I was bored by this week’s episode of The Knick, save for a few treasured moments. I wrote last week that the best part of the show is when Edwards and Thackery get together, and that holds true; when Thack had Edwards come help him work on a cure for syphilis, the energy picked up, and a real sense of purpose took hold.
The only other bright spot in this episode was the storyline of Gallinger. His complexity as a character is growing in ways that I find fascinating; he appears to genuinely love his wife, outside of her looks or what other people think. He is much further ahead than many of his peers on that subject, and yet, the vast majority of the time, he acts like a petulant child. He “rescues” Thackery, which is good, but only does it because he hates Edwards and wants his old job back. He stands in front of Thackery with trembling lip, bumbling on about how HE was supposed to be the one Thackery worked with; but if he knew Thack at all, he’d know that Thack cares only about the work. He shed his racist notions (at least about Edwards) the instant he realized that Edwards was a genius.
Gallinger is clearly brilliant himself and is nearly as good a surgeon as Edwards, who’s one of the best around. But there is just something missing there with him— some little piece of himself that has become dislodged and stuck in his own throat. When his wife suffers physical abuse at the hands of a quack doctor, he is appalled at the idea of her being hurt, but he cannot seem to extend that compassion to literally anyone else.
This is a positive thing! Gallinger coming to life means that he’ll be involved in the Thackery/Edwards pairing, and everything that gets near that vortex automatically becomes more interesting. But there is a bit of a dark cloud coming: if Gallinger becomes involved with the eugenicist movement (one of the most shameful, cowardly, and disgusting movements in human history), that is a bridge too far. To be a eugenicist is to break every law and oath of medicinal practice and to wield power over people based upon rules entirely invented out of prejudice. The irony of eugenicists is that they proclaim a desire to propagate only the best of the species, only the smartest, bravest, toughest. But only the weak and desperate use violence to control others, and if they were really believers in eugenics, they’d kill themselves; the snake would eat its own tail.
I don’t know as an audience member if I can forgive someone becoming a eugenicist.
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Barrow was in this episode. It was boring and his storyline is boring, and everything associated with him is boring, and that is all I want to say about it.
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Cornelia’s storyline picked up a bit as she pushed back against her husband and had some real, present conflict. My only issue with Cornelia is how naive she is; I say this literally every time, but this poor girl is always blindsided by the way the world works, and that is baffling to me. Like, it isn’t as if The Knick was set in 2015; it’s not as if she grew in a world that explicitly, constantly, and with extreme force told her how awful things are. It’s not as if she didn’t know how people thought about abortions in those days; it’s not as if she doesn’t know that being black is thought to be lesser; it isn’t as if she doesn’t know the danger of running afoul of powerful people.
It’s not that I want her storyline to become more “realistic,” or whatever that means, but what I want is her to drop that look of total surprise and hurt and show some anger. She needs to get angry! Angry I get! Angry makes me people say and do things that will end poorly. Anger makes people push back. But that puppy dog-eyed nonsense is a disservice to what is otherwise a complex, interesting character.
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There were some plot developments; we find out, for example, that Edwards is married to a woman named Opal, who is British. We also see Bertie find a new love in Genevieve Everidge, the pseudonym of Esther Cohen, the woman who wrote the asylum exposé that was mentioned earlier in the season. Both of those storylines have promise, but I will say that the only storyline that is really doing it for me right now (sorry Cleary) is the one where Bertie is trying to make his own way.
Though I didn’t enjoy this episode of The Knick as much as I would’ve liked, I think there are a lot of things to look forward to. Let’s hope they all pay off.
[Photo credit: Mary Cybulski/Cinemax]
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