'The Alienist' Episode 10 'Castle in the Sky' Review: Why Does Kreizler Go to the Reservoir?

Because The Alienist is more about the society that creates and nurtures a serial killer than the killer himself, the final confrontation with John Beecham (Bill Heck) feels anticlimactic by design. Almost as much a cipher at the end of his killing spree as at its beginning, it's easy to sympathize with Dr. Laszlo Kreizler's (Daniel Bruhl) disappointment at the end of The Alienist finale, Episode 10 "Castle in the Sky."

"Somewhere inside I believe he wanted to society to know he's its tormented offspring; a living reminder of all the crimes we commit behind closed doors," Kreizler says after failing to get a motive from Beecham, who dies of a gunshot atop Manhattan's titanic Croton Reservoir. Kreizler's final thematic summation comes after a squeamishly arresting image—one more Hammer Films-style gore shot for the road—when the investigators dissect Beecham's brain, hoping to find an engorged serial killer lobe. Instead, they find human normalcy.

Constructed over ten episodes, The Alienist delivers an astonishingly rich and textured portrait of New York City society at the turn of the 20th century, as its investigators followed Beecham through every class rung: Bowery bars, brothels, tenements, opera houses, police stations and socialist meeting halls and even into the private study of financier J.P. Morgan. But the series climaxed with a striking reversal in its eighth episode, "Psychopathia Sexualis," by moving each character out of their grimy urban elements and into the plains, forests and rural expanses of America in search of the killer. Out there The Alienist vastly expanded upon its critique of society-wide American brutality, giving the clearest outline of the killer by showing the violence and wreckage left behind him.

In the finale, all that's left to see is how they catch their killer. Having discovered the killer's lair in the previous episode, the final piece of the puzzle has something to do with the map of New York waterways posted on Beecham's apartment wall. Water has always been essential to the killer's ritualistic murders. The other dominant note in his profile—a love of heights—leads John Moore (Luke Evans) and Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning) to conclude Beecham will next kill at High Bridge Tower in Washington Heights. Howard and the police stake it out and await the killer.

Meanwhile, John and Dr. Kreizler go to the opera, ostensibly to distract former police chief Thomas Byrnes (Ted Levine). Instead, Dr. Kreizler uses it as a dramatic parlor reveal of sorts, telling Moore that Beecham isn't heading to High Bridge Tower at all, but to the Croton Reservoir.

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Dr. Kreizler chasing the serial killer John Beecham into the depths of the Croton Reservoir. TNT

The Alienist finale then arrives at a befuddling turn: I simply cannot figure out where or how Kreizler arrived at this fresh deduction, leaving a surprising disjunction just before the episode's climax. After following the investigation, step-by-step, for ten episodes, it's downright demoralizing to have its final turn pop out so inexplicably. Even reading synopses from the novels on The Alienist fan sites leaves me utterly clueless. Is it that Beecham would go to the wellspring of all Manhattan waters on the occasion of John the Baptist's birthday? Or is it something to do with the confluence of sewer tunnels on the waterway map?

It's possible I missed something obvious, but the lack of a clear answer feels intentionally ambiguous. Kreizler comes close to telling us the answer. "The map on its own tells us nothing," Kreizler tells Moore, "It's not only love that resides at the heart, John, it's pain." As he speaks, we witness Howard observe the waterway map, the pipelines traced out in red and the Croton Reservoir at its center. It seems both Kreizler and Howard successfully interpreted this meager visual metaphor: the killer has gone to the heart of the water system, because pain resides in the heart.

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The map of New York waterways which reveal the killer's final ritual grounds to both Dr. Kreizler and Sara Howard. TNT

It's quite a reach, but the final clue serves a different purpose than the gradual accumulation of clues and facts of which we, the audience, were made part. Instead, this final turn is a matter of revelation. Though they believe the killer's interior will forever be a mystery, both Kreizler and Howard have absorbed enough of his truth to scry this final confession (the episode earlier delves into their troubled backstories: they both know pain). Their eyes looked upon the map just like the killer's did. They saw as he saw.

For such a methodical show, filled with staid people slowly writing order on to chaos, The Alienist denying us Kreizler's final insight is a shock. On reflection, it seems a narrative subversion similar to the death of Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men. You thought this was one kind of story, but it's another. The Alienist is a procedural—methodical, plodding episode after episode—but then the final clue can't be sussed the same way. It does not emerge from empiricism. Instead, it springs forth from intuitions that don't belong to the audience at all. It's a bold and powerful storytelling choice, but, practically, it's too small a turn to accomplish much more than bafflement. The overwhelming sense is that a ten-hour throughline has just been ripped from your hands.

Chasing Beecham into the bowels of the reservoir, we finally see the face of the killer, complete with the facial tic described by those who knew him. This is not a tense cat-and-mouse game like Silence of the Lambs. Nor is it a confrontation with implacable moral corruption, like Seven. Instead, it is as Kreizler describes it: "all we found was a wounded child." That The Alienist perfectly fulfills its own design doesn't make it any less unstimulating.

In the aggregate, The Alienist might be well-served by its final winding down. That the actual serial killer is the least important figure in this sweeping serial killer drama made for an engrossing journey through 1890s New York, even if the intricacy of its design struggles to raise your heartrate.

Uncommon Knowledge

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