The Knick - Season 1, Episode 04: Where's the Dignity?
Trailer
The story of the series begins when Thackery already flows into the wrong new electrical system in the hospital, ordering Herman Barrow, the twisted admin at Knick, to bring more bodies so he and his team can test new surgical procedures. As more patients die, Algernon displays the exchange of procedures he learned in France, but was rejected by Thackery and Everett.
While it stumbles around in a few places and makes some regrettable choices in dialogue, 'Where's the Dignity?' is at least commendable for working so hard to define the narrative's core relationships as well as the characters in them.
It's the most breathtaking cross-section of Amiel and Begler's often club-footed historical observations yet, and the show's finest episode thus far: proof that, however irritating the procedure, Soderbergh's experiment is still working.
Where's the Dignity - picks up more or less where we left off: crackling energy, unsettling tension, and another amazing dialogue-free visual sequence.
As in the superb back alley fight scene that closed the previous episode, director Steven Soderbergh drowns out all the sound aside from Cliff Martinez's oscillating electronic score.
The writing and plotting was sufficient to the task. Everything else was good to superior, and scene by scene, even when the story bordered on melodrama or enlightened piety, the storytelling was believable, engaging, subtle and subtly humorous.
So episodes like "Where's The Dignity" largely ride on what's happening and how, not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, What's Happening is wild.
So after weeks of simmering tension, The Knick finally came to blows this Friday night. Unfortunately it was Doctor Gallinger who gave Doctor Edwards a black eye, and not the other way around, but hey, we can't have everything.