The Alienist Review: These Bloody Thoughts (Season 1 Episode 4)

On The The Alienist Season 1 Episode 4 “These Bloody Thoughts,” the team continues to imagine what it would take for them to become killers.

The Alienist is a classic example of something looking interesting in theory, but the execution is a bit lackluster.

In theory, this series would like to be something akin to Hannibal, which is all well and good. It wants to be able to have conversations about the human psyche and how investigating crimes of that matter can be reflected back onto your own mentality.

This is where the execution comes in.

As we said, if the show wants to get increasingly introspective, that would be more than fine. In fact, we encourage it. The main problem (practically the primary one) is that these conversations aren’t illuminating anything greater about the characters than we already knew or could have guessed about them.

When a significant chunk of an episode or show, in general, is not working nearly well as the series wants it to, that’s a problem. Even worse is the fact that this the most interesting aspect of the series, one that doesn’t work and that we’ve all seen done on better and more interesting shows than this.

This is indicative of a larger problem within the show where it’s trying so desperately to be interesting in the slightest, but it simply isn’t and there’s no way around that.

It’s possible some of this could be solved by the case progressing faster than a snail’s pace, but even then we’d still have a show where it took until the fifth episode to get any kind of momentum in the investigation. No matter how you cut it, The Alienist is a dull show and even when it’s exciting is still rather boring.

The visual style of the series doesn’t help. It’s a palate of grey upon more grey and even if that’s the way that eighteenth-century New York looked, that doesn’t make it any more compelling.

In fairness, Penny Dreadful worked with a similar aesthetic but it had better direction and cinematography to back it up than The Alienist has.

Another continuing problem with the series is the detached feeling that exists with investigating murdered child transsexual prostitutes. It doesn’t truly want to engage with any aspect fully and we don’t know the children themselves in any profound way. The series treats them as little more than narrative devices, which feels like a disservice.

Instead of engaging in an intriguing conversation regarding trans children or child prostitutes in general, it has opted to treat them as indifferently as a dead woman at the beginning of a CSI episode.

In short, it can do better and that’s more or less a statement on The Alienist as a whole.

What did you think of this episode of The Alienist? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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The Alienist airs Mondays at 9/8c on TNT.

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