Andy Palmer: The impact of language deprivation can be seen in Reunion (BSL)
Reunion (watch it on BBC iPlayer here) is a four-part BBC thriller is about a deaf man called Brennan, played by Matthew Gurney, who’s just come out of prison after ten years for murder hellbent on revenge.
Meanwhile, a dodgy detective is looking to get him put back inside, his victim’s wife is looking for answers, and his daughter is trying to save her father from himself.
For anyone acquainted with the deaf community, this series isn’t just a crime thriller— it has lots of familiar themes and truths of the injustice experienced by deaf people every day.
There are lots of things people can read into the series. Here’s my view.
Alert: There are spoilers in this article. Do not read on until you have seen the entire series of Reunion.
I see there being two main destructive themes: the main character Brennan being unfairly victimised by the brutal inaccessibility of prison (equivalent to almost solitary confinement for the entire sentence), and the trauma of Brennan’s experience of historical abuse in deaf schools.
These two destructive themes are twisted up in Brennan like angry venomous snakes fighting to break out of his guts as he drives his 1988 3-Series around the peak district, ready for revenge.
Brennan desperately needs therapy but he’s not going to get it and he doesn’t want it either. Those snakes won’t be able to leave slowly through his mouth, safely cajoled out by a counsellor to find their freedom somewhere in the long grass. In the real world, the availability of counselling services in BSL isn’t close to where it could be. Those evil twisting snakes in the pit of Brennan’s stomach are going to have find their own way out … and it seems like they’ll do it through the barrels of a sawn-off shotgun.
At the end of the final episode, Brennan eventually tracks down his old headmaster (Monroe) who sexually abused him and many others in his deaf school. The festering trauma from those abusive school years sparked the chain of events that led Brennan to kill his best friend and the decade of misery that followed.
It’s the moment of reckoning.
In the darkly lit kitchen of Monroe’s isolated cottage, Monroe almost gets his head blown off by Brennan’s furious daughter after stonewalling Brennan’s emotional crescendo the kitchen table. A cowering Monroe, the monster career paedophile, is forced to say sorry, when maybe for the first time in his life, he’s the one in real danger.
What happens then is extraordinary. Brennan accepts his apology. Time to move on.
Why would Brennan, the victim of such a heinous and destructive crime be satisfied by a simple and forced apology?
I have a theory. Brennan grew up in a system where saying sorry was all you had to do to end a situation. He gets in trouble at school? Say sorry. No one’s sitting down with him explaining what he’s done wrong or helping him process why it happened. There’s no language for that. Just two boxes — good or bad. Sorry or not sorry. You’re naughty or you’re not. And Brennan was always in the naughty box. And the only way out was to sign “sorry” and take the punishment.
You get an idea of what education must have been like in Brennan’s school from the way Monroe communicates. Monroe is a life-long education professional in the deaf sector. Responsible for moulding generations of deaf young people into successful human beings and yet he shows he barely can use the language they use. He relies on Brennan’s daughter to translate because he doesn’t understand him. His language level only allows for the binary. The sign language level of Monroe had been passed down to Brennan and created this linguistic T-junction in Brennan’s mind. Left for ‘Sorry And Move On’ or right for ‘Get Your Brains Blown Out’. Not only was Brennan sexually abused, but he was language deprived.
In an earlier episode, we see a clip of the police recording when Brennan ‘confesses’ to the murder. He doesn’t understand what signing a confession really means. He’s been conditioned by his education to apologise and move on, because that’s all he’s ever known. He’s at that t-junction again. Most people have some kind of roundabout with multiple routes our language could take us down.
Brennan’s best friend Ray, the one he murdered, was a gold-hearted go-getter and the lucky one of the class who seemed to find a linguistic satnav. The one with a good job. When Brennan finds Ray at the t-junction and can’t force him into a left turn, he ends up taking a right turn to the graveyard.
That’s why, when Monroe finally apologises — Brennan sees that as enough. He doesn’t want or expect an explanation. No one ever taught him how to ask for one or ever asked him for one. Even when a young Brennan turns into arsonist to get expelled from the school and freed from abuse, no one cared to find out why he set the school alight. No one really cared about the opinions of feelings of the bad deaf boy.
Now contrast that with Christine — the widow of the man Brennan killed. She doesn’t want Brennan’s apology. She wants answers. She needs to know why her husband was murdered and won’t give up until she gets them. She’s got the language for justice, for emotional complexity, for truth. She’s not locked into the same system Brennan was.
And that’s the divide. The difference in language has shaped the way both of them process trauma, grief, and justice. Christine looks for understanding and meaning. Brennan just wants the pain to end.
But let’s be clear, many hearing survivors of childhood sexual abuse also struggle to talk about it for years, sometimes their whole lives. The shame, the fear, the trauma — it silences people. But for deaf people like Brennan, there’s often an extra barrier: language deprivation. If you grow up without the tools to express your thoughts, to name your feelings, to make sense of the past — then it’s not just that you can’t talk about it. You literally don’t have the words. It lives in your body instead, unresolved, until it maybe finds another way out.
