“I think it’s delicious, so long as it’s not really happening,” Nurse Elgins tells Bertie, referencing a different kind of horror show than the one that usually goes on in the Knickerbocker. It’s a telling line, considering how many of the laughs this evening are rung out of near misses and close calls. Edwards and his attending nurses in the basement can’t help but give a chuckle at how close they came to being found out because the white staffers only ever venture into the basement for a quickie. Barrow, wearing nothing but a towel, looks like a fool failing to outwit a policeman, and like a literal boob resting his head on his mistresses’ chest, whining about the sure-bet gamble he took that got him into Bunky’s debt. And when Harriet and Cleary lay out the risk they just avoided by not performing an abortion on a women too far along in her pregnancy, the relief of having not getting arrested makes for a fine consolation to a pay day.
There’s an infectiousness to the energy with which writer Steven Katz keeps laying on the incidents and crises, and Soderbergh’s camerawork keeps up with the pace effortlessly. There’s a tracking shot with eye-popping depth that takes us from the ambulance admittance hall into the Knickbocker’s main entrance, which heightens the mania of Thack and Edwards running from one emergency to the next. Same rules for when we spend three shots following Edwards as he hurries to treat his ailing mother, only to reveal that Thack is already on the scene. Even when Soderbergh keeps trauma in the foreground, like the tear-stricken woman facing an unwanted pregnancy, there are rich laughs to be mined when Cleary and Harriet bicker out of focus in the background.
It’s The Knick basically taking none of its stakes all that seriously for a time, and it eventually wins you over as a silly one-off. But the secret purpose to all the levity is to setup a sucker punch late into the hour. On Thack’s third emergency surgery of the evening, he and Bertie must save a previa case that’s identical to the one Dr. Christenson failed back in the pilot. Sister Harriet drolly rolling her eyes when Bertie doesn’t trust her diagnosis is another funny bit, but Bertie’s concerns during scrub-up are taken seriously by Thackery. “Christenson was brilliant but he froze, he lost his nerve. We won’t. We make a bigger incision, we have the electric cauterizer which is faster. We can save this mother, we can save this child. We can do this.”
Instead of capping off the speech with one final boast (“what could possibly go wrong?”), the scene ends with a couple more seconds of Bertie and Thack scrubbing, so that Katz and Soderbergh can really rub in the dispiriting failure we see in the next cut. Thack is devastated, and we should be too, but in a silly hour, the transition makes for the night’s grand joke. Comedy is the subversion of expectation. As Bertie says, no one could have done the operation faster, and Thack did everything right. But they still failed. The cute final scene of Elgins teaching Thack how to ride her bike is a nice little digestif that fits with the rest of the episode tonally. Cliff Martinez’s soundtrack plays things out with a merry-go-round styled tune, but once Thackery gets off his new ride, it’ll be back to the grind. Like the circus, the carefree fun provided by “They Capture the Heat” probably won’t be in town next week. Best enjoy it while you can.
- Stray Thoughts
-More great moments in exposition-spewing: Robertson laying out for Thack what he really thinks about Cornelia’s prospects. “You’re already in my debt,” Thack teases. “Nicaragua,” Robertson teases further, like Bunky “teased” a molar out of Barrow two episodes back. We get it, some stuff went down in Nicaragua!
-Despite referring to the episode as a one-off, I think it’s the first to properly get across the financial difficulties facing the Knickerbocker, and how it intersects with the show’s class concerns.
-The pairing that hasn’t paid off just yet is Cornelia and Speight, who are still trying to contain the Typhoid outbreak. Their one scene isn’t all that exciting, but I liked the staging of all the help standing silently behind the head matron.
-Gallinger’s kid might have meningitis. Gallinger himself is still probably a dick, though.