Back from the dead

Maia and Ethan. Photo / Supplied

When dastardly doctor Ethan Pierce met his maker on Shortland Street in January, it was a bit of an anti-climax. You couldn't help expecting the cocky doctor to pull a rabbit out of the hat and somehow survive the shooting. After all, now that he'd been exposed as a murderous body trafficker, viewers wanted to see his haters, and his lovers, confront him.

But with death a pretty final exit strategy, that's the last we'd see of Dr Evil, right? Wrong. In virtually uncharted territory for the soap, last week Ethan (played by Owen Black) returned as a ghost to taunt his killer, tortured nurse Maia Jeffries (Anna Julienne).

Let's rewind to when Maia's life started spiralling out of control. After her on-again, off-again lesbian lover Jay was slain by the Ferndale Strangler, Maia took solace in son JayJay. But he's also a source of guilt: both because Maia has passed hereditary Kennedy's Disease onto him, and because he's living proof that she manipulated brother-in-law Mark into donating his sperm without telling her sister/his wife Tania.

Succumbing to post-natal depression, Maia was just recovering when Ethan started working at the clinic. Ethan sabotaged Maia's career and her friendship with object-of-her-affections, Alice, and infected Maia's mother Yvonne with a cancerous bone graft.

Not a clever move. Although Maia's not the only one who hated Ethan enough to kill him, after a nail-biting whodunit storyline she confessed all to Alice; and flashbacks reveal it was unpremeditated. Although Maia's sisters have reluctantly stuck by her, shocked-to-the-core mum Yvonne and a fed-up Alice froze Maia out. As Maia throws herself into guilt-assuaging charity fundraising, her paranoia worsens and her erratic behaviour starts raising eyebrows around the clinic. Then she gets over-involved with and tries to donate a liver to patient Verity, whose death leaves Maia a wild-eyed mess. Then Maia starts denying that she ever committed murder.

This week, things pass the point of no return when Maia leaves her toddler locked in the car all day. Finding him, a distraught Tania has her sister sectioned to a mental health unit, where a psychiatrist diagnoses her with reactive psychosis (characterised by paranoia, depression and delusion). Angry and defensive, Maia is adamant it is all "a big misunderstanding", but it's clear she's completely lost the plot when she asks a nurse to phone long-dead ex-girlfriend Jay. Enter Ethan, whose smirking face and sarcastic jibes starts popping up all over the ward, though only Maia can see and hear him. The vengeful doctor vows he won't leave her alone "until you've paid for what you've done".

By the time Maia wretchedly curls up in a corner, clutching a blanket, she's lost all traces of that cloying self-righteousness that sometimes overwhelms her character.

Beetroot-faced and a little defensive, Julienne admits she too sometimes finds Maia annoying. "I think just pull it together, Maia!'"

Over a coffee at Shortland Street's studios, it's clear that Julienne and Black get on much better than their characters do. "I didn't work with him that much when he was a real person, but since he's been dead I've worked with him a lot more," laughs Julienne, 26. For two weeks, the pair were holed up at a former Waitakere Hospital psych unit, where remote-control blinds are shut between two windowpanes so they can't be used to self-harm.

Coming back from the dead was a surprise reprise for Black, but a welcome one. Although he'd known from the word go that Ethan would have a short shelf life, he wasn't ready to leave when "one of the most fun characters I've ever played" was killed. But don't go mistaking dead Ethan for alive Ethan, warns Black. "He's a figment of Maia's imagination, so he's almost a caricature of Ethan the way Maia remembers him."

For Julienne, Maia's descent into madness made a meaty change from the day-to-day normality of Shortland Street. Throughout, she kept in mind that playing a mentally ill person came with a responsibility "to do it right. I remember feeling that way when I started as a lesbian as well."

The hardest thing was playing Maia flipping between highs and lows. "It was almost a reprieve to go completely bonkers!" Still, the psych-unit scenes were immensely "physically and emotionally demanding", says Julienne, because of all the emotions (terror, panic, desperation) that had to be summoned up.

The heart of this storyline is Maia's confrontation of her moral double standard. How can Maia condemn Ethan when she is a murderer, too? Well, arguably Ethan is worse because he killed an innocent old lady, whereas Maia killed a murderous psychopath. Julienne makes no such distinction, saying the murders Maia and Ethan committed "are essentially the same crime".

While the very self-assured Black doesn't want to pigeonhole Ethan as evil, he has been berated when out and about for his character's crimes. "But only by drunken middle-aged women in bars," he grins. "They say you're that guy, that evil guy' but they've always got a twinkle in their eye."

Evil or not, what will Ethan do next? This week, expect Maia to get worse as Ethan tells her that her family intends to keep her locked up forever. But could Ethan be helping her, by persuading her to accept what she's done?

Thankfully, it's not the end of the Shortland Street road for Julienne who, at five-years-and-counting, is the soap's longest-standing current actress. Julienne thought the redundancy axe had fallen when Maia was revealed as the killer. "Not many people kill someone and stay on." But when dead characters get a second go, perhaps the odd killer can slip through the cracks.