The Alienist Review: Psychopathia Sexualis (Season 1 Episode 8)
On The Alienist Season 1 Episode 8 “Psychopathia Sexualis,” leaves New York in separate directions to find clues across the country about their killer.
For a good portion of The Alienist, it’s often felt like the structure of a lot of their episodes have been fairly lacking.
For the case of “Psychopathia Sexualis,” it has the structure down, but, despite that, still feels rather meandering at parts, no doubt due to the very structure that it employs in this episode.
In what can only be described as a very Game of Thrones move for the series, much of the episode involves characters jumping on a train and traveling somewhere, where they are apparently riding on a magic train.
Look, maybe this is a problem with the editing, but this episode would have us believe that it takes an equal amount of time to go from Washington, D.C. to New England as it does to get from New York City to North Dakota. It’s not a huge problem, but its a level of continuity confusion that would’ve been fixed by giving us a better sense of how much time is passing.
A big thing about this episode is how a lot of the reveals of the suspect feels, as if the show realized that it hasn’t sprinkled enough of these details through the previous episodes and now it has to speed through these plot points.
Ultimately, though, this is a perfectly serviceable episode right up to the final scene and then it goes belly up.
From the start, The Alienist has been a bit too interested in the violence inherent to humans. After all, this is a show that revolves entirely around the murder of sexually exploited children, but then it started doing things like Kreizler slapping Sara and took on a new degree of harshness.
In that specific regard, it jumped the shark at the end of this episode with the entirely senseless murder of Mary, whose death will only serve to further unravel Kreizler, a character that we hardly care about at this point.
It’s not just her murder that seems unforgivable here; it’s also that this is indicative of the type of series that The Alienist is comfortable being now.
Similar again to Game of Thrones, it’s using the era it’s set in to justify the irrefutably lazy impulse and abhorrent impulse to put a traditionally defenseless individual onto the chopping block to spur on other (mostly male) characters. It’s pretty shameful all around and makes us particularly wary of Sara’s treatment going forward.
This brings to mind the fact that The Alienist has yet to be renewed for a second season yet, but if this is the way that it chooses to treat characters that it feels are more disposable than others, then perhaps it shouldn’t have one.
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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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.