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[cyborg_cop]

IC Information;

Character Name; John Reginald Kennex

Canon; http://almost-human.wikia.com/wiki/Almost_Human_Wiki The fandom wiki

Canon Point; Post ‘Straw Man’ (season one finale)

Age; 41, birthdate 7 June 2007

 

House;  Hel

Power; shadow control

 

Personality;

 

John is not the easiest guy to get along with. Perhaps it has something to do with the seventeen-month long coma he was in after getting blown up and his partner killed by the woman he thought was his girlfriend who—it seems—was in league with a dangerous insurgent cell known only as inSyndicate. That’s the kind of thing that might make a guy have some trust issues. 

Not being able to remember the incident nor several months prior to it, in fact, only makes him more anxious and unwilling to trust people. He visits a Recollectionist—a not particularly legal or safe attempt to reawaken those lost memories—because not knowing is killing him.  He is willing to take the risk to find out what happened and why, because Kennex hates mysteries, driven to do anything he can to solve them. This is hardly the only incident in which John displays an almost reckless disregard for his own well-being—he often goes in alone or with minimal backup into danger, in the name of solving a case.

 

Like his father, Kennex prides himself on being a ‘good cop’—incorruptible, and determined in his pursuit of criminals, and his list of won awards and citations speak for themselves.  His father, whom he’d idolized, died in the line of duty under a haze of suspicion for corruption.  Only in this last case, the Straw Man case, does Kennex get to see his father vindicated, finally, but growing up thinking his father was maybe not the man he thought he knew and loved had weighed on him.  It is probably the proudest moment of his life, even though there’s no public recognition for it, that he was able to dispel the cloud over his father’s name.

 

He has, for all of that, very little in the way of people skills. He plays harmless but embarrassing jokes on people (telling people, for example, that a coworker he didn’t like had alternately gotten an infected genital piercing, hemorrhoid surgery, etcetera), and has been known to pretend not to get a message from a superior officer if it stands in the way of him solving a case, all of which he brushes off and hides behind a sarcastic sense of humor.

 

Kennex, notably, has no sexual or romantic life. He has a crush on a coworker, Stahl, but lacks the ability to move forward with it, especially when Dorian points out that Stahl looks very much like his former girlfriends, Anna, the one who nearly killed him.

 

His partner, Dorian, however, after commenting on how sad Kennex’s sex life is, has made a dating profile for him on a website. Which Kennex, obviously, resents, because it rubs against his sense of self-sufficiency. He doesn’t need a dating profile, he thinks, least of all because Dorian thinks he does.

 

He has a low tolerance for frustration—he’s terminated at least two of the MX robots, one for questioning him about a traumatic flashback he had at a crime scene, one for simply refusing to shut up. He wouldn’t do that to a real person, but MXs are robots, and he can’t forget that an MX had been arguing with him about helping his partner during the inSyndicate assault instead of helping. They are not human, and thus suitable targets for his antisocial behavior. Back home, his supervisor insists he attend some therapy, so he—grudgingly—attends a group anger management session, where he normally eyerolls and barely endures the ‘sharing’.  Needless to say, he is not getting much out of it But it is a condition of him working back at the police department, so he obeys, at least the letter of the requirement, if not the intent.

 

Although he threatens Dorian, and even at one point calls him a ‘toaster’, he grants Dorian a lot more credit for sentience than the MX models, though if anyone asked him, he wouldn’t be able to answer why he put up with the DRN. Whether he admits it or not, Dorian gets results: while Kennex tends to threats and intimidation (such as against Trevor Janns, a wounded suspect), Dorian’s softer approach works in some circumstances, making them an almost cliché’d good cop/bad cop team. He may not like it, but they make an effective team and that overrides a lot.

 

His relationship with Dorian is complex: at one level, Dorian is a ‘defective’ robot—the DRN ‘synthetic souls’ were considered flawed, which was why the DRN line was discontinued, and John is aware of himself as a pretty flawed human.  At the same time, Dorian puts up with him, and has proven to be loyal and dedicated, and those two go a long way to winning him over, though Kennex would never admit it, at least publicly to Dorian. In fact, he outright denies that he likes Dorian, when Dorian teases him about it. However, when Dorian is up for review, John praises him to the interviewers (though he later denies it, vociferously).

 

Despite all these issues, Captain Maldonado has faith in him, calling him back to the force as inSyndicate attacks again, and fighting to keep him on active duty, against the police psychiatrist’s orders. Maldonado knows that giving John something to do, utilizing his skills, will not only help the force solve crimes (he is, despite all his flaws, an excellent detective), but also will help John himself recover.  Canon hasn’t yet disclosed why Maldonado cuts him such slack, but she also worked with Kennex’s father, and that may be a clue.

 

John’s only other semi-kind of friend is Rudy Lom, a brilliant programmer and erstwhile hacker, a real geek’s geek. Rudy is the one responsible for awakening Dorian, and later, when Dorian expresses discomfort about staying in the stationhouse on the level with the MXs, it’s John who arranges to let Dorian ‘live’ with Rudy. He likes Rudy, but finds him embarrassing: at the end of ‘The Bends’ where Rudy has gone undercover (and gotten a little more action than he’d imagined he would) as a drug chemist, Rudy wants to go out to celebrate, and John expresses discomfort about having to be seen in public with him, telling him to act like ‘we just met’.

 

Finally, all of this, and his accident, have given John a few mental health issues. Officially listed as PTSD and OCD, John’s issues manifest in his dogged, almost obsessive pursuit of cases (he’s still working on the case that almost got him killed and cost him his right leg), the lack of trust, and at least in one case, intrusive flashbacks to the accident. His trollish, sarcastic sense of humor, though, is probably all him.