‘The Knick’ Season 2 Gets Quarantined in First Teaser

If you are not watching The Knick, it should definitely be high up on your list of television priorities. Steven Soderbergh’s early 20th century period medical drama is gorgeously cinematic and exquisitely intense, and may be some of the filmmaker’s finest work to date. Today brings our first look at Season 2 via an appropriately unnerving and slightly surreal teaser — in addition to revealing a quarantine in San Francisco, the teaser also promises an October premiere.

It looks like Clive Owen’s Dr. John Thackery is heading to San Francisco, following our dear Cornelia (Juliet Rylance). At the end of Season 1, Cornelia was forced to end her affair with Edwards (Andre Holland) after an unfortunately unplanned (and impossible, in their social climate) pregnancy. Cornelia reluctantly agreed to marry Philip and move to California, away from the Knickerbocker, Thackery and Edwards — and taking her progressive approach to hospital politics with her.

But it seems as though Thackery will be joining her (perhaps briefly) in San Francisco, as a “quarantine” sign indicates an epidemic of sorts among the immigrant population.

Last we saw of the increasingly erratic and rapidly degenerating Thackery, he’d accidentally killed a young girl with a failed blood transfusion and found himself ordered into a rehab facility. The final shot of Season 1 was a deliciously dark and particularly unsettling one, as Thackery’s doctor offers him a promising new drug to help alleviate his cocaine addiction — that drug was heroin.

The first Season 2 teaser offers little clues into the future of Thackery & Co., though I have my fingers crossed for a reunion between Cornelia and Edwards. And perhaps fewer penile drug injections this time around.

HBO will air Season 1 of The Knick on their network prior to Cinemax’s debut of Season 2 on October 16.