The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article contains discussions of child abuse.

I genuinely cannot believe that I have not seen more people rhapsodizing about Reunion.

It’s one of those shows that I feel the need to go out into the streets and start telling people about – it’s probably my favourite single piece of TV to come out this year (though that Doctor Who episode this weekend comes close, to be honest), a compelling, intriguing, and beautifully-constructed crime thriller and family drama that starts where so many of these stories would end and finds an extraordinary depth in the would-be epilogue. And, of course, it’s a show that centres deaf people and the deaf community in a way that exceptionally few have done before – But what I’d really like to talk about is how it handles victims of institutionalized abuse, and the depth and weight it gives to this aspect of its story.

Reunion follows Daniel Brennan (Matthew Gurney – in what, for me, is probably the performance of the year – who also has plenty of interesting and important stuff to say about deaf people in the media that’s well worth checking out), a deaf man recently released from prison after he killed his childhood best friend years before. Brennan has only one thing on his mind: revenge against the teacher, Monroe, who abused him and many other children at a residential school for deaf children during his childhood.

I was really impressed with how the show handled the topic of sexual abuse in general – it’s tastefully done in terms of literal depiction, but unflinching when it comes to impact. There are three featured characters who were victims of this abuse that we meet in the show: Brennan himself, his childhood best friend Ray (Ace Mahbaz), and Sean (Stephen Collins), and each of them responds to the abuse in completely different ways – and the approach the show takes to them explores the expanse of reactions to sexual abuse and the abuser in ways I have rarely seen done so well.

For Brennan, the answer is obvious: he wants revenge, an explanation, a reason. He wants to make Monroe pay for what he has done, not just to Brennan, but to the other students at the school, too. Which, I think, broadly, is the way we expect to see victims of abuse react to their abuser. It makes sense – their abuser hurt them, and now they want to cause them hurt in return. Without Gurney’s brilliant performance, it could have fallen into rote territory, but the excellent script touches on how this abuse affected the rest of Brennan’s life in other ways – from dropping out of school and remaining unable to read and write as an adult to exile from his community, the abuse he experienced had a negative impact on the practical aspects of his existence, too.

But then there’s Sean, a character with just a couple of episodes of screentime, who was also a victim of Monroe’s abuse. For Sean, Monroe has been a constant figure throughout his life, even into adulthood – when Brennan visits him to try and discover Monroe’s whereabouts, Monroe has remained one of the few consistent figures in his life offering him support. As a deaf man, the world that Sean has grown up in has not been particularly welcoming to him; Monroe, despite his abuse, has been an ongoing presence in his life. The institute where Monroe encountered Sean offered him access to vulnerable children who already felt isolated, and that isolation allowed him to exert control over Sean far past the actual instances of sexual abuse. Sean goes as far to defend Monroe when Brennan criticizes his behaviour – for Sean, to accept the harm that Monroe has done is to lose one of the few people in his life he feels he can really rely on, so rationalizing that abuse is the more appealing option. It’s a truly heart-breaking storyline, probably the one I found most affecting in the show, and I was particularly impressed with Collins’ performance, which balanced this duality in Sean with his limited screentime.

And, finally, we have Ray. Ray, before his death at the hands of Brennan, was an enormously important figure in the deaf community of Reunion – an advocate, a teacher, a father. He even returned to the very school he and Brennan were abused at, in the hopes of making things better. But, as he reveals to Brennan moments before his death – he sees himself as complicit in the abuse Monroe committed against other boys, having complied with elements on Monroe’s abuse in order to protect himself from suffering further. It’s an incredibly bold choice for a character who, throughout the series, is spoken as highly of as Ray; the show goes out of its way to build him up as a respectable, passionate, campaigning figure, and uses this reveal not as an unsympathetic attempt to undercut that, but to contextualize where his passion for justice and kindness has come from.

And, despite all his attempts to make amends for his perceived ill deeds, it’s the memory of that abuse which eventually kills him – as Brennan is triggered by a touch to the back of the neck from Ray, an attempt an reconciliation that instead reminds Brennan of Monroe’s abuse tactics. It’s a phenomenally tragic ending for Ray, a visceral detail that underlines the point of the show at large: that abuse stretches far beyond the act, and leaves a painful legacy of destruction that can twist even loving relationships into something toxic.

Reunion is a truly exceptional show, and I can’t recommend it enough – for the excellent performances, for the brilliant story, but most of all for the intelligent, unflinching, and bold approach it takes to abuse exacted against those in marginalized groups. If you have watched the show, I would love to hear your take on it below!

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(header image via Deadline)