more in the flesh thoughts: such a good rewatch now in 2026. the walker family is a perfect example of The Kind of Family They Are— kieren's dad in particular, where at the end of season one you get this big dramatic heartbreaking scene where his dad, who is just blandly pleasant the whole time to this point, is finally pushed into a breakdown where he talks about what it was like to find kieren's body, to be the one who carried him home after he killed himself. and in the early parts of season 2, his dad is still making an effort to express himself more and talk about things— because he did finally have to see that the kind of home he helped build, where no one was ever allowed to be too upset or too out of line, did incredible damage to both of his children (kieren's suicide and jem as a 14 year old joining a fascist paramilitary force)
and then as season 2 progresses, we start to reach the actual heart of the problem: not kieren's suicide or even kieren's rise from the dead, but the fact that the walker parents do not know their children at all. kieren's dad is so uncertain about who his son actually is that he is persuaded by the anti-undead government and cultural forces to believe that, even if kieren is somehow not a dangerous criminal, it would be better for him to just accept his treatment as such because What If. it would be so much trouble and fuss to fight against it when you could just keep your head down and hope for better in the future.
which is still such a perfect encapsulation of the show's view on homophobia— i saw someone talk about how the small town of roarton wasn't homophobic aside from the one vile murderous homophobe example in season 1 of rick's father, but i think that is a misunderstanding of the way societal homophobia works. kieren was a stranger to his own family. he was so fundamentally lonely and ostracized that when the One Other Queer Person He Knew Died, even though he had a ticket out of that town on an art scholarship, he literally could not imagine a world that was livable. people being blandly tolerant isn't the same as people being supportive—and we see the same thing with the town and his family about the undead. towards the end of season 1 and early season 2, we've moved towards undead acceptance. but by the midway point, we've taken a million steps back and we're worse off than we were before, because none of the people who just held their nose and let the undead reenter society actually wanted them there—and the second the political winds started to crack in their favor, they were foaming at the mouth to take away whatever rights had been shakily gained.
and kieren's dad, who wept so brokenly about carrying kieren's dead body in his arms, can't be moved to see that he's doing it all over again.
