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The series is a look at the professional and personal lives of Dr. John W. Thackery and the staff at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital, where they try to maintain their reputation for quality care while struggling to keep the doors open.
The Steven Soderbergh-directed series wraps up its first season not in a happy place, but instead with every character in jeopardy, which is pretty much exactly where a show with a season 2 order perhaps should end.
"Crutchfield" did a nice job of bringing the major stories of the season to a boil, mostly while linking them to the series' larger questions about scientific and social progress.
It's hard to remember a season finale this bleak, in the sense that not one major character ends up in a better place than they started 10 episodes ago, and everyone across-the-board is miserable.
Most seasons end with cliffhangers. The Season 1 finale of The Knick on Friday night was more like a slow-moving avalanche that left every major character buried - in grief, remorse, apprehension, fear, addiction.
The Knick's season finale, which held actual serious consequences for just about every character on the show, was a beautifully unnerving ride. No happy endings here.
Even before this final act, "Crutchfield" was the most exquisite episode of The Knick, but after it, "Crutchfield" is evangelism material. Every new shot is diamond.
To say things go from bad to worse would be putting it mildly. And yet, there's no sense the series derives pleasure sending its characters to wallow in a new form of misery.
This last installment of Season One started to feel like much too much. It was like a haunted house that wouldn't end, but instead of frights around every corner, it was the pitiable fates of all these characters playing out in front of you.