied denunciation of his new face.  When he washes off his flesh-colored makeup every night, he physically covers the mirror because he can’t bear his own reflection, and he never removes his colored contacts (against his doctor’s recommendation,) even though it hurts his eyes.  It’s not that he pretends to be living; it’s that he knows he isn’t and has been implicitly taught that who he is now isn’t worth being.

This makes Kieren sound like a huge, depressing mess of issues, and he is, but I’m writing about him because he’s more than that.  Through all the guilt and fear and self-loathing, he finds the strength to keep going.  He seeks out the family of one of his victims to take responsibility for what he did, and he realizes that his own family will never heal unless they speak openly about his suicide.  Time and again, he places himself in the path of violence from PDS-hating people, sometimes even to protect rabids so they can receive treatment instead of being killed.  Though he starts out trying to abide by all of society’s rules, the ones that want him to hide himself, hate himself, and apologize to the living for who he is, he grows to learn that he cannot, he should not submit to them.  He shouldn’t yield to those who hate him, and he shouldn’t yield to the hate inside himself.  Kieren is a huge, depressing mess of issues, but he doesn’t give in to any of them.  He learns, endures, and becomes stronger, taking all of his horrible experiences and using them to shape himself into a young undead man who can stand up to any monster, whether it attacks him from the outside or within himself.  And that is astounding.