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Did Samson Kill Delilah in HBO’s The Night Of? Episode 106, Recap & Review

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Spoilers
& Biblical Parallels

As soon as I heard the mortician-undertaker in episode 6 of HBO’s The Night Of refer to the book of Judges from the Hebrew Bible, I knew it referred to Samson and Delilah, without even knowing the name of the show’s episode. When Chandra later read passages to Naz’s attorney John Stone, I was surprised that someone as savvy as Stone didn’t already know that story in its entirety. If creator-writers Steven Zaillian and Richard Price were giving that information to us viewers, however, then I’m less surprised: how many people even know the story of Samson and Delilah these days, let alone that it comes from Judges? More interesting to The Night Of, however, is how the story of Samson and Delilah relates to that of Naz, a Pakistani-American college student accused of rape and murder,  and to that of the murder victim, Andrea (Sofia Black-D’Elia).

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In Judges 13-16, Samson is favored by God from the moment of his conception. In fact, an angel of God comes to Samson’s mother, who has been barren, and tells her that she should have no wine or other fermented drink because she is to bear a child. As he grows, Samson is blessed by God, though we are never given a specific reason for this, and, further, “the spirit of Lord stirs in Samson.”

Always the bad-boy himself, Samson has a thing for the foreign ladies. He falls for a Philistine woman and wants to marry her, to his parents’ dismay. They ask, “Must you go to the uncircumcised Philistines to get a wife?” (14:3) But God is controlling the story of Samson in order to show His own might: “[Samson’s] parents did not know that this [love for the Philistine woman] was from the Lord, who was seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines; for at that time they were ruling over Israel” (14:4).

Eventually, after shows of strength, being betrayed by his wife, and displays of both anger and strength, Samson falls for another foreign woman, Delilah. We can only assume that, since God causes or allows Samson to love his first wife, who is ethnically and religiously “foreign,” God also allows Samson to love Delilah.

In order to be betrayed? So that Samson will lose the “gift” of his strength and, after he is a blind captive, return to God, showing God’s forgiveness and power?

I’m not sure of the reason: God doesn’t explain Himself. But Samson is betrayed: Delilah cuts off his hair, causing him to lose his strength, and he is captured by the Philistines. Imprisoned, Samson prays to God for one last burst of strength to pull down the pillars of the Philistine temple, knowing full well that he himself will die with the enemies of his people and of his God.

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I don’t know if The Night Of  intends to take the story that far, but its writers are the ones who named the episode after the Biblical story, and then quoted it in the episode itself, so let’s see what we have.

Is Naz the Samson in The Night Of? Naz (Riz Ahmed, center) doesn’t seem like a strong-man, though his attack on the Rikers inmate who burned him gave us a hint of the depth of Naz’s strength, anger, and violence. Naz doesn’t seem like a man blessed by God either, though because of his ethnicity and religion, he is in a post-9/11 land that is relatively hostile to him, despite his having been born in New York city.

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An outsider like Samson, Naz also has secrets, as Stone (John Turturro, above R) and Chandra (Kara Amaran, above L) learned in the previous episode and again last night. Samson’s secret was the key to his strength: his unshorn hair. Naz has already shorn his hair, so that doesn’t seem to be the key to his “strength.” In fact, I’m guessing most viewers don’t think Naz has much strength, unless naïveté and stupidity count as “strength” when you have enough of either one.

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In fact, let’s count Naz’s shaving his head before going to trial for rape and murder as one of his more  stupid choices. I’m not even going to go back to episode 1 where Naz stole his dad’s cab to go to a party, picked up a strange girl, took unknown drugs from her, had unprotected sex with her without even knowing her name, woke to find her dead and ran out, broke back in after he found he’d forgotten his keys, then ran out again with the bloody knife in his pocket. From the premiere, we knew Naz was unrealistically naïve and foolish.

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But in episode 6, we can add getting prison tatttoos, just before your murder trial, in places you can’t hide (on the knuckles), tattoos that say Sin and Bad, no less, among those incredibly stupid choices that Naz makes. Oh, and let’s not forget Naz’s free-basing with Freddie (Michael Kenneth Williams).

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I realize that Naz is in prison, and that he’s asked Freddie for protection, but nothing says Naz has to do drugs and further dull his already-befuddled mind in order to survive. His ability to beat up one inmate and intimidate others has proven that the boy already has most of what it takes to survive the penal system.

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But back to the metaphor of Samson and Delilah.

Samson fell hard for the seductress Delilah, and she apparently toyed with his affections in order to learn the secret of his strength so that she could betray him and have his enemies capture him. Delilah asked Samson multiple times what the source of his strength was, and Samson lied to her every time but the last.

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Samson’s secret was the source of his strength, and, in The Night Of, Naz has more than enough secrets: his rage, his capacity for violence, and his taking illicit amphetamines which can cause further rage as well as psychotic episodes. But do Naz’s secrets give him strength? I suppose it depends on how you look at it. They seem to be helping him survive in prison, even amongst the baddest of the bad boys.

Did those secrets get him involved with the victim? Naz’s secrets don’t seem to have had anything to do with that, unless the illicit Adderal “persuaded” Naz to steal his father’s cab and to have drug-and-alcohol-fueled sex with a complete stranger.

So, if Naz is the betrayed Samson, then who is Delilah in The Night Of? Is the murdered rich girl Andrea the seductress? As a representative of the type of girl Naz dreamed of, perhaps Andrea unconsciously tempted him much as Delilah tempted Samson. Of course, she’s not the initial reason Naz stole the cab, but she did get his mind off the party he was planning to attend, and she did convince him to take drugs, get him back to her home, and get him to play dangerous games with knives.

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In the original biblical story, however, Delilah is the one who betrays Samson, after he is already in love with her, though it is understood that Samson is as much responsible for his own downfall as is the seductress Delilah. After all, had Samson not abandoned his God to be with a foreign woman, he would never have revealed the secret of his strength, been shorn and lost his power, then been blinded by his captives.

(I realize there’s a problem with the story of Samson and Delilah itself, since God is the one that causes or allows Samson to initially be attractive to foreign, Philistine women, so that God can show His own strength and power through Samson, but that’s one of the unresolved mysteries of the Bible stories.)

In any event, though Judges presents Samson in a relatively non-judgmental, mostly sympathetic light, Judges still puts the burden of responsibility for his ultimate capture and suffering solidly on Samson’s own shoulders.

If we are to follow that interpretation of the biblical story, then Naz, as Samson, is the one mostly, if not completely, responsible for his own downfall. Just as Samson got involved with a woman who was not of his ethnicity or religious beliefs, a woman whose loyalty was to the Philistines and to the money they would give her for her betrayal, Naz became involved, if only for part of one night, with a woman who was not of his socio-economic class, his ethnicity, or his religious faith.

Whoa. Are the writers of The Night Of getting moral on us here? Or did their protagonist Naz just make some incredibly stupid and immature choices that night, choices that happened to involve a rich white girl? After all, if Andrea is the Delilah of this story, then she ends up dead, not wealthy after the betrayal of her lover.

As we learned in last night’s episode, Andrea was wealthy from the death of her mother. She was, in fact, wealthy enough to make her stepfather angry after she refused him half of her mother’s estate. As attorney Stone learned last night, Andrea’s stepfather has a history of marrying wealthy, older women. Thus, the stepfather has become a suspect in Andrea’s murder.

So far, Andrea doesn’t seem like much of a Delilah, despite the mortician-undertaker’s referring to Judges, and despite his calling Andrea, whom he met only briefly, a “cat” that plays with men like “yarn.”

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So what is all this Samson and Delilah stuff in The Night Of? Are viewers supposed to look at the source of the Biblical story — Judges — more than at the story itself? If so, who are the judges in this limited mini-series that is exploring the criminal justice system, and that finds it most sincerely corrupted?

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Is Detective Box (Bill Camp), who never for an instant doubts Naz’s guilt nor seeks any other suspects, a Judge, condemning Naz without a trial?

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Is DA Weiss (Jeannie Berlin), who has virtually coerced her witnesses into testifying according to her script, a Judge, also condemning Naz without trial, and, worse, manipulating said trial witnesses’ testimony so that Naz is condemned without sufficient evidence?

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Are attorneys Stone and Chandra the Judges? Though they represent Naz, they see his flaws, and they realize that he has secrets and that, worse, he has lied to them: about his personal illicit drug use during the night of the murder, as well as about his violent past when Naz, without provocation, threw a fellow student down a set of steps, breaking the boy’s arm, and got expelled from school so that Naz then had to transfer to another high school.

I’m guessing that we viewers are the Judges in The Night Of. 

Not only are we judging Naz and his victim, we’re judging the criminal justice system itself, from the police officers to the detectives, from the attorneys to the judges, from the penal system to our society itself. We are judging the criminal justice system and finding it corrupt, biased, and inhumane.

Further, we are judging the criminal justice system and finding it terribly and relentlessly horrifying for anyone who happens to get caught up in its maws.

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Legal & Medical Pariahs: Naz & Stone Are the Victims in HBO’s Limited MiniSeries The Night Of, e4, “The Art of War,” Review

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Spoilers

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HBO’s critically acclaimed limited mini-series The Night Of  examines the current state of criminal justice in America via a fictional New York murder case. Created by Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, and based on the BBC series Criminal Justice, the miniseries has metaphorically battered the legal system starting with the show’s premiere. From the police to the attorneys, from the prison guards to the judges, the criminal justice system in The Night Of  assumes that everyone accused of committing a crime is most certainly and without exception guilty. In episode 4, “The Art of War,” this metaphorical slash and burn was expanded to indict the medical establishment alongside the legal one. In symbolically parallel stories involving the accused murderer, Naz, and his attorney, Stone, the legal and the medical arenas were mercilessly dissected. Naz is a victim of a legal system that is predisposed to find him guilty because of race, ethnicity, religion, and circumstances, while his attorney Stone, suffering from disfiguring and painful eczema, is a victim of a medical system that appears to have little empathy for anyone’s suffering.  Both Naz and Stone are victims. They are pariahs and outcasts — unwelcome and undesirable.

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The Night Of  began its twisted journey with a young Pakistani-American college student-tutor, Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed) taking his father’s cab, without permission, to attend a party for members of the basketball team. Though he is a good student and a tutor, Naz is an outsider to these players. He is not an athlete, and, probably worse, he is a good student. One basketball player invites Naz to the party, but another is annoyed by Naz’s inclusion. Naz doesn’t care that he’s not fully welcome: he just wants to meet the type of girls who will be at the party, girls he ordinarily would consider out of his league. Instead of making it to the party, Naz is sidetracked by an enigmatic stranger (Sofia Black-D’Ellia) who gets into the cab and asks to be taken to “the beach.”ep-1-clip-knife-games-2-881115-1_PRO1-300

Naz takes the girl to her home, where a passing African-American who sees the couple calls Naz “Mustafa” and inquires about his “bomb” materials. Though Naz is approximately the same age as the girl, he is not the same race: he is again branded as an outsider. Once inside the girl’s home, after doing some drugs and shots of tequila, Naz has sex with her. When he awakes later, he is in the kitchen, and the girl is dead upstairs. At the crime scene, the police and detectives assume that the “Arab” who was with the dead girl is guilty by race, religion, and circumstances. Before he is charged, Naz has become a pariah.

Enter John Stone (John Turturro), an “ambulance-chasing” attorney who takes Naz’s case simply because Stone was “in the right place, at the right time.” More importantly, Stone probably takes the case he is an underdog himself. He seems to specialize in representing underdogs and undesirables: he is shown helping transvestite/transgendered prostitute Paul-ine, so it’s no surprise that Stone appoints himself Naz’s attorney after he sees the young man completely isolated in a holding cell at the precinct. After Naz’s family hires a more important lawyer because she offered to represent Naz pro bono, Stone continues to investigate the circumstances of Naz’s case. Instead of being an “ambulance chaser” in it for money, Stone seems to be the only one who actually cares about Naz’s welfare. A fellow outsider and pariah, Stone empathizes with Naz in a way that no one else in the judicial system seems to.

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Attorney Crowe (Glenne Headly), who lives up to her name as a scavenger and predator, goes to the DA and brokers a plea deal for Naz. Despite Crowe’s statement to Naz’s parents that she would fight for the accused young man because his case reminded her of why she went into law in the first place, and despite Crowe’s denigrating comment that Stone would do nothing but “cut a deal” because he isn’t a trial attorney in a big, exclusive (insiders’) firm like she is, Crowe immediately sold out her client without even attempting to gather any evidence in the case. After negotiating a plea with the District Attorney, Crowe went to Naz and said she would try to get the very deal to which she’d already agreed on his behalf. Naz is nothing but a means for Crowe to further her own career. He is a prop, an actor who needs to “rehearse” his lines in her play.

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Crowe misrepresented herself to Naz’s parents, and treated them as annoying inferiors who had to be chastised. Outside the courthouse, when Naz’s father Salim (Peyman Moaadi, below) asked, in a whisper, if he could make a statement to reporters, Crowe coldly scolded him, ordering him never to “interrupt” her again. Like his son Naz, Salim is an outsider to the justice system as well as to the entertainment business: Crowe is a legal insider who wants to be a celebrity, à la Nancy Grace.

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Crowe misled Naz’s parents, but she lies to Naz outright. With Naz’s life in the balance, Crowe’s showed herself ruthless and self-absorbed. She was furious with Naz when he didn’t answer the DA’s questions “correctly.” Instead of pleading “guilty,” as insider Crowe had instructed, the outsider Naz went rogue: in court, Naz stated that he did not, in fact, kill the girl. It was obvious that Crowe wasn’t upset because she believed Naz to be guilty and wished to save the state the cost of prosecution. She was concerned with her legal reputation and with the fact that Naz’s response had upset the judge’s expectations.

Naz is an outsider who breaks the insider rules of the plea deal, and he further alienates himself from the justice system when Crowe quits. At every move, whether because of his own action or that of others, Naz becomes more of a pariah. Though Naz metaphorically fights back against the legal system by refusing to admit guilt in the plea deal, he is already in prison without bail. Given that stark reality (and the clear bias against the legal and judicial system that The Night Of is presenting), it is not likely that things are going to turn out well for Naz. He is an outsider, and it looks like outsiders get destroyed in The Night Of.

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Imprisoned without bail at Rikers as he awaits trial, Naz is mercilessly reminded that he is a pariah. Everyone gives him advice, but most of it is conflicting and ends up hurting him. From Attorney Crowe to the judge, from the “friendly” inmate who later viciously assaults Naz to the powerful convict, Freddy (Michael Kenneth Williams, below), who wants to “protect” the college student, everyone wants something from Naz. None of these insiders has Naz’s best interests in mind as they attempt to manipulate and control Naz. He is an outsider that others want to use, not help.

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A pariah in the post-9/11, racial-profiling world, Naz is a victim of a criminal justice system where he is already and forever an outsider simply because he is not a policeman, detective, attorney, prison guard, or judge. Further, once he is an accused criminal, and the worse kind of criminal at that, Naz will remain an outsider, unwelcome and despised by the insiders.

There seems little possibility that Naz will be able to successfully fight the impersonal justice machinery. The police and detectives have, from the beginning, assumed his guilt rather than his innocence “until proven guilty.”  The attorneys do not wish to be “stuck with the truth,” or they care more about their personal reputations than Naz’s fate.  The inmates and guards in the violent and merciless penal system care only for their perquisites, their “names,” their standing in the convict society. In the criminal justice environment, Naz is an undesirable because of his ethnicity as much as because of his alleged crime. He is undesirable unless he can somehow help someone else’s career, be it legal or criminal.

The only person who seems to genuinely empathize with Naz is attorney Stone, who is an outsider himself. With his rumpled, disheveled suit and overcoat, he is given advice on an appropriate tailor and on what kind of proper suit to wear to a trial of this magnitude by District Attorney Weiss (Jeannie Berlin) after their own plea deal falls apart.

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He is heckled by police officers as an ambulance chaser. He is ridiculed by chief investigator Detective Box (Bill Camp).

Stone is threatened by the Director of a Rehab House (cameo/guest appearance by Turturro’s cousin Aida Turturro, below) after he is seen taking photos while investigating the murder victim in Naz’s case.

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Though Stone is a street-wise attorney who technically should automatically be an insider in the criminal justice system, he remains an unwelcome outsider. To emphasize his pariah-status, The Night Of  writers have  Stone fruitlessly fighting the inhospitable medical establishment, which is set up as a symbolic parallel to the justice system that Naz is fighting.

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Seeking a treatment for his incurable eczema, which stands as a visible symbol of Stone’s “undesirable” status, Stone faces doctors who regularly contradict each other or who dismiss their colleagues’ treatment plans, as well as pharmacists who openly scoff at the prescribed medications. By showing Stone’s following the recommended “medical” treatments — like applying Crisco onto the eczema-affected areas then encasing his feet and lower legs in Saran Wrap —  The Night Of reveals Stone’s desperation to be healed, to be cured. It is also his desperation to fit in, to become an insider rather than to remain an outsider.

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The symbolic sub-plot of Stone’s adversarial and confusing “fight” with his eczema as well as with the members of the medical community brilliantly parallels Naz’s “fight” with the criminal justice system. Insiders of both the medical establishment and the legal system consider Stone and Naz to be uncooperative outsiders, guilty of disobeying the “rules,” whether they are supposed to be following scripts for plea deals or told to follow recommended medical treatments. No matter what these two men do, neither system will accept Stone or Naz as one of the privileged insiders. Neither of them will be welcomed to the inner group.

Stone is street-wise, tough, and not easily intimidated: his interactions with the police officers at the precinct where Naz was jailed, with the lead investigator Detective Box, with the judge at the bail hearing, and with the District Attorney during a plea deal all prove that Stone is competent and clever. He knows the personal and professional lives of his “opponents;” he knows how to “attack” them even if they seem to be baiting him in jest. Technically, Stone should have already been accepted since it is clear that he is an insider. For some reason that remains unclear to viewers but which is symbolized by Stone’s incurable and disfiguring eczema, the attorney remains a pariah. He is not accepted. He is not welcome. He is undesirable.

Just as Stone’s disfiguring eczema can be managed but not cured, Naz’s race and ethnicity could be tolerated, but they cannot be changed or completely ignored. His race and ethnicity, combined with his religious beliefs, made Naz an outsider and a pariah before the circumstances of the murder make him appear guilty of a heinous crime. Naz and Stone are pariahs, undesirables, unwelcome outsiders in a criminal justice system and in a medical system that will, no doubt, forever remain closed to them.

If you’ve missed The Night Of, your summer is not nearly as exciting as it could be. No matter how harrowing its presentation of the American justice system, this show is compelling drama, well written and extremely well acted. You can catch up any time on HBOgo or HBOnow. The mini-series airs Sundays at 10p.m. ET on HBO, and the rest of the week on other HBO channels. Viewers who are HBO subscribers can watch the premiere “The Beach” free. Other viewers can see the tease or the official HBO trailer for the miniseries.

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