Almost Human Fan Con — Name: John Kennex Rank: Detective, Delta...

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Name: John Kennex
Rank: Detective, Delta Division
Honors: Medal for Valor, Purple Shield, Police Life-Saving Medal, Excellent Police Duty, Marksmanship: Expert

Description on File: Det. Kennex has served with distinction and high honors in the department. Often characterized as an “unconventional thinker” and “driven” in annual performance evaluations. Led investigation and tactical raid of Case #34P-C91244 last year. Kennex’s team was ambushed. KIA: Tactical squad Bravo One-Seven and Kennex’s partner (Martin Pelham, Det.).

Kennex has returned to active duty after an 18-month medical leave. (MedFile #19FFPD, See SubSection: AMPUTATION, See SubSection: COMA) Initial PolPsych eval suggests Kennex may suffer from depression, trauma-onset OCD, PTSD and psychological rejection of his prosthetic limb.

A Cop’s Cop
John Kennex is a career police officer (and son of former, disgraced officer Edward Kennex) whose faith in the necessity of his department appears to be unshaken even after serious injury in the line of duty and over a year away from the force. The loss of his leg and, more devastating, his human partner in a violent ambush by inSyndicate have left him, instead, with what seems to be more a lack of confidence in himself. Captain Maldonado, John’s personal friend as well as his superior officer, convinces him to return to work over orders from the department psychiatrist and over Kennex’s own reservations. From there on out, Kennex seems almost to overcompensate for his injury - primarily the synthetic leg he clearly hates - and his perceived misjudgment of two years prior by being as hard-nosed and confident as he can be.

It would be interesting to see what kind of cop Kennex made before the inSyndicate ambush - if he was as difficult with unfriendly coworkers like Paul and seemingly reckless as he is now. The fact that he advanced his team into the ambush kill zone over the recommendations of his MX seems to suggest that he was never overly concerned with rules and regulations, but there’s a difference between confident swagger and overconfident risk-taking, and Kennex seems always to be flirting with that line.

What is enormously clear, however, is that where before Kennex may have taken bold moves that endangered other members of the force, he is now less willing to take such chances and mostly puts himself in harm’s way. This is probably less a feeling of invulnerability than it is a feeling that he’s still making up for the mistakes he’s made, atoning for the loss of life for which he feels personally responsible. His psychological trauma certainly contributes to his unwillingness to trust others, and make his initial relationship with Dorian rocky. Exacerbating that, of course, is the fact that a synthetic judged his partner’s waning life to be not worth saving, but it’s interesting to note that Kennex doesn’t have a problem with technology generally. He relies upon mind-altering tech to try to forcibly extract his own memories and isn’t averse to using tech in the field; it’s the integration of humanity and technology that seems to be a sticking point for him. The manner and reasoning for his father’s death and investigation by the police could have something to do with that.

John must always have a bloody nose
Relationships
Perhaps the most interesting development in John’s character is on the interpersonal front; he’s very much a “typical” gritty police officer in the vein of a hundred other TV police detectives before him, detectives with whom he might even be familiar (Dirty Harry or Lennie Brisco, anyone?). Kennex’s gruff, overbearing, rule-breaking cop persona feels almost charmingly antiquated in a futuristic world of androids and Chromes, a little like Raylan Givens’ cowboy hat in a modern Marshals’ office. Surely this hard-assed attitude is easy for Kennex to fall back on and to use as armor when his authority and competence are questioned by fellow officers, but it doesn’t get him far with the infuriatingly human Dorian or the quietly intuitive Detective Stahl.
Don't be fooled, 90% of the show is Maldonado being exasperated with John
Captain Maldonado knows Kennex well enough to allow him to keep him tough image intact for the sake of dignity, but Stahl seems to see through it at times, and Dorian outright ignores it. This is what makes interactions with Dorian so amusingly frustrating for Kennex; early on in their relationship, he tries to bluster his way through conversations with a person who cannot be blustered. For all Dorian’s humanity, he is still a logical thinker, and he doesn’t have any use for the decoys and feints that John hides behind. Watching John learn that all his dancing around Dorian is completely useless, and, ultimately, watching him give in to Dorian’s unending perseverance is possibly the most rewarding part of Almost Human. More than the funny man/straight man dynamic, Dorian and Kennex are two damaged people finding out where their rough edges fit together, and that’s a lot more fun to watch than season four thousand and sixty-two of Law and Order.

Valerie Stahl, the woman Kennex clearly has eyes for, provides another appealing upset to the typical tough-girl-cop routine and provides things Kennex can’t get elsewhere. Dorian is infinitely intelligent and Kennex has great cop instincts, but Stahl literally sees the world differently and provides perspective Kennex often lacks. She’s extremely smart and obviously a capable cop - and more than a little admiring of Kennex’s police work - but more than that, she’s diametrically different from Kennex. She is quiet and firm where he is loud and cagey. She’s younger than Kennex (in experience if not in reality; her Chrome genetics may mean she isn’t as young as she appears), and obviously grew up privileged, which gives her a unique style of working that complements Kennex in a way that seems surprising (and, of course, very gratifying) to him. He respects her observations almost immediately, when viewers might have expected to see him brush her off at first, given his tendency to distrust; her pretty face certainly doesn’t hurt, here, but he never patronizes her, which suggests he appreciates a different way of doing things as long as it proves effective.

Finally, Kennex’s friendship with Captain Maldonado is the background hum to the entire show. While Kennex-and-Dorian are the show’s beating heart, Kennex’s quiet, personal interactions with his captain suggest years of hard-earned trust on both ends. It’s interesting and important to see the tough-guy cop have so much respect for a female superior officer, and even more so to see that their relationship is clearly that of friends, and not a mother-son or former-romance relationship. It’s professional when it needs to be and more like buddies when it doesn’t, but of everyone in the show, Maldonado is the one Kennex actually talks to on more than one occasion, and that says a lot about both characters.
[text by iwritesometimes]
john kennex almost human ahfancon karl urban iwritesometimes character panel day late due to technical difficulties! reminder that anyone can add commentary to character panels!

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