“Who killed Andrea Cornish?” may have been the central animating question of HBO’s The Night Of, but Sunday night’s finale left us with a lot of unanswered questions, too. Like: Wait, so Naz had to go back to Rikers to get his stuff? And: How much eczema can one TV show contain? Here, we attempt to answer as many of these pressing queries as possible.
Did Naz kill Andrea Cornish?
No, he did not.
Are we sure?
Pretty sure.
So who killed her?
Best guess? Andrea’s financial manager, Ray Halle. The one who cast suspicion on Andrea’s father but neglected to mention that he, Ray, and she were sleeping together. Detective Box’s postretirement investigation reveals cell phone records that show that he called Andrea five times the night of the murder, and security camera footage shows them having a screaming argument on the street earlier that night. Further security images place him in the area of her house around the time of death, and driving out of the city at 3 a.m. using a cash lane even though he has a toll tag. Andrea’s bank statements show large withdrawals from her accounts, and he has a gambling problem.
How strong is the case against him?
Um, not that strong, actually? Having just spent eight hours showing us how an innocent man can be nearly convicted of murder based on circumstantial evidence, The Night Of expects us to buy an even weaker circumstantial case against him. There’s still no sign of the murder weapon, and if he did kill Andrea, Ray has had months to cover his tracks. Prosecutor Helen Weiss isn’t wrong when she tells Box “We have more on the kid.” But it’s the last episode and he looks pretty squirrelly, so let’s say he did it.
Never mind, at least Naz is innocent, right?
About that. John Stone’s closing argument points out that Naz has admitted to committing several crimes, from taking his father’s cab without permission to using drugs and leaving the scene of a crime. Murder, he argues, just isn’t one of them. What he doesn’t know is that Naz served as a lookout for a prison killing, which makes him guilty of at least conspiracy to commit murder. He wasn’t a killer when he went to jail, but he’s as good as one now.
So the justice system imprisoned an innocent man, and then it freed a guilty one?
Pretty much. Naz emerges from prison with a drug dependency, ostracized from his community and distanced from his family, which makes the whole “freedom” thing a little shaky.
Why does Naz have to go back to Rikers Island after the charges are dropped? That seems kind of outrageous. Couldn’t they just clean out his cell for him?
Inmates have to be “processed out” before they can leave. If Naz had been free on bail, he could have walked right out of the courtroom, but he wasn’t. Plus he left his copy of The Call of the Wild behind.
What about the other characters? Did they turn out OK?
No, nobody turns out OK. This is serious drama. Stone’s eczema returns with a vengeance, brought on the by the stress of preparing his closing argument. Box is a miserable retiree, glumly playing golf (which he swore he’d never do) and taking a job as a New York University security guard just to keep busy.
And Chandra, hoo boy, things do not go well for her. First, she makes the terrible decision to put Naz on the witness stand, which would likely have led to his conviction had the prosecutor not had a change of heart midway through her closing argument. Then video surfaces of her kissing Naz in his holding cell, which leads to her losing her job and could end up getting her disbarred—and that’s without anyone finding out that she also smuggled drugs to Naz so he wouldn’t be suffering from withdrawal when he testified. Her career as a lawyer of any repute is pretty much over.
Man, that seems unfair.
Kind of? But again, Chandra kissed her client and smuggled drugs to him and put him on the stand when she clearly shouldn’t have. She seems like a nice person, but she’s a pretty terrible lawyer.
Was there more gross foot stuff?
Not specifically. Stone’s eczema did return, but it mostly seemed to afflict his upper body this time, or at least the show’s creative team decided, correctly, that we’d had enough of Crisco-covered feet wrapped in plastic.
Is this how the British version ended, too?
Both shows do end with the charges being dropped and a lawyer being out of a job, so technically yes. But whereas Naz isn’t found guilty of the crime and is let go because the district attorney chooses not to re-try the case after the jury deadlocks, in Criminal Justice, our protagonist is convicted and that conviction is overturned after another man is found to be the real killer.
Is it OK to end a TV show title with a preposition?
I mean, The Night on Which a Murder Happened doesn’t quite have the same ring.
What happened to the cat???
The one from Andrea’s house that Stone took in despite his crippling allergies for the sake of symbolism? It’s fine, at least symbolically. After the cat snuggled up to his face while he was sleeping and caused a major allergy attack, he took it back to the animal shelter, which had previously made clear that it would be put to sleep if it was returned. In the last scene, we see Stone wistfully staring at a TV ad for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in particular a close-up of a terribly sad-looking cat. But after he leaves to tend to a new client—he has a thing for the helpless and desperate, you see—the cat dashes through his apartment, apparently alive and well.
So wait, so did he go back and rescue the cat or not?
I’m reluctant to admit that, just because it seems like terribly clunky writing. But The Night Of isn’t the kind of show that otherwise goes in for pure symbolism or ghost cats, so the apparent answer is yes. Is that enough closure for you?
I guess.
Good.
