Relationship Spotlight: Rick Macy & Kieren Walker (In the Flesh)

Oh good gracious, Kieren and Rick.  In the Flesh hooked me by the end of the pilot, but it owned me by the end of the first season, and Kieren and Rick were a huge part of that.  Looking deeper at this really compelling, massively complicated relationship (major spoilers for series 1.)

In a way, as Kieren navigates figuring out himself as a young partially-deceased man in series 1, he sees two paths laid out for him by fellow PDS folk Amy (embracing her undeadness) and Rick (going along with his dad’s full-on denial that Rick is undead.)  Kieren himself falls somewhere in the middle, not sure how to reconcile what’s become of him with how he still feels.  If Amy is encouraging Kieren toward a new life, Rick is inviting him back into an old one, but it’s a life where neither of them fit anymore, not like they used to.  They’re still themselves, of course, but they also are people with PDS, and denying that fact won’t change it.

Strangely enough, it’s this pull from Rick that really helps Kieren move forward in coming to terms with his PDS.  With Amy, Kieren tends to dig in his heels and urge caution, warning her not to rock the boat, but when he sees how Rick acquiesces to his dad’s anti-PDS rhetoric and violence, it shakes Kieren out of his hesistancy.  It makes him stop and go, “Wait – this is really messed up.”  He still cares for Rick, enormously so, and in his horror at Rick being caught up in something so conducive to self-loathing, it helps Kieren say, not just “stand up for who you are,” but “stand up for who we are.”  In trying to save Rick from his dad’s toxicity, Kieren finds a bit of peace for himself as well.

You get the sense that this whole thing is a repeat of when they were alive.  We don’t have too many details on Kieren and Rick’s past relationship.  We know that they were close, that Rick’s dad freaked out after Kieren “made [Rick] a mix CD,” that Rick joined the army essentially to prove he wasn’t a sissy, and that Rick’s death in Afghanistan sunk Kieren into a depression that ended in his suicide.  We know Kieren blamed himself for Rick’s death, which further influenced his decision to end his own life (side note – I likee the conversation between Rick and Kieren about how the latter died, and how shocked Rick is by it.  How he simply can’t believe that Kieren could have killed himself in his grief over Rick, how he’d been so sure that Kieren was going to “make it out” by leaving Roarton for art school, that Kieren would’ve been better off without him.) 

It’s a similar pattern, with Rick’s desire to placate his dad’s prejudices wreaking havoc on his personal well-being and Kieren getting caught in the wake of it, but while Rick is falling into old habits, Kieren sees the writing on the wall.  He doesn’t want to go down that road again.  He’s more assertive, and he begs Rick to be so too, for his own sake as well as Kieren’s.  And though, thanks to Rick’s horrific wreck of a dad, it still ends in tragedy, both boys are stronger in their own parts.  Under Kieren’s influence, Rick stops lying about himself, and in the devastating aftermath, with Rick murdered by his own father and dumped outside Kieren’s house, Kieren is shattered but keeps on going.  He confronts Rick’s dad and throws the contemptible thing he’s just done back in his face, and even as his heartbreak overwhelms him, he makes a conscious choice to “stay” this time, to lean on his family and friends rather than collapse into his depression and be consumed by it.