Relationship Spotlight: The Walkers (In the Flesh)

To be fair, I’m largely focusing on Kieren’s relationships with everyone else, but this is still the first time I’ve done a Relationship Spotlight on an entire family.  The Walker home certainly isn’t an idyllic place – they have lots of issues to sort through, mostly (but not entirely) related to Kieren coming back from the dead and returning home with PDS.  However, much like I applaud Kieren for facing up to his darkness, I applaud the Walkers for digging through all that messiness and finding the family that got a bit lost along the way.  (Includes spoilers.)

When Kieren first comes home, no one knows how to react.  His sister Jem, part of the zombie-killing HVF, doesn’t trust him anymore.  She calls him a “demon” and demands that he prove it’s really him, visibly recoiling at his natural, undead face.  (On a side note – I love the how the show plays with their sibling dynamic.  Though Jem was 14 when Kieren died at 18, she’s grown in the intervening years and he hasn’t.  She’s physically older than him now, but he’s still such an older brother to her.  It’s an interesting detail.)  His parents kick-start an uneasy, unspoken pact of forced cheerfulness, where everyone knows Kieren has PDS but tries to avoid mentioning it.  Kieren’s dad blithely talks about the films Kieren missed while he was “away” and plans movie nights, while his mom is surprised by his “tan” (it’s the makeup.)  No matter what they do, the basic fact of Kieren’s new existence keeps confronting them, and they don’t know how to handle that.  When they prepare his favorite meal and discover he no longer eats, they have him pretend, sawing his knife and fork in the air above his plate.  When someone drops by the house unexpectedly – initially, Kieren’s entire presence is a secret from their anti-PDS village – he’s shoved into a closet to keep him out of sight, even though tight spaces give him a panic attack. 

Kieren feels it, of course.  Whether it’s Jem’s outright hostility or his parents’ tiptoeing, he can’t avoid the way they treat him differently.  He does what he can – when his parents try too hard, he forces a smile and goes along with it, and when Jem accuses him of being the monster that wears her brother’s face, he tells her something about her that only he would know.  The more he learns to accept himself and his PDS, the tougher it gets, because his family is in a “love the son/sibling, fear the zombie” stage, and when he looks or acts undead, they have a harder time seeing him as Kieren.  They’re less likely to believe him what he says when they look into his eyes rather than his colored contacts, and recollections about his time during the Rising are considered inappropriate dinner conversation.

It’s complicated, it’s hard, and sometimes it hurts, but all the same, Kieren’s family loves him.  It’s not just that he comes home a zombie; he comes back from the dead, and that’s incredible.  That part isn’t all sweetness and light – he’d killed himself, and everyone in the family is still working through that – but it’s strong.  Kieren’s mother bursts into tears when she first sees him, not because he’s undead, but because her son is standing before her again and she’s overcome.  When Jem’s HVF friends are out for PDS blood and breaking down doors, the Walkers bring out guns and chainsaws to protect Kieren from their neighbors.  When Kieren wants to confess his sins to the parents of a woman he killed in his untreated state, Jem accompanies him.  When Kieren is in a dark place and retreats, his mother remembers how badly that turned out in his first life and she seeks him out, offering comfort and support any way she can.  They fumble, they say the wrong things, and they can’t always see him beneath the PDS, but at the end of the day, they keep trying because he means too much to them to squander their second chance with him.