It was the high profile nature of the case that saw Stone fired, and replaced by Alison Crowe (Glenne Headly) who almost immediately started preening for the cameras, and finding a way to a quick resolution, even if it meant Naz behind bars. When he goes against Crowe’s advice to plead guilty, the case is immediately tossed to her inexperienced assistant Chandra Kapoor with Stone angling his way back in as well. Even so, Naz is lucky to have this much support on his side. Had Stone arrived five minutes earlier or later at the precinct that night, Naz likely would’ve been stuck with a public defender, or whoever his parents could afford with their modest means. So the lawyers, who form such a crucial part of this story, the tired, end-of-shift cops who first pick him up, the expert witnesses called to testify on either side, the judge who is chosen, even Naz’s cellmates and confidantes on the inside — all of these people are part of the chorus of characters in a pitch battle over the unknowable secret of what happened the night of, and all of them are there by accident.
Also persistent throughout the series are the optics of the case, with everything from how it plays in the media (even though they seem to have moved on long before the verdict is rendered), to how Naz looks in court (Stone is dismayed when a new tattoo on Naz’s neck appears “on the jury side”). Andrea becomes a troubled party girl, with Naz a young Muslim-American, seething with unacknowledged anger in a city where racial tension is never far below the surface. Even gestures such as walking out of court during testimony — which both Naz’s mother Safar (Poorna Jagannathan) and Det. Box do at various points — are all part of the fabric of the case, sending signals to the jury regarding what these characters may or may not believe. Again, these are hardly novel concepts, but the rigorous method by which Price and Zaillian explore the ramifications of each subtle shift in the case is revealing.
In their analysis of the finale, Vulture asked two key questions: Why was no one looking at all this security footage that eventually implicated Raymond, and did it make any sense to put Naz on the stand? The former they chalk up to “narrative convenience” and the latter to simply being nonsensical, but that feels like a misreading of plot elements that underscore Price and Zaillian’s commitment to highlighting the deficiencies in the path en route to “justice.” The surveillance was ignored for two very simple reasons: Det. Box (crucially, again, close to retirement and ready to pack up his desk) and the prosecution believed Naz was their man for the crime (at least early on), and Kapoor and Stone were out of their element and working with few resources. It’s worth remembering that Crowe offered Kapoor little assistance from the firm, and while the defence worked on providing reasonable doubt, it’s understandable that neither one of them had the time or even the thought to closely examine what pretty much everyone figured was innocuous CCTV footage.
Meanwhile, putting Naz on the stand was a mistake, and that’s entirely the point. Kapoor, reeling from a breakup, emotionally vulnerable, and dealing with the biggest case of her nascent career, was already falling for her client, and made a fatal error: she failed to see Naz through the eyes of the jurors, and instead, thought by putting him on the stand, they would see the good man she saw in him. There does feel like an uncharacteristic amount of manipulation going on in the Kapoor/Naz relationship, and it is slightly hard to swallow that a young, bright and ambitious attorney on the make would make so schoolgirl an error, but it’s all there to justify the idea that Naz has to, at some point, get on the stand. And not necessarily for strict realism’s sake, but to bring home the very point that Price and Zaillian have been spending over eight hours teasing: the judicial system, this massive, flawed, perhaps even fundamentally broken machine populated with men and women at all levels of morality, duty and efficiency, is simply incapable of ascertaining the truth of any event beyond a reasonable doubt. And that could not have been better encapsulated then by the moment that Weiss has Naz in the dock and more or less on the ropes and asks him finally, again, if he killed Andrea, and Naz replies in a kind of stupefied whisper (and seriously, just how revelatory is Riz Ahmed is in this role?): “I don’t know.”
The famous symbol for justice is the blindfolded lady holding the scales and a sword. But “The Night Of” makes us notice anew that her blindness can be interpreted in various ways — it’s supposed to suggest impartiality but it also evokes a kind of wilful ignoring of the complexity that is encapsulated in even the smallest encounter or event. “The Night Of,” especially in this clever, engrossing and deeply satisfying finale, makes us wonder what happens when guilt and innocence are weighed on that scale of hers and found to be perfectly, ambivalently balanced (6-6, a hung jury). And furthermore, it makes us ask if ultimately, that’s actually what always happens because like everyone in the show, not only do we not know, we can never know. Maybe that’s why she really wears a blindfold: she’d rather not see just how impossible it is to find definitive truth and achieve definitive justice through systems that are as flawed as the people who make them.