#it's interesting particularly to view it in context with his birthday ep i think

[pynkhues]

hi hey hello would you please write me a miniature essay on why you think kendall tried to tell caroline the truth (of all people) and whether you think—had caroline listened, even inattentively—he would've actually been able to get the words out?

Hi hey hello, sorry it’s taken me twelve million years to answer this, it got swallowed up by my inbox, but YES, I am absolutely fascinated by all the kids’ relationship with Caroline, and in particular that choice to have Caroline be – maybe – the first person Kendall ever actually told.

How members of the family found out, or almost found out, about what happened at Shiv’s wedding, feels really symbolic of the deeper relationships beyond the discovery. From Logan knowing before Kendall could ever tell him, and using that to not only strongarm his son professionally but to re-create a half-real-half-manufactured intimacy in order to control him (and I would argue protect him as well), to Shiv almost finding out in 2.04 out of her own sense of vulnerability and insecurity, to Kendall finally, cathartically actually caving and telling Shiv and Roman in Italy in a way that didn’t so much heal a break but maybe reset a dislocation between the three of them.

Kendall almost telling Caroline in England is that in spades too, and I think a lot about how the title of that episode, The Return, is so apt because it’s more than just a return to the UK. It’s a return to childhood for the Golden Trio in revisiting their mother, but it’s also a return to trauma in so many ways – most literally, of course, for Kendall, who ends up at the family home of the boy he killed, but also for Shiv who’s been forced back into the role of capital-d Daughter, ergo outsider to the machismo-soaked inner circle of her own family, for Tom who’s reconfronted with the cruise ship documents Greg salvaged, and I think for Caroline too, who’s sort of re-faced with the fact that her children chose their father and shunted her to the outside of the family.

(This isn’t really here nor there for this particular post, but I’m always fascinated that this ‘return’ pre-empts a larger one for Logan in the next episode as he returns to Scotland and is seemingly confronted with the memory of his sister).

I think in that sense, Caroline’s a sort of outsider to the inside, or an insider on the outside, depending on how you want to look at it, and that positions her pretty uniquely in the family itself. There’s a space to that, room, which given how tightly entangled everything and everyone else is, I think Kendall felt maybe there was a way out through.

An exit from his father, from the man he himself has become, through his mother. Like a choice he could retrospectively re-make - he always picked his dad, what would life have been if he'd picked his mother?

He knows deep down that she isn’t capable of this sort of emotional intimacy, but Kendall was drowning and I do think his hug and brief flicker of closeness with Shiv in 2.04 pmade him seek out the perceived open-embrace of the women in his family versus the perceived close-fist of the men. Kendall canonically is pretty sexist anyway, and I do think he expects more emotional labour from Shiv and Caroline than he does from, say, Roman, Connor and his dad, but at that point in s2, I do think it makes sense given how his interactions with the family had gone overall.

But yeah, more to the point of your ask, I think Kendall was thrust back into two pasts – one where he’d done something awful, and the other a childhood marked simply by before (before he’d done what he’d done, before the whole mess with his dad, god, even before the drugs) – and together that formed a complicated, twisting cocktail which meant seeking comfort in his mother was something romanticised. He wanted someone to shoulder some of the emotional labour, wanted relief, and he wanted looking after - he wanted a return to childhood - and for a minute, in his mother’s country, in the motherland, he could pretend she was capable of giving him any of that.