When it comes to The Alienist,
weirder is better. You can see when it really comes
alive, and none of it is in the numerous serious discussions
about murder; look no further than “That’s a fine armadillo you
have” for where this show’s heart lies.
However, that isn’t the
priority of “Ascension,” which is the most deliberately
genre outing so far. It has the outline of a procedural sting
episode, period-drama beats so intense they swing toward high camp,
and some old-fashioned horror-flick framing. Also,
murder (time permitting).
The season has found something of a
foothold in recent episodes—particularly as it moved away from its…complicated approach to gender issues in its serial-killer
plot and focused more on the detectives and the world around them
than the murders they were detecting. This episode, which jumped with
both feet into the underworld sex trade again, had its work cut out
for it. All things considered, it did well enough, perhaps because it doesn’t dwell on the
tricky material for long. But without much strangeness to go around,
this episode also loses some of the edge that last episode hinted at; it gets to host the murder of the
red herring, and otherwise is just at play in the fields of
genre. (Any genre! The Alienist wants
them all.)
I admit I was hoping against all existing story
logic for a twist on the twist, and that the show had broken with the
book and we actually did have our killer in Willem “Don’t You
Know Who I Am” Van Bergen. And not just because the closer the
show hews to the novel, the more delicate issues they’ll have to wade
through, and that has…not gone well so far. Josef Altin’s stagey
weirdness suggested the possibility the show was throwing any
expectations about the second half of the season out the window for a
fearlessly weird take on the super-rich at play in a city they built
on the backs of its people. Now we’re back to hunting for a
mysterious killer, and I’ll just have to live in hope that Sean Young
has some other reason to look for advice from her dog.
Because somehow (and perhaps
unfortunately), it’s genuinely hard to care for long about the murder plot on this show, especially as things around the main characters
get stranger. Things were slightly askew to begin with—watching them
invent forensics as they went along felt like glimpses into a series
of slightly alternate universes—but the weirder things get, the
better the show is. The Alienist just seems more itself when
you feel like it’s fucking with you. When it tries to be serious, it
runs a bigger risk of being like everything else.
And that outcome isn’t such a terrible
thing; it’s just that without that sense of wrongness, we fall back on genre paint-by-number. The sting plot makes sense enough—the story moves forward, even if suddenly putting
Stevie in danger feels a little odd. (I’d say this was tied in to the
show’s problems with making any of the other kids compelling
characters and having to bring in a ringer, but…was Stevie ever
compelling either?) We get Sara Howard and Dr. Kreizler sitting in
America’s first stakeout sedan. We get Marcus Isaacson, Final Girl, as he stalks the killer (who’s right behind him,
naturally) through the bowels of The Slide.
We even get the old “Allow me to
tenderly examine your wound” period romance beat between Dr.
Kreizler and Mary. (“You’ve cut yourself,” he explains to
her helpfully, in one of those moments where the show sails past
stating the obvious and into something sort of sublime.) This show’s
pressure on itself to avoid melodrama means that the camp aspects sort of ooze
in around the edges. For moments like this, it’s perfect.
For moments like the typewriter scene,
it’s harder. There’s no way we’re meant to take this seriously as a
charge to the sensual atmosphere, but it’s also almost
brilliantly unfunny, which leaves it in that space beyond camp where oddness thrives. Luke Evans is gamely trying to turn these moments
into a lighthearted battle of the sexes. Dakota Fanning (whose
aggressive slouching initially seemed
like a character struggling against her bonds but at this point just
seems like Millenial Posture) treats every single one of their scenes
as if they’re delivering a series of coded messages rather than human
dialogue. The two approaches make their moments together almost
hypnotic, even if it’s not the way anyone intended.
And there’s no way of avoiding
melodrama in moments like the showdown between Sara and Dr. Kreizler,
when she whips out her personal detective work about his childhood—she brought Mozart to a stakeout just to get him flustered, Sara is
not fucking around—and he reacts with the the sort of camp this show tries so hard, generally, to avoid. (“He
slapped her!” I wrote in my notes, complete with the exclamation
point, exactly the pearl-clutching I’m sure they intended to
evoke.) It’s a jarring moment—both for the characters, and for the
show, which even in most unabashedly genre moments tries to be
understated in an increasingly losing battle against its own story.
Since it happens in the middle of so
much other action, there’s no closure on it whatsoever, and I’m so,
so curious how they’ll handle it. At this point in the series, it’s
tried so hard to be so many different things that this feels like an accidental
litmus test. How will they address it? Will it be a perfunctory
acknowledgment amid fifteen other plot points? Will it be a bizarre
back-and-forth cutting between the slightly-too-close-ups that have
become something of a signature style? Will it be a dry apology
surrounded by exposition about starlings and abusive mothers? Will
they burst the bonds of sexual repression and get to second base
right at the dining table as a weeping Mary watches from the
kitchen door and John hurls that armadillo right into the cooking
wine? Given this show’s track record, it could be anything. (Also I
guess we’ll hunt for the murderer? Whatever.)
Stray observations
- This episode had several background details that
connected, for a sense of a living city. The shot of
children sleeping on the street fading out to a charity gala for the
prevention of cruelty to children was slightly on the nose, but the
dead horse paralleled later by street sweepers was a nice touch, and
in an episode about chasing a man who’s ghosted them, Marcus having
to run through what felt like a city block of disembodied laundry was
really effective. - I am incredibly serious about Sean
Young and her dog. If that doesn’t happen, maybe she can just
continue to murmur “It won’t be forever” in every possible
situation until it becomes the Dune litany
of fear for the Gilded Age. - I assume that Roosevelt getting the “Do
not betray your own kind” speech, combined with the Statue of
Liberty moment, means the show intends to really dig in to the
vulnerable-immigrant aspect of the narrative? (She said hopefully,
well aware this could end up like everything else.) - It is fascinating, probably, somehow,
for a show to handle a central thematic concern so awkwardly that
you have to actively avoid talking about it in order to enjoy
yourself. This outing was less terrible than it could have been
(glimmers of personality, even), but I could really go the rest of
this season without ever getting another scene of laced-up children
flirting sadly with men in order to provide a suitably louche
backdrop for all the murdering. - Despite all the genre elements running
free in this episode, this show still comes alive most truly in the
beats that are strangest, whether on purpose or otherwise. Watch
Mary, whose unhurried choreography and unruffled mien makes it seem,
if you squint, like she cut her finger on purpose in the hopes that
Dr. Kreizler would slather some of the ol’ personal coagulant on top
of it, in a brilliant long con to sexually ruin him, as if he wasn’t
the guy who went into her room a few episodes ago to sniff her
underwear in a move the show has apparently completely forgotten. - Related: Please let Q’orianka Kilcher
do more. She has done so much with so little; each of her scenes is a
great argument to give her more scenes.