'The Knick' Season Finale Review: Is It All Over?

It was a great season for The Knick — and this finale so good, I’m very glad I put it on my Best Dramas list. Friday night’s second-season finale was excellent… and possibly the final episode of The Knick ever.

Warning: This review of the “This Is All We Are” episode of The Knick contains spoilers.

Thackery’s decision to operate on his drug-abused, rotted intestines himself — adjusting mirrors and waving off ether as anesthesia; just a cocaine spinal block, please — seemed to our 21st century eyes the most ludicrous and suicidal of moves for the show’s chief protagonist. But on The Knick’s own terms, it was a combination of drug-fueled ambition and ego-stoked hubris on Thack’s part, and the sober, clear-eyed ambition of show creator/writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, and director Steven Soderbergh. The buck-naked, jittery speech Thack gave to the startled but undeniably impressed assembly of physicians can stand as one of Clive Owens’ greatest moments to date.

Related: ’The Knick’ Postmortem: Clive Owen on Thackery’s Risky Surgery and the Future of the Series

The season’s final hour was a little masterwork of ever-increasing tension, as Thack prepared his medical self-experiment, and other plot-lines came to a climax. The most rich of these explored the ever-more-desperate schemings of hospital manager Herman Barrow (Jeremy Bobb), whose weasel-working is coming back to bite him quite viciously. His graft is perpetually on the verge of being thoroughly exposed, his relations with women are a disaster (his wife is exacting revenge, and his mistress — well, does the foolish Herman think she’s really in it for the love?), and those spots on his hands look awfully ominous. Nurse Lucy went even more fully over to the dark side with Evil Robertson Brother. Just about the only impurely happy characters are the engaged, merry condom-makers, Harriet and Tom, and you just know they’ll hit a bad snag sometime soon.

With some characters fleeing the Knickerbocker Hospital — one heading as far away as Australia — the producers set up what could be not just a season finale but a series finale. Certainly they want us to at least entertain the possibility that Thackery has breathed his last breath. And knowing how hard Soderbergh works on this show, manning the camera and choreographing those long, gorgeous takes that require split-second timing from actors and crew alike, it wouldn’t seem impossible that The Knick is headed for a heralded two-season history.

But if I were a betting man, I would wager we’re in for more. “The show must go on,” said Thack at one point. I certainly hope so.