Once more, The Knick is slow-playing Edwards’ eventual rise out of the enmity. The pilot could have ended with him performing some new European technique in order to demonstrate his value to the hospital, but the spotlight was still Thackery’s. When “Mr. Paris Shoes” introduces two patients suffering from aortic aneurysms, and one dies under Gallinger’s instructions, the obvious follow-up would be to have Edwards sweep in with his fancy new galvanization method, and succeed where Gallinger failed. The Knick, again, sidesteps an easy solution; Gallinger’s mix of jealousy and animosity leads him to break into a journal library after dark, preferring to commit a felony just to learn Edward’s method (once he finds a French translator), instead of proving the man’s an equal by asking for help.
As much as the higher-ups at the Knick are concerned with how Edwards’ presence reflects on the hospital, their own appearances are always just as much a priority. For the hospital to maintain its reputation as the best in the city (and all the funding that entails), the staff must appear as nothing less than professional by day. By night, though, they play games off hours that impact their work. Thackery’s cocaine and opium addiction are at least stable, for the time being; Barrow is running a shell game with hospital resources that has him on the outs with some very bad men. He’s a toothless (now, even more so) suit that puts on an air of authority to mask the negligence that’s put him, the hospital, its patients and the staff at risk.
The dichotomy of The Knick’s two world’s is captured visually tonight thanks to the lighting design. Soderbergh may be the ringmaster, but crew members like director of photography Peter Andrews are instrumental to keeping the big top looking its best. The Knick has two different aesthetic settings: crisp, clear daylight, and sickly, saturated orange. “Mr. Paris Shoes” uses the hospital’s troublesome transition to electricity as both a plot generator, and a signifier of the era’s changing class, social, and technological structures. Daylight is strictly for appearances; it’s in the dark that the dirty work gets done. Whether it’s for good or ill, the real action is all happening under the artificial sun of an oil lamp or light bulb.
Where the two types of light collide is in the operating theatre, where this week, a matinee surgery ends with a shocking twist. Re-watching the sequence, it’s almost comically riddled with fatalism. Cutting from nurse Monk turning on the room’s electricity, to the surgeons bathing their hands, to Monk’s perspective as the surgery is underway, you don’t even realize you’re watching the prelude to a very specific kind of accident. As ever, the show plays the moment with observational curiosity and complete restraint. It’s not until the next scene that we even find out that poor Mrs. Monk is toast.
The callous manner in which Thackery, Barrow, and Cornelia talk about the incident is key to The Knick’s worldview. On the agenda of grievances caused by the electrical backfire, the death of an employee ranks third behind a lawsuit, and the slightly crisped patient. (Hell, Thackery’s probably willing to find a silver lining in the whole debacle, seeing as he’s might get a new cadaver out of the whole mess). The doctors don’t use gloves in the operating room, and they don’t use kid gloves with their patients either. As Thackery, Edwards, Gallinger and Barrow stage a pissing contest in the infirmary about hospital positions and funds (in another terrific long take that starts subtle, and ends with fireworks), the people they’re meant to be treating get less consideration than the light fixtures.
We’re seemingly still a few years out from bedside manner being a priority among physicians, but as Thackery tells Dr. Christenson’s widow, that’s intentional. “My dear friend Jules lost sight of the procedure…stopped seeing the work, started seeing the death, ” he reasons, both as an explanation for Christenson’s suicide, and an excuse for his own drug use. What he delicately refers to as a “regiment” is the coping mechanism he pursues outside the hospital’s walls in order to survive being within them. For now, he’s been able to keep those two halves of his life separate, but his bloodstream is the drug mule smuggling his vice passed the border gates of the Knickerbocker everyday.
If Thackery finds a parallel in anyone tonight, it’s Cleary, another user of self-medication that views incoming patients like they’re sacks of meat with a price tag sticking out. When his drunken eye spies Sister Harriet, it’s a hell of a coincidence that all the same leads us to Edwards’ own double for the hour. When the sun goes down and the orange lights are out, Edwards and Harriet start doing the work they can’t under the transparency of daylight. Edwards is turning the hospital into an integrated one, literally under the management’s noses, while Harriet is performing abortions for desperate women without options.
Deliberately kept in the shadows during her house call, Harriet’s incognito appearance conveys the depth of the risk she’s taking, both as a civilian and a Sister. Edwards doesn’t have that same luxury, but he nonetheless manages to twist his appearance into a smokescreen. While Thackery and the rest ignore Edwards, he’s busy doing the job no wants him to; when a tough guy is fixating on Edwards’ shoes, he’s not noticing the guy who knows where to land a kidney shot. Hippocratic oath or no, making progress in The Knick requires doing some harm. Just be sure to not get caught doing it, and if you do, make sure you have plenty of anesthetic on hand.
- Stray Thoughts:
-Glad to have Matt Frewer sticking around as Chistenson, even if just in flashback. “Never read him” is the funniest line of the night.
-“See, he’s moving.” Tom Cleary, M.D.
-Thackery knew the The Captain back in Nicaragua. Odds on some really bad stuff having gone down there?
-Bertie continues to be the only hospital staffer willing to give Edwards the time of day. We’re still no closer to finding out why that is, as his facial hair interest in nurse Elgin are still pretty much his defining trait.