The Night Of Episode Three Recap: The Show’s Dragging It’s Feet A Little
I’m going to call a spade a spade here: Last night’s episode was, for the most part, pretty “meh”. After a heart-pounding, anxiety-inducing setup for a premiere then a descent into the hellish chaos that is now Naz’s life as a follow-up, Episode Three fell a little flat. It was anti-climatic, at times it was boring, it talked about feet too much and we didn’t learn much about the investigation or any of the characters.
I still have faith in this show, but next week better be pretty compelling or some “Wait is this show REALLY as good as everyone says it is ?” doubts will start in the back of our minds a la right what happened around the end of True Detective Season One. Again, I think this was something of a bridge episode and the rest of the season will be closer to the quality of the first two, but the concern is now there.
The main thing we learned last night is that contrary to what Netflix and Orange Is The New Black would have us believe, the typical American prison is in fact not a group of mischievous rascals zinging clever one-liners and forging friendships and trendy haircuts. It’s actually an irrevocably broken system built on corruption, violence and brutality. Who knew?!? The Hamburgerler always seemed so happy. But Naz’s deep exploration of life as an incarcerated citizen awaiting trial did serve six interesting purposes:
1. It further painted the picture of how “Muslim” is going to be the specter that hangs over everything. Naz’s isolation and undeserved hatred from his other prisoners for his race and religion is more intense and savage, but not entirely different, from what he will experience during his criminal investigation and to an extent, what he experiences in his everyday life outside of bars.
2. The monologue from Freddy (Omar from the Wire’s character) talking about how many of the guards grew up with the prisoners is reminiscent of the “the criminal justice system is one big club” theme from Episode Two, drawing an interesting parallel between the corruption of the two.
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3. The character of Freddy also allows to Michael K. Williams to be cast in an HBO show where there could potentially be a tough but street-smart black character, in accordance to United States federal law.
4. Just an interesting theory I saw floating around to keep an eye on is that Freddy knows something about the murder and knows Naz is innocent, and that’s why he’s willing to help him. We know Freddy’s reach is long, and what other reason would he have to help Naz? For all he knows, Naz is a murder and rapist like everyone else in the pen thinks he is.
5. Prison in America is unimaginably awful and there are a lot of innocent people who are awaiting trial and can’t afford bail or were wrongly convicted inside of it, which makes “PRISON RAPE, OMG LOL!” jokes a lot less funny.
6. The speech about veal waiting in dark crates for slaughter and the image of an innocent little tabby cat with ten days to live being carried into a dog pound of barking beasts that want to tear it apart gave the writers two chances to slap us across the face and scream into our ears “IT’S A METAPHOR!!!! GET IT?!?!? METAPHOR!!! I LEARNED THAT IN MY UNIVERSITY OF IOWA CREATIVE WRITING WORK SHOP!!! METAPHOR!!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!?!!? MEEEEETTTTTAAAAPHHHHHOOOORRRR!!!!”
And that was the main focus on Sunday night. The second focus was feet. I’m not going to write about feet. Pres has delivered too many papers for me to have to blog about feet. But I did find some other tidbits about John Stone interesting. The main being, of course, well what the hell is he doing here?
I wrote last week about how much like most HBO shows, there isn’t going to be a clear-cut black and white dichotomy between who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Everyone is just going to be different shades of grey. But we as viewers are conditioned to believe, almost as a default, that the main character is the protagonist and therefore “good guy.” That’s why we for the most part think Naz didn’t kill Andrea even though the evidence would overwhelmingly suggest he did (it’s interesting the viewer experience and experience of the detective parallel each other in this way) and that John Stone must be an avid believer in justice and everyone deserves a trial and THAT’S why he’s going to represent Naz and PUT THE SYSTEM ON TRIAL MAAAAN and blah blah blah.
But that’s not what the show is going to be. I’m sure John isn’t a bad person, but he isn’t going to be canonized in the Vatican anytime soon either. The cop handing John’s card to the taxi cab stand owner for him to possibly press Grand Theft Auto charges against Naz shows he’s part of Club Criminal Justice as much as anyone. He told Naz’s parents to not trust any lawyer who says “I guarantee you” then a few seconds later said “I guarantee you, you won’t find a competent lawyer who will do it for less” after naming a price he knows they can’t afford. And everyone who knows John prior to the events of this show questions his motivations, whether it be DA’s, cops or other lawyers, which means we should question them too.
That type of moral ambiguity is more interesting to me than his feet, and I hope that’s what the focus of the show will be going forward. I think most people outside of Rex Ryan and dermatologists will agree with me. I’ve heard it said that you should judge a movie or show by what it’s trying to accomplish, not what you want it to be. And I totally agree with that. If the show wants to be critique of the criminal justice system, I’m fine with that. If it wants to be a murder mystery, I’m fine with that. I just don’t want it to stand still, which is mostly what it did last night. I think the foundation of The Night Of is still solid enough where last night could be a minor hiccup in an excellent series. At least I hope so. I’ll stomp my feet I’ll be so mad if it isn’t. I’d have to put my foot in my mouth for recommending it to so many people. And I’d have nothing to watch until football! HBO would be out on their feet. People would really get cold feet about watching another miniseries. The show has to stop dragging its feet. But I’ll still jump into next week foot first. I still bow at the feet of HBO. Hopefully they sweep my off my feet. Have I sufficiently killed this joke and buried it feet first yet?
So we’ll see what happens next Sunday. Thanks to everyone for reading and also, I recommend using the next few days to watch BOJACK HORSEMAN Season Three which was released on Friday. I’ll be blogging the season recap the coming Monday or Tuesday in addition to the usual The Night Of Recap. Until next week.
Feet pun.
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