The Knick: Bad Medicine

The Knick has closed its doors on season one.

Overall, the premiere season was an effective one thanks to the vitality and visual engagement that director Steven Soderbergh served. In fact, I would hold up many scenes from the season against some of the finest cinematic work this year. I am still incredibly impressed with the early season scene juxtaposing Cornelia Robertson and Dr. Algernon Edwards and establishing a previously unexpected connection that played out in dramatic ways over the remainder of the season.

While the show has not yet proven a “great” show (it needed much tighter writing to accompany Soderbergh’s directorial prowess), it has provided many welcome diversions and haunting imagery along the way. This week’s season finale continued to provide a litany of well-considered visuals that remain with you long after the episode closes.

We begin with a brilliant shot of Cornelia, cloaked in black and standing in the shadows. Only her tortured face is lighted. We immediately understand where she’s going.

Through an arrangement with Cleary the ambulance driver, Cornelia connects with an out-of-habit Sister Harriet to perform the abortion that Dr. Edwards could not perform on his own child last week. Harriet makes an attempt to dissuade Cornelia but quickly understands that the child would be most unwelcome in the world.

The procedure is performed just in time for Cornelia’s wedding to Phillip and his grabby father who has miraculously kept his hands off Cornelia since their tense bedroom encounter. Guilt-ridden over the procedure, Cornelia proceeds with the wedding… as if there were any doubt given her social status and the customs of the era. At the end of the episode, we see Cornelia riding away in her wedding coach, face firmly set with a determination to make work the marriage she does not want.

Her plight highlights a theme that runs through much of the episode: that choices under duress, the decisions we make when faced with unbearable options, are often poorly made. Cornelia remained determined to abort Edwards’s child and proceed with her marriage as if it were the absolute right thing to do. After going through with both, she is full of regret, and, seemingly more convinced than ever, her choice was wrong.

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Facing the double trauma of losing a child and a lover in the same day, Edwards avoids Cornelia’s wedding completely, opting instead to pick a fight and box his anger away. Instead, Edwards is swiftly handed a defeat and is left bloodied and beaten on a cobblestone street.

Dr. Gallinger also faced the repercussions of a difficult choice he had to make in committing his wife, Eleanor, to a mental institution. In doing so, he inadvertently subjected her to a doctor (wrongly) convinced that mental illness was a direct result of disease and filth within the human body. His brutal, inhumane treatments included the removal of all teeth. In fact, the doctor bragged to Dr. Gallinger that he removed the teeth of his own children to keep them from becoming mentally ill. Better than the removal of the colon, I suppose, which was the final “treatment” in this crackpot’s arsenal.

Hospital manager Herman Barrow also made a rather poor decision to engage Wu, the owner of Thackery’s favorite opium den, in an attempt to rid himself of Collier the mobster and his ever-increasing debt. Initially, the choice appears to have been sound. Wu, thinking he is repaying Thackery for saving his life, is a brutally efficient killer, disposing of Collier and his men in seconds. However, Barrow found himself deeper in trouble as Wu discovered Collier’s ledger and took ownership of Barrow’s debt.

Finally, we come to Dr. Thackery whose cocaine-fueled decision making has been suspect but fortunately beneficial through much of the season. His lucky streak, however, came to an end this episode. Seeking superiority over a rival physician in a cocaine-fueled haze, Thackery rushes through an exploration of the differences in blood, pioneering what we have ultimately come to understand as different blood types.

Convinced he’d made the right discovery, he prematurely engages in surgery on an anemic child. He grotesquely opens his arm and hers and directly connects veins to veins through rubber tubing. Obviously not a match for the blood type, the child’s body rejects Thackery’s (cocaine filled?) blood and dies in the process. Stunned by this setback, Thackery goes into a near catatonic state forcing nurse Lucy to reach out to a horrified and disillusioned Bertie for help.

At the end of the episode, Thackery is committed to an early rehabilitation center for treatment and withdrawal from his drug habit. He is admitted under a pseudonym, Crutchfield (also the title of the episode), which recalls the maiden name of his mother. The episode ends with an amusing visual joke and potential hint for further Thackery struggles in season two: the prescribed treatment for cocaine withdrawal is heroin, initially manufactured by the aspirin company Bayer.

Board members of The Knickerbocker Hospital react to Thackery’s absence and mounting debt by voting to shutter its doors and move uptown to attract a higher-paying clientele. Given the theme and incidents within the episode, you have to wonder if the decision was a sound one indeed.

Overall, I’m a fan of The Knick and Soderbergh’s ability to bring a modern touch to period drama. In doing so, he found a way to eliminate the barriers to the material and give it a life and energy rarely seen in period dramas of the type. The cast works well together in a manner similar to a seasoned theater company and, even though Clive Owen is billed as its star, it is fashioned as an ensemble piece rather than a star-driven vehicle. The weakest aspect of the series has to lie within the writing. Given Soderbergh’s flair for visual storytelling, the words and plots often felt superfluous and all-too leisurely.

But the pleasures of the series are many and, for viewers with the patience and the stomach, the reward is a series that gives a brilliantly realistic and lived-in recreation of the period.

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