‘The Night Of’ Finale Review: The Verdict Is In
The Night Of wrapped up Sunday night with what HBO billed as a “series finale,” a supersized episode that just made you wish and hope that phrase proves to be wrong, because it’s hard to let go of most of the characters the show created for us. The eighth episode — titled “The Call of the Wild” after the Jack London prison literature Michael Kenneth Williams’s Freddy tried to get Riz Ahmed’s Naz to read — paid off with a beautiful, sometimes moving conclusion. Don’t read further if you don’t want to know Naz’s fate.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE SERIES FINALE OF THE NIGHT OF FOLLOW.
The finale played out, to some degree, like a superb episode of Law & Order. There were lots of characters/suspects taking to the stand to be grilled by Amara Karan’s Chandra Kapoor and Jeannie Berlin’s D.A. Helen Weiss. (Duane Reade, a joke turned into a man, seemed to be very much the kind of cleverness co-creator Richard Price would have invented, and it’s a measure of Price’s skill that he kept repeating it in variations that never spilled over into groaning ridiculousness.) There was Bill Camp’s now-retired police detective Dennis Box, refusing to give up and ultimately cracking the case, culminating in that superbly hard-boiled casino confrontation between Box and the weasel financial-adviser Raymond Halle (Paulo Costanzo), the guy whodunit. The extra-long final episode paid off very satisfyingly by doing right by two people in particular: its star and a key co-star. John Turturro wasn’t merely excellent in giving John Stone’s closing argument; we, as an audience, deserved to see him deliver such a speech, having spent so much time with his itchy feet and his itchier brain. Then there was Berlin, fabulous in her cross-examination of Naz and crucial in the final moments in court, weighing, in the seconds the judge had given her to decide whether to impanel a new jury for a retrial, everything she now knew from Box’s investigation and coming to the right decision. The screenwriters were able finally to give TV viewers a chance to see how good an actor Berlin continues to be.
To whom did the show do less service? Well, clearly, Karan’s Chandra Kapoor. It’s one thing for a young person immersed in her first big case to become so involved in the defense that she forms an emotional bond with her client. (That penultimate-episode kiss.) It’s another thing entirely to have Kapoor willingly reduce herself to being Naz’s drug mule, and lose common sense and control: Putting Naz on the stand? From what we’d seen of this woman up till now, she would have known she shouldn’t have put Naz on the stand, even without Stone’s warnings. And crying in the courtroom? No. No way, sorry, Price and Zaillian: too much. There will be those who’ll say the two victims in this series were both women: Andrea and Chandra.
But if you can get past those misgivings, and I can, you will likely say that The Night Of was ultimately, taken as a whole, a very good, exciting series that hit the right note of poignance at its conclusion. Its conclusion was one of those won-the-battle-lost-the-war situations. Naz may be free, but he’s also likely doomed: He’s a drug addict who’s hiding his addiction from his parents; he’s complicit in a murder that Freddy committed, which will likely never reach back to him but must weigh on his conscience; and he’s now got the muscle and the prison mindset that will make his previously established temper a trigger mechanism for future violence. The filmmakers have established, decisively and dramatically, that this young man’s life has been ruined by our legal system.
The lesser but still stinging tragedy is that of Stone, fated to return to obscurity, his eczema an outer sign of his inner alienation from any possibility of human closeness. The double-chuckle of the ASPCA commercial he watches, followed by the show’s final player — that darn cat — crossing our TV screens turns into a sad reminder of his life. Zaillian said recently that, while The Night Of was conceived as a one-off piece, there’s a chance it will come back in some form. (The show it was based on, the British production Criminal Justice, did a second season.) I know how Zaillian and Price can do it; I said it in my first review of the show: Detective Box, with our favorite sourpuss law-man as a private eye, am I right? Who doesn’t want to see him solve another case?
