UNITED KINGDOM
Den of Geek
REVIEW
Louisa Mellor
This review contains spoilers.
Give me the child and I’ll give you the man, says an old Jesuit adage I’m paraphrasing and probably misattributing, but nonetheless the wisdom stands: what we learn in childhood forms us as adults. Of Broken’s many messages, that’s the loudest.
In childhood, Michael Kerrigan learned there was something wrong with him. He learned to keep quiet. He learned the sexual abuse he suffered was his fault. None of that’s exclusive to Catholicism – those are the lessons all abused children learn and they’re the fastest to sink in. Unlearning them can be the job of a lifetime.
It’s a job that Father Michael, now in his fifties, is still working on. As he struggles to support his bruised community and atone for his past wrongs, he’s also trying to make sense of the abuse he suffered. Why him? Why was it allowed to continue? And why didn’t he speak out about it? Episode three shows him still reeling from the trauma, and, in its most powerful scene, finally confronting his painfully indifferent abuser.
Father Michael’s story is Broken’s most affecting strand. Not because it’s the saddest—you can hardly rank these desperate stories by weight of wretchedness, they’re dreadful to a one—but because it has the most complexity. As a child, Sean Bean’s character suffered physical and sexual abuse by priests and then became a priest, a vocation in which he clearly believes. Michael was terribly wronged by the adults in his life, later went on to wrong others—women, and now lives a life of atonement. He gets angry. He can be selfish. He could have, but didn’t, save a boy’s life for want of picking up the telephone. He struggles to square his anger and pain with his faith’s aspirations to forgiveness and mercy. Put simply, he’s not perfect.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.