Margaux and I got this up in the Knick of time.
Trevor: What a great beginning. The difference in the way that Dr. Edwards and Cordelia Robertson start their days is pretty striking. He gets hassled over his shoes while in line for a communal bathroom; she has servants dress her and her father scoffs over the notion of the Robertsons as “new” money.
Margaux: The single take shot of everyone arriving for their day on the job was extremely impressive, Lucy rambling up on her bike looked like photo of the idea of you have of the turn of the century. But to touch on your point of Cordelia and Dr. Edwards being similar in that they’re both minorities in their field (reflected very well in the scene between Cordelia and her father) but their lives couldn’t be more different. Ebony and Ivory. Dr. Edwards captures their difference justly when he says to her, “ I expect these things, you’re upset because you do not”.
Trevor: LOVED that tracking shot. It seemed so natural, so effortless. I’m a sucker for tracking shots, and “Mr. Paris Shoes” had more than a few. The camera was freewheeling and meandering, stopping to check in on various elements of the hospital. I’m thinking especially of the scene where Drs. Thackery, Chickering, and Gallinger are discussing a patient, and the camera follows Herman Barrow as he opens windows, then it lets him leave the room so it can focus on the doctors.
Margaux: Soderbergh is definitely doing some of his best work with The Knick, very rarely does a show go to such great lengths to treat the camera like another cast member. Yet I can’t help answering every question Dr. Thackery doles out by shouting, COCAINE! And for a doctor working in disgusting times, he most certainly keeps the jokes coming. Guess corny doctor jokes were always a thing.
Trevor: Thack is the quintessential man with a hammer – every problem looks like a nail, or coke injected into a dick.
Moments of levity are always appreciated on The Knick, especially if we’re going to see more scenes like the botched aorta surgery. For some reason last week’s botched C-section didn’t bother me that much, but I had a much harder time this go-round. It’s telling that the surgeries at the Knick are typically unsuccessful, and the doctors still want to find a way to circumvent Edwards, going so far as to break into an office so they don’t have to accept Edwards’ help.
Margaux: When the surgical sheet caught on fire, I literally had to stand up – I couldn’t take it anymore. You’re totally right though, no matter how many times Thack, Chickering, and Gallinger utterly fail, they will not take any advice from Edwards. And this might not be oh-so PC of me to say but I sort of appreciate their total transparent racism. In turn, I do enjoy discovering more about Dr. Edwards (more than the other doctors, save for Thack and Barrow) and how he is not one to just sit around and literally or figuratively take one to the chin without standing up for himself. It was refreshing to see him knock out a bully and start his own ward of the hospital (pig cadaver adjacent!) all in one episode. The doctors might sweep him aside, but the show isn’t.
Trevor: You know what, I appreciate the racism not being hidden either. The doctors aren’t some lynch mob frothing at the mouth, but they make no secret of their desire to see Edwards make like a tree and get out of there. It’s just the way things were back then; that doesn’t make it right, not by a long shot, but it’s the smart move on Soderbergh’s part to play it that way, instead of tyring to romanticize Thackery. “He might be a cocaine addict who hangs out in a Chinatown brothel, but at least he’s not racist!”
Margaux: Haha, true. And by the same token, Edwards also makes Thack a more interesting character too – who, in different hands, could just another white dude anti-hero in doctors coat. It’s interesting that a man who calls a Chinatown opium den his home simply will not tolerate taking orders from what I feel would be anyone Thack doesn’t deem as qualified as himself – even though Chickering seems like an incompetent tard. Like you said earlier, they break into a fucking office in the middle of night to steal a study they can’t read because it’s in French.
Trevor: Everyone was trying last-ditch efforts to avoid facing their problems head-on. Barrow, for instance, goes to his loan shark Bunky Collier and suggests some plan that we don’t hear but that definitely ends up costing Barrow a tooth. Edwards, once again, has the most integrity, tracking down the woman with the swollen arm so he can drain her in the middle of the night (that sounded sexual; it’s not). But The Knick needs to watch itself here; I don’t want it to celebrate Edwards too much, because making a perfect black character among a sea of flawed white men is weirdly racist in and of itself. I trust Soderbergh not to screw it up though.
Margaux: I don’t think he will, they’re slowly drawing comparisons between him and Thack (they work hard in the name of “science”) so if/when they team up (see: tolerate each other, a la 48 Hours – just kidding) it feels natural and not like the forced relationship it is now.
And just as I was wondering if The Knick was going to touch on abortions, they went and done did it. It was a really well done scene, I liked that they kept doctor basically shrouded in mystery – barely lit. She does do her work in the shadows so it seemed fitting, not as heavy handed as it could’ve been but I’ll give DP credit for that.
Trevor: I really liked that scene. The way the abortionist was lit, you couldn’t even see her face. She looked like an entity, not an actual person. The Knick is a very unsentimental show. The surgery scenes are thankfully bereft of the pulse-pounding music that you’d hear if this were House or ER or something of that ilk.
Margaux: There is zero romance in The Knick’s turn of the century world, though I highly doubt there was that house music underscore either. Nothing was scarier than watching Thack on opium taking a straight razor to the face.
Trevor: Jesus, that was so tense! And watching Thack inject cocaine between his toes was harder to watch than Michael Douglas and Matt Damon popping amyl nitrates during sex in Behind the Candelabra.
Margaux: It’s basically watching Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction get stabbed in the chest, but like, more frequently and on a part of the body that’s gross. I don’t like needles or feet, this show is hard to watch for me.
Trevor: Same here, but in a way that makes me want to keep watching. It’s a dichotomy, I tells ya.
Star count?
Margaux: I’d give “Mr. Paris Shoes” a solid four stars. Also because I’m going to start using that as an insult on people.
Trevor: Damn, I was really hoping to beat you to that. Four stars it is. Aces, I guess. Are we still saying “aces”?
Margaux: Say whatever you damn well please, Mr. Paris Shoes. BURN.
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