Favorite Characters: Rick Macy (In the Flesh)

Even though Ricky is only on a few episodes of In the Flesh (even for a series with only nine episodes total, his arc is very short-lived,) his character is still so rich.  He’s deeply flawed but sympathetic in such a rueful way – short as it is, I love his time on the show (Rick-related spoilers.)

Rick doesn’t appear until the second episode, but his presence is felt before that.  For both Kieren and the Macys, Rick is a sort of spector hanging over the entire first season.  His parents have spent four years mourning him after his death in combat in Afghanistan, celebrating ghostly birthdays with his picture on the mantle.  Meanwhile, Kieren blames himself that Rick felt he had to join the army in the first place, and Kieren’s depression and misplaced guilt after Rick’s death led to Kieren’s suicide.  Even without taking PDS into account, it’s a big deal when episode 1 ends with the news that Rick is coming home.

But of course, this is In the Flesh, and so PDS has to come into it.  Rick, the war hero who died in combat, rose from the grave and has spent much of the past four years as exactly the sort of “rabid” that his dad Bill has been fighting against.  This is right around the time that people with PDS are just starting to come home from the treatment center, and PDS folks in Roarton are in hiding for good reason; in the pilot, Bill spearheads a raid on one of Kieren’s neighbors, dragging a woman with PDS out into the street and shooting her in cold blood.  This is the environment, this is the family, that the undead Rick comes home to.

But something’s broken in Bill.  His loathing toward undead “rotters” collides with his love for Rick, and the two feelings can’t reconcile.  He sees Rick in his flesh-toned makeup and colored contacts and goes into complete denial that Rick has PDS.  Despite the jagged-looking scars running down his son’s face held together with surgical staples, despite knowing that Rick died four years ago, he can’t accept it.  He pretends that everything is normal, but not in a “he’s still Rick, no matter what” way.  This is in an unhealthy “nothing has changed, you are definitely 100% living” way.  He takes Rick to the pub, glaring daggers at anyone who suggests that anything is different about Rick and pouring drinks down him even though Rick’s undead body can’t digest anymore and trying to do otherwise makes him sick.  He praises his hero son in the same breath that he condemns the rotter “abominations” who’ve come back to town and urges Rick to go on patrol with him to search for rabids in the woods (and, upon finding some, his aim is not to get them sent to the treatment center.)

And Rick, breaking my heart, goes along with it.  Just like he did when he was alive, joining the army to prove his “manliness” after Bill got freaked about Rick and Kieren being too close, he lets his dad’s prejudices dictate who he is, which absolutely keeps him from finding peace with who he is now.  He physically can’t act like nothing’s changed, but Bill’s attitudes force him to try, anyway, to the detriment of his own physical and mental well-being.  That shot of Rick looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, covering the scarred half of his face with one hand and trying to smile, just kills me.  In his limited time on the show, Rick is caught between Bill and Kieren, who are both battling for his soul.  Bill is trying to make him what he can never be again, and Kieren is trying to help him acknowledge who he is.  You know which side you want to win out, but even as you root for Rick to go with Kieren, you know Bill won’t let things lie.

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.