Even by the deeply degraded human-behavior plausibility standards of The Night Of, the jailhouse kiss shared by Nasir Khan and his attorney — his attorney! — Chandra Kapoor in “Ordinary Death,” this week’s episode, strains credulity beyond the breaking point and well into the realm of “you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.” Not that I’d expect anything more from Naz, who later in the episode becomes an accessory to murder, for real this time. Nor, frankly, would I hope for much better from Chandra, who despite her law degree and work on a high-profile case for a prestigious firm has been depicted to be green as the summer grass time and time again. (Remember when she didn’t know what ketamine was?)
But from Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, the two highly acclaimed auteurs behind this turkey, I think “not having a brilliant young lawyer make out with the murder suspect she’s representing in full view of Rikers Island security cameras” is the least we could demand. Naz is a handsome guy, sure, and I suppose I could understand how transference could cause Chandra’s protective instincts toward him — at this point, she’s one of the few people alive who believe he’s not guilty — to transmute into attraction. But he’s no more the only eligible bachelor in town than his dad was the only delivery guy capable of bringing her dinner the other week. Yet here we are, once again forcing a plot contrivance the way a prowler would jimmy open a lock. And for what? So Naz can have a series of gruesome flashbacks and visions of Andrea and her bloody corpse during and after the kiss? Whether to deepen our suspicion that he’s guilty or to simply exploit the perverse charge of seeing a woman maimed once again, it’s no more necessary than the kiss itself.
Tags: decider, reviews, the night of, TV, TV reviews