The Alienist Review: Requiem (Season 1 Episode 9)
On The Alienist Season 1 Episode 9, “Requiem,” the team closes in on the killer as they recover from the loss of one of their own.
The best thing about “Requiem” as an episode is also what makes it falter as a season: It moves at a wicked fast pace.
The team blows through new leads and clues with such an incredible speed that it honestly makes you wonder why the rest of the season wasn’t like this.
The answer to that is probably that there is not enough material here to support multiple episodes, even one that is only ten episodes, so they’ve stretched it out rather needlessly.
We’ll have a better sense of after the season finale, but the thing that this episode illustrates the most is, similar to a Netflix series, how much this season could have been trimmed down.
More than that, this episode forces you to come away with the conclusion that the greatest hindrance to their investigation is not the killer or the police interfering, but Kreizler himself.
The moment that he is no longer involved in the investigation is the one where actual, definable traction is made in tracking down this killer.
The lack of Kreizler throughout this episode gives it a lot of extra air to breathe. Daniel Bruhl is a fantastic actor and his performance as Laszlo Kreizler is excellent, but the character’s presence is often so large that it often feels that he takes up all the space in any given scene.
In this episode, however, that space is given to other characters like John Moore, who completely delivers in ways that some of the previous episodes would lead us to believe that he isn’t capable of.
Even the Isaacson brothers, who most often feel entirely extraneous to the series, occupy a great role within the episode as the ones that are able to open certain doors as Detective Sergeants. It turns out that it’s all about the utilization of these characters that the series seems to have finally figured out.
Likewise, this an episode that has finally figured out how to get us to care about the killer: Actually talking about who he is and what he wants.
The season as a whole has discussed the killer in such deliberate obliqueness that it often felt that he was, as certain characters have stated, some supernatural being incapable of recognizable descriptions.
Recently, the characterization of him has shifted demonstrably towards someone who might actually exist within the real world.
It’s been understandable why the series wants us to not have a good sense of who the killer might be, but it’s largely resulted in us not having a considerable amount of interest in him as either a character or a figure.
All said, this is a rather solid episode that markets tremendously at a kinetic speed in which it dispatches clue after clue to great effect.
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.