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.

Relationship Spotlight: Simon Monroe & Kieren Walker (In the Flesh)

(Season 2 spoilers.)

This is quite possibly one of the most complicated romantic relationships I’ve ever seen on TV, and I really appreciate seeing such rich conflict in a story about a same-sex couple.  While there are exceptions, when same-sex couples come up against roadblocks on TV, it’s often specifically about their sexuality, frequently depicting a new relationship alongside a coming-out narrative or a storyline about external bigotry.  Not that these stories can’t be compelling and well-done, of course (Emily and Naomi’s story in the third season of Skins is absolutely gorgeous,) it’s good to see variety in the kinds of stories that are told, and Kieren and Simon’s problems have nothing to do with orientation.

Really, every relationship Kieren has in the show is about facilitating his journey in accepting his PDS.  This makes sense – when you’re undead and (relatively) newly-medicated to manage that condition, when your society views you as a monster and hates you for the things you did in your untreated state, that’s what’s going to be on your mind most of the time.  And so, everyone Kieren encounters offers a slightly different lens through which to understand his PDS.  He can be encouraged by them or push back against them, but it’s all about that road to acceptance, and dishy Irishman or not, Simon is no exception.

As one of the disciples of the Undead Prophet who’s come to Roarton to identify the First Risen, Simon has a totally different perspective on PDS than Kieren.  At this point in the series, Kieren has learned to live in his own skin, but he’s still internalized the idea that PDS is something wrong with him, something to disguise so the living don’t get too uncomfortable.  Simon, who preaches undead superiority, is deeply disappointed in Kieren when they first meet, despite being drawn to him.  He makes pointed comments about Kieren’s flesh-tone makeup and colored contacts, shaking his head at Kieren for being ashamed of who he is.  It’s true that Kieren has a way to go in terms of self-love, but as someone who never loses sight of his culpability for his actions during the Rising, he also can’t get behind the idea that people with PDS are “ascended.”

So their initial interactions are mostly ideological, with Kieren arguing with Simon that he’s not denying who he is but at the same time feeling stirred by Simon’s message of self-acceptance.  And in the midst of all that, they’re also attracted to each other, with each getting continually pulled in by the other.  It’s a really fascinating mess of interpersonal back-and-forth and inner conflict; Kieren’s dealings with Simon have him doubting what he thinks of himself, and Simon’s longing for Kieren has him doubting what he believes.  It’s a big deal when Simon puts on his makeup and contacts to go to tea with Kieren’s family, just like it’s hugely important that Kieren wants Simon present when he’s finally ready to remove his own makeup.

It all comes to a dizzying head of love, religion, and politics when Simon discovers that Kieren appears to be the First Risen.  It’s with awe in his voice that he relays what he’s found to the Undead Prophet, (“he’s beautiful,”) but the rug is sickly yanked out from under him when he learns of the the Prophet’s intention:  the First Risen is to be sacrificed in order to bring on a second Rising, and the Prophet expects Simon to be the one to do it. 

I mean, wow.  How’s that for drama?  Everything Simon feels for Kieren colliding with everything he believes, the teachings that essentially saved him after he left the treatment center now telling him he has to kill the boy he cares for.  This is what people mean when they talk about someone “warring inside themselves.”  Holy crap.  Watching Simon wrestle with these two immense forces in his mind in an experience that leaves you wrung-out, but it’s also a genuine dramatic pleasure to see him tear down the sky of all he’s built up for the sake of Kieren.  I’ll say it again:  wow.

Relationship Spotlight: Kieren Walker & Amy Dyer (In the Flesh)

A lot of bleak stuff happens on In the Flesh, and Kieren gets more than his fair share of it.  In the midst of all the sadness, regret, fear, injustice, and confusion that fills his new life, he’s in need of some spark of light, and for the most part, that light comes from his friendship with Amy.

Kieren comes across Amy when he first ventures out upon returning home.  He avoids her, fearing the society that hates him and abhorring the undead face beneath his makeup.  He left the house because he couldn’t bear to sit there any longer, but now, he wants to retreat again.  But Amy’s not what he expected.  She doesn’t fear or hate him; she’s like him.  She recognizes the PDS features he disguises, but she doesn’t mind them.  In him, she sees a potential kindred spirit.  She knows what he’s been doing since he came home – looking at old photos, wallowing in old memories, and tearing himself apart with guilt – and she knows that’s no way to live.

Amy’s death was the polar opposite of Kieren’s.  While he committed suicide, overwhelmed by pain and remorse, her life was taken by cancer.  Like him, she died young, but she died against her will, her health and vitality ripped from her.  Though Kieren has a hard time returning to life at all, let alone with PDS, Amy doesn’t waste a shred of her second chance.  Kieren absolutely needs her in his life, to remind him that life can more than just pain and that it needs to be lived.

Since Amy is quick to come to terms with her PDS, she’s also an important force in helping Kieren to accept himself.  Sometimes she simply leads by example, going “au naturel” (sans makeup/contacts) in public and speaking openly about being undead.  Sometimes she confronts Kieren about the self-loathing he pretends is really just about fitting in – she asks him how far he’ll have to go before he’ll let himself be who he is.  Sometimes she stands up for her and Kieren’s rights when he wants to back down, and sometimes she simply tells him how beautiful he is; a boy who can’t look at his own reflection needs to hear that, and not enough people tell Kieren.  While he doesn’t embrace the Undead Prophet’s teachings like Amy does, Kieren definitely grows under her influence, becoming bolder and more confident about being himself. 

Kieren additionally finds a confidante in Amy.  Her natural openness make her safe, and her curiosity pulls many of Kieren’s private feelings out of hiding.  Within days of knowing her, he opens up about his suicide and his history with Rick.  She accepts it all with sympathy rather than pity – no judgment, just comfort, and going forward, she doesn’t treat him like he’ll break.  They even joke, lightly, about his past depression, and when Rick returns to town (undead,) she tells Kieren while others try to keep it from him “for his own good.”  It’s a tough love approach that isn’t always what Kieren needs, but she generally knows when to ease up and stop pushing.

That’s a lot about why Amy is good for Kieren, and since he’s the main character, it makes sense that the relationship is largely from his perspective.  It’s not one-sided, though; Kieren is much more obviously in need of a good friend, but Amy needs him, too.  Her constant jokes and chatter serve in part to fill empty spaces, and Kieren keeps her from being alone.  His quiet, gentle friendship evens her out.  In Amy’s other relationships, we see defensiveness (Phillip) and bravado (Simon,) both fueled by a desire to be loved and a fear that she won’t be, but Kieren is a sure presence, someone who’s on her side and won’t leave.  He bemusedly accepts the mantle of her BDFF – Best Dead Friend Forever – and doesn’t plan to give it up anytime soon.

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.

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.