And as one conflict is remembered, Bill Macy’s son Rick (David Walmsley) returns home from an even bloodier engagement, Afghanistan. Not as walking wounded, but walking dead; his handsome head stitched together like a forensic reconstruction of a ham. “Rick is coming home,” Macy announces, “We expect your full support,” and we choke down our anger at the hypocrisy of the man who hunts his son’s kind yet will happily toast his own offspring in front of an awkward pub.

It’s one more ugly sight in a cold grey England. A corpse of a country where prejudice has set in like rigor mortis and the blood runs bad between the living and the slightly-less dead. So it’s a breath of fresh air when kooky and confident PDS sufferer Amy Dyer (Emily Bevan) jumps onto the scene and starts to challenge Kieren’s preconceptions of having PDS.

Outspoken and zany, you could have imagined her appearing as a Type 4 in the late Being Human, and it’s because she’s so trying in her actions that she’s the first one who seems to get Kieren to betray real emotion. But not the last…

For Kieran, confined to a closet every time the doorbell rings – an act that we soon realise has deeper symbolism – Rick’s return stirs his (beating?) heart. Not just because his death in combat caused Kieren to take his own life, but because of the unspoken feelings between the two of them. Feelings that caused Kieren to be an outcast in backwater Roarton before he was a zombie.

It’s not a love story but the ghost of one, made all the more difficult by Rick finding it harder to accept being gay than being undead. Filled with just as much self-loathing for his own sexuality as he is with vile black goop, Walmsley gives a difficult performance great life, and together he and Newberry bring tremendous subtext to the script.

They’re two people who have been apart for so long, and so much separately, that they’re not sure if any of the love they felt between each other still exists. It’s a powerful, beautiful, and completely understated piece of writing and acting, and it’s a shame that In The Flesh is only three episodes long. This is the kind of storyline that could sustain a slow-burn throughout a longer series, and which has bigger implications that one more episode can likely contain.

Because bodies? They’re easy to cover over. Feelings are much more difficult to bury.

Aired at 10pm on Sunday 24 March 2013 on BBC Three.

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