The Book of Rannells: The Knick: Season 2, Episode 8 – “Not Well at All” (2015)

Okay, so this last entry is the only one of Andrew Rannells’s episodes to consecutively follow the one before it, with no episodes in between in which Wingo was absent.  Honestly, though?  It doesn’t really help.  There are important things from episode 7 that aren’t even mentioned here, important things culminating here that weren’t on the radar of episode 7, and so forth.  So, I don’t even know if watching the complete season (or the complete series, for that matter) would make the various plotlines feel smoother and more cohesive.

Major occurrences are as follows.  Dr. Thackery prepares to operate on a woman whose plastic surgery he botched back when he preferred to get paid in heroin.  Sister Harriet and her friend keep working on their DIY condom enterprise, as he tries to convince her there’s more to life than helping other people have a good time.  Another doctor from the Knick – Dr. Gallinger, a racist and eugenist who obviously has it out for Dr. Edwards – learns something troubling about his wife, who’s the one who recently returned home from an asylum.

As usual, there are a bunch of largely-unconnected plots to juggle, and like I said, going from episode 7 to episode 8 doesn’t help much in holding it all together.  I like the stuff with Sister Harriet and her pal the best, we catch up with Cornelia’s diggings into her father-in-law’s business dealings, and there’s an interesting little bit inserted about some of Dr. Chickering’s latest medical experiments.

I’m sure you noticed that Andrew Rannells isn’t actually in the picture at the top of this post, which probably gives you a good indication of how much he’s used in this, his final episode.  IMDb told me he was in this episode, albeit only a voice credit, but I’ll admit that, the first time I watched it, I didn’t catch him at all.  Even now, watching it again, I didn’t figure out where his offscreen appearance actually was until a later scene referenced it.  So yeah, not so much with the screentime for Wingo today.

Part of what threw me off was that I was looking (well, “listening”) for him the hardest during a scene about the hospital construction, since I figured that’s where I was likeliest to find him.  Instead, he’s in a different scene involving Barrow (the shady money guy from the hospital,) but then in an indirect way:  Wingo makes a call to Barrow’s wife in an attempt to stir up some trouble for Barrow.  Of course, he uses a fake name on the phone, and the fact that I hadn’t previously been aware that this woman was Barrow’s wife didn’t make me think I’d find him there.  It wasn’t until later, in a scene where Barrow is home and his wife brings up the call, that I made the connection, then went back and watched the scene again.

In light of that, it won’t surprise you to learn that there’s next to nothing I can say about Wingo as a character or Andrew Rannells’s performance of him based on this episode.  And so marks the uneventful farewell to Wingo from The Knick, as well as the farewell to The Knick from The Book of Rannells.

Recommend?

In General – Naw.  While there are some intriguing threads in the episodes I saw, the show didn’t hold my interest enough to be able to keep track of the many different plots, or to make me want to go back and watch episodes I missed.

Andrew Rannells – Nope.  Wingo is barely a plot device, let alone an actual character, and the whole thing is mainly just a waste of Rannells.

Warnings

Gross/disturbing imagery (with lots of old-timey medical gore,) drinking/smoking/drug use, sexual content, some violence, language (including racial slurs,) and strong thematic elements.