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TV: The Knick, season 1

I did not like the final two episodes. Entirely too bleak for my taste and devolved into what I would call a typical druggie narrative. Perhaps inevitable because of the Thackery character, but it was entirely familiar and made the show way less interesting to me than the initial exploration into surgery. In fact, I'm not much intrigued by the 2nd season at all.

I was particularly disappointed in how the Edwards-Cornelia abortion bit was played. It revealed pure pandering to an upper middle class white liberal audience and made the characters mouthpieces for political points of view versus real people. Upon finding out Cornelia intended to abort the child, Edwards was hurt and disappointed by the racial element. This seemed entirely ridiculous for the Edwards character, who would fully understand the implications to Cornelia (an engaged women) to having a mix raced child at the time. And at the same time, he expressed no opposition to abortion on a spiritual level. It seems to me his character would have religious objections to the practice. Later, he cannot go through the procedure because it was his child, but not because it was a child. This is a ridiculous position to take. It makes his emotional priorities about himself as a victim versus himself in relation to a larger, spiritual existence, or about the unborn child, or even about Cornelia and the fact it is her body and she is the one who stands to lose everything. An entirely problematic section, if you ask me. I won't even go into the vast numbers of dead infants in the show, which hit a tipping point for me.

Earlier in the season, there was a fantastic subtle moment about race when Edwards, Thackery, and Herman performed some clutch maneuver and were bonding in the aftermath and Herman offered Thackery a drink and neglected Edwards. The bottle was out of focus in the foreground and Edwards in focus in the background, realizing he was not going to be offered a drink because the men did not want to share the bottle with him. But that was the one good moment. Too often, Edwards was the magical negro.