by Sandy DeVito

I decided to combine my thoughts about the final two episodes of The Alienist because they feel like one episode chopped into two parts. I'll be honest; I am not happy to see the end of this show, and my greatest hope is that the executives at TNT will consider the 10-episode series to be enough of a success (which is not totally clear yet ) to fund a sequel series covering the second book, Angel of Darkness. Author Caleb Carr also has other Kreizler novels in the works; my hope is this is not the last we've seen of Bruhl, Evans, and Fanning in these roles. I've become deeply attached to them and want more time with them.

by Sandy DeVito

The final three episodes of The Alienist will no doubt be largely devoted to the killer, a man we have only seen from the back and one whom John cannot even seem to draw with direction from Stevie, the only one from our group of misfits who has looked at his face. I'd also assume this knowing where we are chronologically compared to the novel; I can't possibly divorce the source material from the show as I've probably demonstrated already. Last week's episode was the only one that I was sort of actively disgruntled with; this week is a marked improvement, though it's still not trying to tie up everything that bothered me in Ascension yet.

by Sandy DeVito

Hildebrandt's Starling

This episode features two of my favorite scenes from the novel:

by Sandy DeVito

It's important to consider The Alienist in the context of 2018, and the showrunners here are hyper-aware of its themes in a contemporary mindset. I keep expecting TNT's premiere drama to play out as a more conventional adaptation of the novel (which is wonderful, don't get me wrong), but it's building on Carr's world with subtle, masterful precision. In the scene in this episode where John takes Mary to see a vitascope projection, a lovely scene in the book, the context is given new layers when we see the tumultuous world outside Mary's usual controlled environment inside Kreizler's household; suffragettes campaign for voting rights, and we witness the frenzied reactions of spectators to the new invention. Likewise, we are given a rich new scene where we get to see the meeting between Kreizler and Sara that prompts the outing between John and Mary, a scene we are excluded from in the book; in it, Kreizler deftly asks Sara if it would be possible for her to empathize with someone who had murdered. Sara immediately balks at the idea, but Kreizler proceeds to tell her about a woman they see across the path, who was convicted of killing her two young children but acquitted as she was from a wealthy family. She now brings an empty perambulator to the park every day, and sits with it quietly. The ills that society wreaks up on the human mind, Kreizler points out, can push anyone to madness and violence; and women are given darkly heavy burdens.

by Sandy DeVito

At its core, The Alienist isn't about finding a serial killer; it's about attempting to understand what makes people the way they are. In the third episode, we begin to be privy to some of the details of how Mary and Cyrus came to work in Kreizler's household, for instance. It's an important reminder of Kreizler's profession; his work is helping those with "a disease of the mind", oftentimes, helping those who have been forced into a violent mental state due to the trauma inflicted on them by society. We learn that both Cyrus and Mary have murdered someone in the past, Cyrus, a man who was assaulting a woman, Mary her father; but the narrative does not yet let us know why. The importance, here, comes in realizing we don't have all the information; we cannot yet judge these actions until we do. In that lies the nature of our story.

by Sandy DeVito

Episode 1: The Boy on the Bridge

I've been anxiously anticipating TNT's new high-profile period thriller The Alienist for about a year now (as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows quite well; I've expounded on my excitement there ad nauseam). I hadn't heard of Caleb Carr's novel before word of the show going into production began to circle, and I took an interest initially because of True Detective showrunner Cary Fukunaga's involvement; then I read the novel, and I was absolutely staggered by it ("how could this book have existed in the world since 1994 without it being a part of my life?", I wondered with exasperation). Now that the show is finally here, Fukunaga's involvement is somewhat diminished in the final product (though he's still attached as a producer), and it's impossible for those of us who weren't intimately involved in the show's production to know what is or is not a product of Fukunaga's influence - nevertheless, I was enthralled by the first episode. Not even months of anticipation, while reading the source material (enough to set anyone's expectations sky-high) could dull the thrill of this introduction for me. I'm in love.