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***Spoiler Alert***

Season 2 is often my favorite of a TV show. You spend Season 1 immersing yourself in the show’s world, getting to know the characters, wrapping up the first big plot lines, and positioning the show’s universe for Season 2. Frequently, new characters are introduced in the second season, many as plot catalysts.

In the world of Kingdom, Season 2 is both its best and its darkest, particularly for Jay Kulina. While the end of Season 3 (waiting that Season 4, Netflix …) brings tragic, life altering changes for the Kulina family and the whole Navy St. crew, much of Jay’s personal battles hauntingly play out in Season 2. Jay finds himself at the edge of very high highs, and very low lows, a rollercoaster with such a drop it’s amazing that he survived the fall.  But survival isn’t just getting up to fight another day, and the emotional trauma he experiences carries into the next season, effecting life choices and continued substance abuse struggles.

Jay’s Achilles heel is being left behind. He’s unusually sensitive, perhaps even more so due to Christina’s abandonment which leads to almost a role reversal of the mother/son relationship. He becomes her protector and a provider, while struggling with how she manipulates him into providing what she wants. While Nate has a wall built against her, Christina and Jay’s relationship is too damaged and frankly, kind of bizarre, to allow that wall to remain for Jay. Every struggle Christina has is another shot to Jay’s heart, and without distance, he becomes a constant raw nerve around her.

Coupled with the volatile relationship between Jay and Alvey, who are too similar and are constantly on edge around each other, Jay’s open heart and sensitivity lead to a desperate and heartbreaking need for affection. To be seen, to be loved, to be wanted, to be an equal, to be enough.

So when Jay meets Laura at the beginning of Season 2, their immediate connection and attraction kicks him into overdrive, he’s on all systems go, no holding back. Problem is, Laura has very carefully curated her life into what she wants it to appear as, and Jay’s open nature and unspoken social class will blow that wide open and into the reality she is running from. Jay realizes pretty early on that something is off with her. Like any highly observant person (myself included), he starts to investigate his suspicions that she’s involved with someone else, but also pushes that away enough to be with her as much as possible. The two sets of emotions play hard and fast against each other, suspicion and jealousy up against lust and the need for love.

Even if Laura hadn’t been involved with another guy (and living in his house, presumably driving a car and wearing clothes that he at least partially paid for), her total fear of being average would come into play eventually. Model Jay fits into her tightly cropped photo of her life. Suit Wearing Fighter Jay does. But Emotionally Distraught, Drug Addict Jay does not. And that is the damage that Christina does in the art supply shop – in her own weird jealousy of Laura, she injects a dose of reality into Laura’s fantasy, and Laura can’t handle it.

So while the relationship never would’ve lasted, out of Laura’s own insecurities and personal hang ups combined with Jay’s intensity, he can’t see the fantasy she’s created for herself. Instead, he feels the loss hard, while dropping weight which certainly doesn’t help, and retreats into an emotional spiral, blaming Christina for Laura ending things. And he is right, in a way. But his inability to see the whole picture, and Christina’s selfish nature when it comes to Jay, contributes to what has to be one of the most tragic relationships to ever exist on screen, a car crash you see coming from the first moment.

Jay’s battling to prepare for his fight, take care of Nate, deal with Christina, and the hard hit of losing Laura. In lashing out against Christina, Jay forces her to watch him inject heroin, to make her feel what he feels. It’s a rock bottom he hadn’t hit yet, but neither of them realize it’s going to lead to the worst rock bottom he’s ever seen. Next stop on the train to hell – Christina overdosing a few episodes later, the night that Jay wins his title fight. He comes home to Christina barely breathing, and with Nate’s help, revives her with Narcan. It pushes her to attend rehab, but it breaks Jay’s heart – he can’t protect her and he can’t make her stop, no matter what he does.

Enter Ava, Alicia’s sister and Jay’s personal tour guide into the darkest parts of the underworld he’s ever seen. As with Laura, it’s an immediate attraction on both sides. But Ava’s a siren, not by her own fault, and her dark side calls out to Jay’s, giving him an outlet to pour out all the hurt and pain and desire to give up on himself. He holds it together long enough to win his fight against Ryan, and then lets himself fall apart and into Ava’s bad vices.

Ava’s backstory is never really made clear, but it becomes quickly obvious that she has a very serious drug addiction and is struggling with her mental health, with both playing against each other. It creates a cloud of doom around her, pulling Jay into heavy drug use like a tornado, so fast and hard it’s like he was at the edge of a cliff, put out his arms and fell backwards into the open sky. Giving it all up to feel nothing and everything, be alone and not be alone, give in to someone else’s wants and needs. The emotional manipulation Ava plays, making him feel guilty for just barely keeping up with his training, and going out to do anything at all is powerful. A less self-aware person with a duller sense of survival wouldn’t have been able to push through, even at the most basic level, like Jay did.

It becomes quickly obvious to everyone close to Jay that he’s losing his shit and fucking up big time. Alvey provides the strong voice to pull it together, Lisa provides a safe and open space to express her worry in a way he’ll accept, Nate puts his foot down the best way he can and tells Jay he needs him, Mac confronts him directly and cuts back on the drug supply. And it’s all what keeps Jay from drowning in the abyss Ava is already lost to, what keeps him waking up every day, getting out into the world, and doing the most basic training possible. But Christina, although correct in saying that she can’t be around either Jay or Ava if she’s going to stay clean, frames her concern all about her, when if she was real with Jay and told him how worried she is about him, it would’ve made all the difference. Instead, Jay and Ava end up in the hotel from hell, Jay cutting off Christina.

Ava, for all of her problems, realizes that this isn’t going to work – and whether that’s it won’t work for her because Jay is trying to live his life outside of her on some level, or it won’t work because Jay is already cutting back on the drugs and trying to get his head together, but she packs and gets ready to leave. And had she left when she planned, maybe Jay would’ve survived her better. But she doesn’t, and their hotel neighbor, offering her a score, ends up murdering her. It’s a harsh reality, when you really look at it, that Ava was so desperate for a high that she went off with a stranger, and that intense need, the chemical addiction, killed her by way of a murderer.

To come across the crime scene as Jay did, to see the room where Ava was killed being cleaned, to relive it all over and over in their own hotel room, the pain for Jay must’ve been unimaginable. But, I think, for Jay a huge piece of his breakdown comes from guilt. He’s a protector, a fighter, an incredibly observant person with highly honed instincts. All of which was dulled by drug abuse. You can’t have it both ways – being numb but feeling enough to catch a bad vibe, a weird look, a funny feeling about someone. And he missed that in the hotel neighbor, he missed all the signs that were likely there and would’ve made a more sober Jay clue in that something wasn’t quite right.

And the conclusion of it all – from Laura to Christina to Ava – is that Jay missed what was right in front of him.  Nate struggling with his own battle, of being gay and being a fighter, with no one close to him knowing or even guessing, needing Jay. The one person who Jay cares about more than anything else, was unintentionally put on the back burner, as he tried to ease his own pain.

When the people who are supposed to love you and take care of you – your parents – love you and then abandon you, alone to take care of yourself, your younger brother, and then them, the damage runs deep and will never totally heal. It’s the hardest to lose something you had than to never have had it at all.

The voracious need for love and attention itself can turn into an addiction, a void temporarily filled by drugs, money, volatile relationships, fueling an endless cycle of self hate and self inflicted pain. The scars will never totally fade, but can be healed by accepting the past, and opening up to the people in your life who stay. Let them help you, let their love for you build love for yourself, the most important kind.  

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