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meta-squash · 1 year

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(This meta went from being one structured thought to a lot of rambling about Kieren and Rick, so I’m sorry.)

I wonder if Kieren would have ended up staying with Rick if Bill Macy hadn’t killed him.

Kieren’s resurrection after his suicide means he has a chance to start up again where he left off. When he first comes back that doesn’t really mean anything to him; he didn’t want to be alive in the first place, he’s scared and alone and uncertain and as far as he knows, everything is still as shitty as it was when he left, plus now everyone also hates him because he’s PDS. He meets Amy and that puts some light back into his life, of course.

But the revelation that Rick is also back is massive at first, because it means that the Rising not only undid what Kieren did to himself, but what happened to make him do that in the first place. He’s not starting where he left off, he’s backing up even further.

To Kieren, this is a chance at a do-over. He can rekindle his relationship with Rick and maybe it’ll be better this time and maybe they can be more than they were before and do more than they did before.

Only, Rick sees it in essentially the opposite way. He’s more beholden to his father, and the only times he does stand up to Bill is when Kieren is in (potentially) mortal danger. Kieren tells Rick more than once that he doesn’t have to listen to Bill or do what he says and Rick responds with “He’s my dad” or gives him a look or whatever.

Rick is 100% right when he says Kieren shouldn’t blame him for his own death. But Kieren is also 100% right when he accuses Rick of not saying goodbye (and implies that it’s not the first time something like that has happened) and without saying it outright essentially accuses him of leading him on.

Which is why I feel like if Rick had lived, Kieren would have ended up leaving anyway. Every single scene has Rick unable to meet Kieren emotionally. Rick is not wholly to blame; he was under Bill’s abusive, controlling thumb before and he is again now. But even the brief scene when they’re alone, Rick can’t meet Kieren where Kieren needs him to. Kieren loves Rick, but he has an independent, rebellious, self-aware streak that Rick doesn’t have. He wants to fit in, sure, but he also can’t help but stand up and call bullshit if he thinks that needs to happen. And I think if Rick had lived, Kieren would have been less and less interested in hiding, in trying not to rock the boat, in having their relationship confined to the den or the dead of night or “day trips” or whatever.

This was supposed to be a do-over, starting again from before they left off. In fact, starting again from when Rick left off, not Kieren. But Rick is unable to to change the cycle while he’s still alive, and I wonder if he’d ever be able to even if he stayed alive. Because that conversation in the car, and the confrontation in front of the cave, all of that reveals to Kieren that maybe the do-over isn’t all that worth it, because he’s not being treated like it’s worth it. Rick is treating him just as distantly as he was before -- maybe even more distantly, since his relationship with Kieren and Kieren’s feelings for him are 100% confirmed by Kieren’s death, so maybe he’s trying even more to hide their relationship now that it’s known. And he now has this outsider perspective of Amy to show him what she sees and thinks about it, and I think even in the brief time Kieren and Rick have together in series 1 he’s already kind of frustrated that nothing seems to have changed for the better. The good thing is that Rick is back, and it certainly hasn’t been long enough that his love for Rick has waned in any way, but I think his expectations went from “What’s the point of coming back when I wanted to go anyway?” to “If Rick is back we can start over again and things will be better.” And when things aren’t better, when they’re the same as they were before and in fact are maybe even worse because now their relationship is out there which means Bill is watching for it even more, that massive upswing Kieren experienced is now deflating with each pinprick of frustration or disappointment or physical threat or whatever.

So if Rick had lived for this to be a proper do-over, Kieren would have expected change, would have expected something that would make their past actions and their present state worth it, or that would change the path they had been on before to some other, more positive direction. Would Rick have been able to do that?

I don’t think Rick ever expected to have a sustainable future with Kieren. He sort of says so in the car when he talks about Kieren getting into art school and leaving for “new places, new people.” But it’s not even the expectation that Kieren would have a future and he wouldn’t or something like that. Aside from Rick’s fear of his father, I don’t think he was ever comfortable enough in himself and his own feelings to be as in love with Kieren as Kieren was with him, and I think he either expected for Kieren to go away to uni and find someone else, or for Kieren to go away to uni and Rick would gradually be able to comfortably distance himself.

Because Rick had friends in Roarton, had a social life and some sort of positive status in school and in the town, in a way that Kieren obviously did not. Kieren talks like Rick was quite literally the only thing he had in all of Roarton that was keeping him grounded and who accepted him and even bothered to speak to him. He talks like without Rick he was completely alone. But it also means that Rick’s friendship with Kieren, in the eyes of the rest of Roarton, was a weird little black spot on his otherwise acceptable self. So if Kieren went away to art school, found someone new who loved him as much or more and could actually express and match it, Rick would have been able to just continue to exist in Roarton. The hiccup of course is always Bill, and would Rick be able to even have a happy existence in Roarton always under his father’s eye and thumb, I don’t know.

But it certainly seems as though he was very aware of the intensity of Kieren’s feelings for him and the way his own for Kieren didn’t match in strength. (Side note: I’ve always wanted to know if Kieren was at all self-aware of being in Rick’s shoes re: Simon’s feelings for him at the start.) And they were both young and I’m sure it was something Rick both didn’t understand how to and just plain couldn’t handle. Especially when something like that was so obvious to someone like Bill. So his own escape to Preston (whether forced by Bill or by his own will) is not only an escape from Bill but also an escape from having to confront Kieren’s feelings for him and his for Kieren.

And since Rick didn’t know about Kieren’s death until he was already back in Roarton, his reaction to the lack of letters as well as the comments about what he expected Kieren to be finding at uni means that he fully expected to return to find a (living) Kieren who had moved on from him or at least whose all-consuming inferno of love had cooled to easier to maintain coals. Perhaps he even expected to return to no Kieren at all, since it’s 5 years later and Kieren could easily have stayed in whatever city he would have gone to art school in.

Instead he finds a Kieren who has not only not moved on, but who died because of his feelings for him (among other things). Is Rick able to give Kieren the kind of do-over he wants at this time? I doubt it. Would he have ever been able to give Kieren the kind of love that he wanted? I sort of doubt that as well. Even without the stifling, toxic influence of Bill, I think Rick’s love for Kieren was much tamer, more casual.

But Kieren’s intense love and need for that love to be returned also means that I think he would have been much more aware of the things that he wasn’t getting in this do-over situation. The first time, he was just taking whatever he could get. This time, it’s obvious that he wants to be able to be with Rick (literally and metaphorically) in certain ways and he’s going to push until that happens, more than he did before, and I think if his pushing affected no change he would have eventually said “fuck this.” Not because he doesn’t love Rick just as much the second time around, but because I think he gives slightly less of a fuck about how people see him, since he’s already been through that pain once and he’s still gay and still an outcast the way he was before and he’s PDS on top of it all. Rick still very much cares about how people see him. Especially his dad. And if none of that is able to change and somehow meet Kieren in the middle, he’s going to realize that it’s just never going to happen and he’s going to have to deal with that disappointment and then he’s going to say “fuck this.” Because the benefit of this second life is the chance to change things and I think he kind of already has that thought in his head to some extent, and if he’s the only one trying to take advantage of this second chance and it’s not being reciprocated with the same energy, he’s not going to be able to emotionally stand the stagnation, even if he desperately wants to. And I think if his trajectory still wound up in a similar place that he is at the start of series 2, he’d be self-aware enough not to want to stay because there’s a difference between wanting to escape and wanting to grow, and Kieren before his death was the former but Kieren after, especially in series 2, is definitely the latter.

#in the flesh #in the flesh meta #bbc in the flesh #itf #sorry sorry i'm just falling back into the rabbit hole of this show #i'm sure all of this has been said already but it's been 7 years and i can't remember anymore #is this even a coherent meta? i don't know it might just be word vomit

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