heroinIn one of the final scenes in the series, Naz sits by the banks of the Hudson River, under the George Washington Bridge, the same spot he'd gone with the murdered girl at the beginning of their catastrophic night. This time, he's there alone, smoking heroin.
Nasir is afraid of being harmed in prison and takes shelter behind Freddy Knight, a former boxer and an untouchable prisoner who appears to run Rikers Island. Nasir leaves with a criminal background, though he wasn't convicted of the crimes he committed in prison. Nasir becomes an addict in prison.
For eight weeks we expected to learn two things at the end of this series: Who killed Andrea and what the jury's decision would be. Tonight we didn't get either of those things. Yes, Naz walked free from Rikers, but not in the way we expected. The jury was deadlocked: 6-6.
He Wants To Control Naz Sure, Freddy was initially attracted to Naz because of his intelligence and college education, but he also probably saw the vulnerability in Naz and the fact that controlling him would be easy.
While the case is gripping and shrouded in mystery, thanks to Naz helpfully passing out while the murder was being committed, the crime is completely fictitious. Rather than drawing from a real life story, show creators Steven Zaillian and Richard Price adapted The Night Of from a BBC show called Criminal Justice.
Yes, Ray Halle is probably the killer. But in the end, The Night Of wasn't about straightforward "guilt" or "innocence" in Andrea's death at all. When Naz entered Rikers, he appeared to be a frightened kid, wrongfully accused of murder and struggling to survive.
Don (Paul Sparks) killed Andrea, got on his bike, and had that odd staredown with Naz, his patsy. Stay with us here, because the cat is the only one with an obvious motive: Andrea rejected him by putting him out to drink and get stabby with Naz.
In the finale, Stone returns the cat to the shelter. This comes immediately after Naz's lawyer Chandra calls him to the stand at his trial, a move which has Stone convinced that he'll be convicted. The cat's fate is uncertain until the end of the episode; the last few seconds show him inside Stone's place.
Towards the end of the show, it is seen that Anuradha Chandra was having an extramarital affair with her psychiatrist and was pregnant with his child. It is later revealed that she was a victim of marital rape. Even though it is proven that Anuradha murdered her husband, she is sentenced to only two years in jail.
June 24, 2016The Night Of / First episode dateBroadcast on HBO, The Night Of premiered on July 10, 2016 to critical acclaim. The first episode premiered on June 24, 2016, via HBO's on-demand services. The Night Of received 13 Emmy nominations, winning five, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series for Riz Ahmed.
This article reveals major spoilers for every episode of the HBO series The Night Of, which concluded its eight-episode run on Sunday.
Yes, Don Taylor (the perfectly cast Paul Sparks) is a grifter who bed and wed a wealthy, much older woman so that he wouldn't have to settle for making just $35,000 a year as a personal trainer and living in an apartment in Queens . And, yes, he was set up to receive half of Evelyn Cornish's estate, including the house he shared with Andrea after Evelyn's death -- until Andrea sued to stop her stepdad from inheriting the townhouse worth an estimated $10 million and booted him out.
But the answer is that Duane Reade had his day in court (see the knife question above), and he's currently serving time for an unrelated, but potentially helpful-to-Naz crime, of burglary at a state penitentiary known as the Cave.
They will continue to itch, and he will continue to ride the subway to his support group, where he will no longer be as flippant about having been cured by a quack doctor, and he will scratch himself on the subway with a long-ish wooden and/or metal implement, and people will continue to be grossed out when he does that. Life goes on. We are all John Stone.
It's strongly suggested during the trial by Naz's initial lead attorney Chandra Kapoor and in the closing arguments by replacement lead attorney John Stone that the knife was likely taken by Duane Reade if the brute of few words indeed committed the crime, but we here at home know that Duane Reade didn't kill Andrea, thanks to Detective Box's strong detective work post-retirement.
Naz’s question to the cop from the backseat of the crusier—“Is she dead ?”—also comes back to haunt him. Why didn’t he check her pulse? Call 911? Weiss finally makes him break down by quoting the Prophet Muhammad: “Hurry with all of the strength of your legs to the one who needs help?” She asks, “Is that what you did for Andrea?”
If Naz “gets in that box” he will “lose his cloak of innocence.”. The next time we see Chandra and Naz together in his cell, sun is shining through the bars. She’s convincing him to testify. Naz says he’ll do it, but he “needs her help.”. Her eyes and camera pan down to the tattoo of the word “SIN” on his right hand.
Andrea didn’t change the locks after he moved out. It’s a damning set of doubt-creating alternatives, but Chandra is not feeling confident. “I want to call Naz,” she tells Stone. “No you don’t,” he replies. If Naz “gets in that box” he will “lose his cloak of innocence.”.
And the finale spoilers start here, so you’ve been warned. According to the jury, Naz is neither guilty nor is he not guilty. After everything they—and by extension we—have seen, they are deadlocked. Normally, this would prompt a mistrial.
Instead of a mistrial, the judge decides to make Chandra second chair and have Stone finish as the lead defense attorney. Chandra might still be a lawyer, but she doesn’t work for Alison Crowe anymore.
We see J.D. Williams’ character Trevor on the stand, explaining why he didn’t tell the cops he was with a man named Duane Reade when he encountered Naz and Andrea. Then there is Duane Reade himself, now serving time for attempted robbery. We find out he has used knives on several victims in his past.
The man in question is Ray, the financial adviser who previously helped give Stone the information about Andrea’s stepfather. Box lays out the entire crime as he sees it: Ray going to the apartment later that night, getting into an argument with Andrea that went too far and stabbing her to death before taking off, without ever seeing Naz. Financial records show he took $300,000 out of Andrea’s account a month before the murder. Ray all but admits he did it, but Box can’t arrest him. He’s not a cop anymore.
So we see that with Naz. One of the most talked about plot points was the kiss with Naz’s lawyer, Chandra (Amara Karan), and her decision to not only smuggle drugs for him but then put him on the stand.
He wants be near Naz because he wants to be close to that innocence. Freddy’s not a bad guy. No one in the show is a good or bad guy. As much as Freddy wants Naz around intellectually he realizes he has to help out as much as he can. It’s an interesting dynamic between the two of them.
Naz has changed the most. The circumstances he found himself in the beginning of the series and in the end are wildly different. The person he is and the person he dreamed of being have drastically changed. That old version of Naz is no longer with us.
Often prisoners will ask their families to not come and visit them anymore because they have to keep a certain distance and tunnel vision and focus on survival. Seeing families can allow a certain softness that’s not helpful to surviving in prison. It’s too painful. It’s something that’s very realistic.
The Night Of 's undercurrent echoes what went so right with shows like True Detective and Breaking Bad. Even if the HBO miniseries shares DNA with NCIS, it's (brace yourself) art, bolstered by Price and Zaillian's razor-sharp and timely writing.
Like any brilliant procedural, The Night Of 's labyrinthine plot invites the viewers to become amateur sleuths, one episode at a time. It's silly, but we all do it, parsing through information dispensed to us, recreating situations, and imagining scenarios of how it all unfurled.
You know who didn't kill Andrea? Mr. Nasir Khan. Unless the show has been withholding a bevy of incriminating information (i.e., a multiple personality disorder, or some penchant for sleepwalking), there's no part of me that believes Naz brutally murdered Andrea Cornish.
In the finale, which aired on Sunday night (spoilers follow), the trial’s outcome hinged upon a mundane and unsatisfying technicality—a deadlocked jury—and on the personal ethics of a relatively minor character, the case’s prosecutor (Jeannie Berlin), who became convinced that Naz was innocent and declined to retry the case.
Naz’s background is occasionally brought up in the criminal investigations —by, for instance, a zealous white female defense lawyer who is trying to get him out on bail and emphasizes his ties to Queens to make the point that he won’t flee.
Yet Naz maintains an endearing vulnerability until the end. In the final episode, Freddy tells Naz why he feels compelled to take care of him. “Man, these dudes in here . . . whether they’re in here for selling drugs or murder, they all got one thing in common: if you ask them, every last one say they innocent.
But they all got that stink about ’em. Every moron and millionaire. That lying stink,” Freddy says. “But you, you smell like innocence. You’re the real deal, Naz; that makes you one of a kind. And the fact that you’re under my wing—it’s like I got something nobody else got. It’s like—like I got a unicorn.”.
In the course of its eight episodes, which followed Naz’s trial and the toll it takes on him, his parents, and his lawyers (John Turturro and Amara Karan), the show devoted only minimal energy to investigating other suspects and motives for the crime, and its storylines were sometimes uneven.
What redeemed the show—which was created by Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, based on the British series “Criminal Justice”—was Ahmed’s magnificent performance, and the disturbing, and convincing, coming of age his character underwent during his time behind bars.