Method and Madness

I was hooked from the very beginning of this very first episode. That's how you know a show truly has something special!

My overall rating of "The Knick"'s Season 1: 6/10

This episode serves as a rather wondrous introduction to the setting and characters. The era comes across as "retrofuturistic", where surgical (and overall) science is tremendously accelerating (as attested to by Dr. Thackery in his eulogy in this episode's beginning, and in the trailer) and globalisation is taking root but so much is still of the olden days, and the advances made while grand, appear to a viewer of our age as perhaps even funny due to much larger strides still needing to be made. With the disease-wracked, backwards, primitive, corrupt and much-unregulated society making the detail-rich background (the detail of some of the windows' visible existence being argued against in the lore notwithstanding), the modest gains of reason in the operating theatres and patient wards - sterilisation, atomisers, blood-vacuums and so on - appear positively sci-fi.

We are also acquainted with the characters. They have delightful interplay, most quite charismatic and all having a reason for saying things, doing things and going to places, whether the camera follows them or merely passes by. Their speech patterns and musings feel authentic. In this episode especially we can get a good sense of the sequence of events and layout of places, as a schedule is understood and people walk together or step aside, but are all concretely placed in the locations and in the passing of the day.

So what prevents me from rating the episode any higher? Some of the more nitpicky stuff - a few scenes don't quite make sense, being a bit inexplicable within the world, or a bit cringy, and I'm pretty confident Dr. Gallanger (?) teleports in one scene, first walking away and then suddenly - and without prior sound of walking - returning to the conversation from just outside the camera's angle in an improbable location relative to his last known one. Such continuity breaks are disappointing given the surgical precision and clarity the series attempts to present.

Neither the trailer nor the plot line had interested me too much but all that changed when I found out Steven Soderbergh has been directing. Being a Soderbergh enthusiast and with some free time in my hand, I convinced myself to try it out, even though I was a little apprehensive (even Soderbergh have had his dull moments). Five minutes into the first episode and the Soderbergh signature is unmissable.

The Cliff Martinez soundtrack comes in as the doctor protagonist shoots cocaine in a horse carriage on his way to the hospital and all that Traffic, Contagion sense memory comes back. Nothing more exciting than a dark gripping Soderbergh thriller. He is just such an exciting director, he can go into any familiar territory and make something extremely unconventional. The hand-held camera aesthetic when most period pieces are shot steady, the Cliff Martinez psytrance score in place of classical music, the camera angles, the acting, the blocking everything just builds up the most gripping television experience I have seen in some time.

Everything is just so nuanced; the dialogues are realistic, the characters believable. None of that over the top witty exchanges between characters that pretends to be more intelligent than it actually is. The gore is not overdone and perfectly builds up the tension. Corrupt civic institutions, the hypocritical church, sickly immigrants, racism while at the same time the progressive social workers and the men dedicated to furthering science, perfectly paints the picture of a city that is grappling with its troubles but there is hope in the future.