The Knick Season 2 Finale: How Final?

The Knick shuttered its doors on its second season last Friday, and closed a lot more than the at-turns cutting edge, guerrilla medical establishment that we've come to know, love, and sometimes be repulsed by.

First and foremost is the permanent shuttering - for the season being over is not the same as the series ending - of Clive Owen's magnetic Dr. Thackery.  Why the other doctors in the room didn't move a little more quickly to disobey his repeated orders and intervene to save him is not clear, and not satisfyingly explained by their fear of going against his commands.   On the other hand, there was likely little if anything they could have done after he nicked so crucial an artery.  And so the anti-hero hero of The Knick dies of a nick self-inflicted.

The other big event was the marriage of Cleary and (former) Sister Harriet, which happened off-camera - actually, she put on his ring, which I suppose makes them married - but was the nonetheless a triumphant event.  Or, would have been, had not we learned a little earlier that Cleary, in his love for Harriet, had told the police about the abortions she had been performing, in the hope that exactly what happened did indeed happen - she would be thrown out of the sisterhood and into his arms.  On the other hand, it was an act of desperation born in true love, so perhaps there's a little nobility in it after all.

There's no nobility in eugenics, and the talk of taking the ocean liner to Germany to further that work was chilling indeed.   So was the the way people get away with murder in this narrative, not only in the finale but throughout this season.

But there's hope for Algernon, whose wounded eye will not let him resume his profession as a surgeon but leaves open a career in the new psychotherapy, which promises all kinds of possibilities for the next season.

Assuming there is a third season, which hasn't been formally announced as yet.   I'd certainly like to see one - and hey, given that no one cut Thackery's head off, it's even possible that we may see him alive again.

See also The Knick 2.1: Playing Off Our Present ... The Knick 2.4: Spirochete

And see also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.9: Sacrifice ... The Knick 1.10 Sneak Preview Review: Fallibility

 
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The Knick 2.4: Spirochete

My favorite thing about The Knick is the way it shows medical science in heroic, close to hopeless action at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.   Sitting here in 2015, we know how many of these valiant attempts to vanquish malady worked out - or didn't - but it's especially fascinating to see our characters throw everything they can into these one-on-one battles for life and death, or at least health and knowledge.

Actually, it's usually one character who's leading the charge, often alone, or with a doubting assistant. Last season, Thackery did what he could for Abby, an old flame who caught syphilis from someone else, and is now suffering one of the symptoms, a collapsed nose. Thackery performs a pioneering skin graft from Abby's arm to reconstruct her nose.  She's happy with that bit of light in her darkness, even though they both know that the spirochete inside her will work inexorably to her imminent death, however improved her face may be.

But Thackery's guiding principle is that while there's life there's hope, and in last night's episode 2.4 he undertakes to rid Abby of the deadly disease, which is already taking its toll in other parts of her body and psyche.   This is 1901, or nearly 40 years ahead of penicillin, which would finally bring the scourge down to manageable treatment.   It's also a few years before Salvarsan, an arsenic-based drug, but that worked best with cases in early stages anyway, and Abby's is pretty far gone.

Fortunately, Thackery becomes aware of another treatment - fever - the heat of which can kill the spirochete, if it's high enough.  The catch for the Knick's doctor is that the fever has to be high indeed - 109 degrees - which could well fry poor Abby's brain.  So here's the perfect tension for our story: will Thackery be able to raise the heat in Abby's body high enough to kill the spirochete before the heat kills Abby?

You never know how these things will work out on The Knick.  Abby had been a significant but not crucial character to the story.  I was therefore pleased to see the spirochete get its due, and Abby smile, and the end of this fine little story of medical success.

See also The Knick 2.1: Playing Off Our Present

And see also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.9: Sacrifice ... The Knick 1.10 Sneak Preview Review: Fallibility

 
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The Knick 2.1: Playing off Our Present

The Knick was back for its second season on Cinemax last night.   As was the case last year, the New York 19th-into-20th century cinematography was just perfect.   I mean, I obviously didn't see any of that first hand, but I have a fair number of photographs in my collection from that era, and have seen many more, and this movie-like television show captures the textures just right.

The details are on key, too.   One of Edison's cameras, a horseless carriage ambulance, and of course the medical procedures all fit in like glittering parts of an historic mosaic come to life.   The medical parts of course are the soul of the show. They speak an irrepressible optimism in progress and the success of science, which we also saw last season, and which is sadly lacking or at least tarnished, at least among the general public, right now. We go to doctors, submit to procedures, are admitted to hospitals, but we have a little less confidence in our doctors than people did over a century ago, even though our procedures are so much more advanced.   But back then there was a sense - best portrayed by Thackery,  but others including Edwards have it, too - that they can cure anything, if it's a disease or malady.

Thackery makes this point eloquently at the end of the episode, with his realization that if he considers his addiction an illness rather than a craving, he can find a cure.  And Edwards yearns for a treatment for his detached retina, after his physician tells him there's not much that established medicine can do for it.  But given that this is 1901, and we're watching in 2015, you just know that something will come up - even though, given that this is drama, we also just know that it may not work.

The morality in flux also continues to play a major role.  Edwards is subject to racism, though some of his white colleagues have seen the light of equality.  The nun who performed abortions is in prison, and condemned by one of her sisters, her former student.   We in 2015 know that history is on their side - though it moves forward exceedingly slowly.   And it is from our very age, the present we inhabit, that The Knick derives its ultimate power.  We in the future are the foundation upon which The Knick bounces off and builds upon.

Part medical history, part historical and current social commentary, altogether unique and captivating, The Knick is vert much welcome back.

See also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.9: Sacrifice ... The Knick 1.10 Sneak Preview Review: Fallibility

 
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The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.10: Fallibility

Continuing with my sneak preview reviews The Knick  - courtesy of an advance screener provided by Cinemax and Starpulse -  herewith a brief review of episode 1.10, certified specific-spoiler free.  As with all preview reviews, I'll discuss generalities, to give you an idea of the episode.  If you prefer not getting even an inkling of the story ahead, you probably should not read any further.

The final episode of this first season is chocked full of surprises for just about every major character including -

• a very surprising abortionist
• a treatment for a mental ailment that's like pulling teeth - literally
• Thackery is dead wrong about a major treatment - and misses the true treatment, in the words of another character, "by a mile"
• there's a flat out and satisfying murder for hire
• a major character gets a brutal beat down
• there's a new medication - a cure - which is worse than the illness

As you might surmise from the above, the theme of this last episode of the season is fallibility - of both the major characters and the state of medical knowledge at the time.  This is the flip side of the coin in which we're amazed and pleased by how accurate the medical treatments - certainly many of Thackery's - were in the age of The Knick.  But it was a medical age vastly more primitive than ours, and it's good to be reminded of that.

Don't know if I'll have any advance screeners of this fine series next season, but I'll back here with reviews in any case.  Enjoy the winter!

See also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.9: Sacrifice

 
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The Knick Sneak Preview 1.9: Sacrifice

Continuing with my sneak preview reviews The Knick  - courtesy of an advance screener provided by Cinemax and Starpulse -  herewith a brief review of episode 1.9, certified specific-spoiler free.  As with all preview reviews, I'll discuss generalities, to give you an idea of the episode.  If you prefer not getting even an inkling of the story ahead, you probably should not read any further.

The main theme of this quietly powerful episode is: sacrifice, made and not made, involving the now two prominent couples on the show -

• What would someone be willing to do for a lover - not specifically in bed with the lover - to help the lover's life?   Would the person making that sacrifice tell the lover about it?   What would the lover's happiness about the received benefit lead to in the relationship?  In episode 1.9, the answer to the last question comes at the very end, and to our 21st century eyes is quite shocking, though perfectly logical given the context of the story and the age in which it takes place.
• The time in which the series occurs - the first years of the 20th century - also figures profoundly in the situation in which our other couple find themselves.   Racism was rampant, as we know and have already seen in The Knick.  But other moral issues which still beset us were sharply drawn back then.  Episode 1.9 presents a good tableau of one of those issues, with the position of each party not what you first might have thought - but which also makes sense in retrospect.
• None of these compelling issues are resolved in episode 1.9, which also contains no new gadgets, and no memorable patients treated in the hospital.

The Knick continues to be a breath of air, at once both fresh and fetid, as we got a continuing look at the birth of own age, and with a splash of how little and how much we have changed since then.


See also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary

 
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The Knick: Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary

I just saw The Knick 1.8 - courtesy of an advance screener provided by Cinemax and Starpulse - so herewith a brief review, certified specific-spoiler free.  As with all preview reviews, I'll discuss generalities, to give you an idea of the episode.  If you prefer not getting even an inkling of the story ahead, you probably should not read any further.

The main themes of this fine episode - a lot calmer than last week's - include:

• Good loving, for two couples, picking up where the ending of last week's episode left off, and with some explicitness in depiction.  We leave one couple thoroughly happy.  As for the other, well ...  
• Thackery's addiction plays an even more central role than usual, a state which was inevitable given his reliance on drugs and the state of the world - back then, as of now, in a constant series of wars, ever on the verge of disrupting all commerce, and sometimes doing so.  We also see Thackery in the grip of more than one powerful drug.
• We're treated to yet another example of prejudice, in this age in which targeting of groups different from the mainstream was so rampant.
• The Typhoid Mary story moves along, with a memorable denunciation of Mary by NY Health Inspector Speight.   This part of The Knick has taken on a special relevance, I think, given the arrival Ebola in America this week.
• Another medical toy - aka an instrument that could be a big help in surgery - is demonstrated. These Edwardian antique devices, high tech for their day, are one of my favorite parts of this series.

And so The Knick continues as one of most enjoyably played scientific histories to come along a television screen in a long time - actually, maybe the very first.  And I'll be back here next week with another sneak preview review, a day or two before the actual airing of the episode on Cinema.

See also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method

 
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The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method

I've been watching and much enjoying The Knick, now in the 7th episode of its premiere season on Cinemax.  Like Banshee and Strike Force on that network, The Knick has a style, pace, and storyline all its own, like nothing I've seen any place else on television or the Internet.

The pace literally percolates, as the backing music before and during the show brings home.  The beginning of the 20th century was a pivotal time in our scientific and cultural history, the last stance of the sheer Victorian optimism in the power of rationality and science to better our lives - an optimism that would soon be irretrievably doused by the First World War, and the ensuing horrors of the next half of the century.   Our current digital age has brought back some of that optimism, and the hope of attaining the global village foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, but we're still far below where Dr. Thackery is in faith in the future.

Medical treatment was beginning to fully emerge out of the Dark Ages, when patients were treated with herbs, later chemicals and drugs, and little was done to directly intervene in their bodies by surgery.  Thackery sees things differently - willing, always, to try to a surgical technique that either makes sense to him, or he's read about in some journal, or both.   As such, this part of the narrative makes The Knick a paean to the scientific method in medicine.

There's an excellent treatment of social illnesses of the time, as well - in particular the racism which sadly afflicts us to this very day, and was always beyond the power of science and surgery to cure.   Thackery at first resists the addition to Dr. Edwards, an African-American, as second in command on his staff.   Edwards is called the worst racist names you can imagine, and by other doctors in the hospital, not just the white trash in the street.   But Thackery can't help but be impressed by Edwards' talent and genius, and comes to be Edwards' champion.

The physical ills that the two and their associates try to get on top of - i.e., cure or provide lasting assistance for - range from difficult pregnancies to aneurysms.   And, true to the newness of the procedures Thackery and Edwards are attempting, they not always succeed.

Clive Owen is just wonderful as Thackery, Andre Holland puts in a memorable performace as Edwards, and the rest of the cast is as much a pleasure to watch as the series.  Highly recommended!

 
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