S01.E13: Samir's Story

[statsgirl]

 

Quote

A limo driver's infatuation with one of his riders leads him down a dark path.

Original airdate April 25, 2023.

[Snazzy Daisy]

Accused | 1x13 Promo "Samir's Story"

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by SnazzyDaisy

[AnimeMania]

Adam Bakri as Samir
Anne Bedian as Rita Khalil
Matthew James Thomas as Tom Braddick
and Matthew Edison as ADA Simon Stacher
Daniel Maslany is Eli DeMille
Christopher Russell is Josh
Victor Ertmanis is Branson
Tea Zwarych as Police Officer

[Spartan Girl]

This is another episode I can’t help side-eyeing because of the network.

Samir might have been a stalker, but I can’t say the douchebag Josh didn’t have it coming.

[possibilities]

I agree Josh was awful, but it was still murder. I didn't feel like Samir was innocent and I didn't feel that sympathetic to him. He had options and he chose to pursue the worst possible ones available to him. He seemed to me like he'd still be dangerous if let go. 

 

[Halting Hex]

Well, perhaps they've decided to abandon the "I did a bad thing for a good reason" formula.  This is a story about a stalker; they only built "drama" by not showing Alice until the end, making us wonder if Samir had killed her.  Not a lot of moral crisis going on here.

That said, it seems to me that Samir might have done better to plead self-defense;  he had physical evidence that Josh had assaulted him, after all.  (I think he did have intent, right before he hit the gas, but good luck proving that, Mr. D.A.)

Instead, we spent the trial watching people claiming they knew what Samir was thinking, without any evidence.  Whether positive (his mom saying he was "such a good boy") or negative (Tom claiming he knew Samir was dangerous or whatever he said), that seems like a whole pile of speculation going on.  I kept waiting for an objection, but no such luck.

It would be great if this episode was meant to emphasize why we need regulated taxi service, and was inveighing against Wild West garbage such as Heil and its brethren, but I'm probably reaching on that one, I'll admit.

Edited April 27, 2023 by Halting Hex

[Snazzy Daisy]

Whitney Solloway in da house!

Anne Bedian is quite young to be Adam Bakri’s momma, don’t you think?

Quote

“He’s just a boy.”

Really Mrs. Khalil??! He is a grown ass man with stalkerish behavior. Yes, you did push him too hard. You smother him with your expectations and controlling behavior. He’s a ticking time bomb ready to explode. Why Alice Baylor? She’s the total opposite of you.

I enjoyed Samir’s story more than Morgan’s. Thanks to Adam Bakri and Julia Goldani Telles. With JGT, of course we get to see her dancing. 😘

 

Edited April 26, 2023 by SnazzyDaisy

[Spartan Girl]

11 minutes ago, SnazzyDaisy said:

Really Mrs. Khalil??! He is a grown ass man with stalkerish behavior. Yes, you did push him too hard. You smother him with your expectations and controlling behavior. He’s a ticking time bomb ready to explode. Why Alice Baylor? She’s the total opposite of you.

Yeah that part made me roll my eyes. Lots of people have smothering controlling parents, they don’t all become murders.

I want to make myself clear: I thought Josh was a creep, but I don’t condone murder and I don’t feel sorry for Samir.

[Madding crowd]

First off, as an old married lady for 28 years, I have to tell all the single women out there: If you meet a guy and he shares your exact favorite restaurant/musician/artist etc he is not genuine. He could share some things but if you live in a big city and he happens to love ever place you go to he is lying.

This episode tried to explore too many things and didn’t do justice to any of them. The effects of being a refugee from a war torn country, parental expectations, the whole “nice guy” community. Having Josh proving Samir’s theory that women only want to date jerks didn’t help. Samir was guilty , no nuance here.

[Chicago Redshirt]

I think I liked this one more than typically because it wasn't trying to put forth the notion of the protagonist being the bestest person ever. 

Samir is a stalker, no question about it. He committed the crime he was accused of, no question about it.

He couldn't really use true self-defense, because he was safe in his car and there was no reasonable way for Josh to get at him. He might been able to argue imperfect self-defense.  What he CAN'T argue, it seems to me, is "it was an accident." In the situation that we saw, it just isn't possible for him to have accidentally run over Josh at a speed that would lead to fatal injuries. 

As should be expected, the courtroom scenes are ridiculous. In a real trial, you could never ask a friend of the defendant "hey, does the defendant hate women?" or "have you seen the defendant ever be angry towards women?" Generally speaking, you aren't allowed to bring in random acts of badness to smear a person. But even if you could, there would be no reason to ask those questions in this trial where the victim was a guy. At best, you could ask "Have you ever known the defendant to lose his temper and get violent?" It was just a  misdirect for us the audience to wonder if Samir killed Alice or his mother. And given that the prosecutor has presumably no way to show that the friend did know of Samir's history of violence. or that he even had one, it would be a dumb line of questioning.

It's a pretty straightforward case for the prosecution: Samir got obsessed with Alice, stalked her, stalked the person she was seeing, threatened him, stalked her some more, used his stalking to get a date with her, popped up uninvited the night of that date and was pissed that she hooked up with the guy who cheated on her, got even more pissed that he was exposed as a stalker, got even more pissed that Josh smacked him around, and then killed him.

No need to complicate things and beat around the bush. 

I would have been interested in hearing from Alice at the end. 

It wouldn't be Accused without people doing dumb stuff to get the plot going. So in no particular order:

1. Alice not asking for her phone to be FedExed.

2. Josh for randomly getting in Samir's Lyft when his was obviously minutes out.

3. Josh for not realizing that Samir could not put him on blast without revealing that he's a stalker, and/or for not saying to Alice "I'm coming clean, but this guy threatened me. Do you know him?"

4. Alice for letting Josh back into her apartment.

5. Alice for actually answering the door when Samir shows up unexpectedly/uninvited and when she has a dude over the same night she dated him.

6. Josh for butting in.

Interesting. I can't think of too many things that Samir did that were standout dumb, unlike most Accused protagonists. Maybe I'm grading on a curve because he's a stalker.

Am I too much of a dirty old man? There was a viewer warning about sexual situations but nothing remotely deserving a warning was part of the show.

One more random point: I don't think it is possible to "fail" the MCAT like it, say, to fail the Bar. You can get a sucky score on the MCAT, but even with the sucky score, you presumably can get admitted to med school somewhere.

Edited April 26, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

6 hours ago, Madding crowd said:

First off, as an old married lady for 28 years, I have to tell all the single women out there: If you meet a guy and he shares your exact favorite restaurant/musician/artist etc he is not genuine. He could share some things but if you live in a big city and he happens to love ever place you go to he is lying.

Why you gotta be a playa-hater? :)

[gesundheit]

That one was weirdly refreshing, in that the accused was wholly unsympathetic. Maybe not a great look for them to portray that demographic this way, but this series has been pretty performative in the other direction that it's not exactly a worrisome pattern at this point.

14 hours ago, LtKelley said:

So a slightly more realistic version of You, with no glass cage and the stalker is easily caught. No sympathy for Samir from me. 

Exactly what I was thinking -- it was very Season 1 You!

 

8 hours ago, SnazzyDaisy said:

Really Mrs. Khalil??! He is a grown ass man with stalkerish behavior.

 

I cracked up at that, too. "He was agitated when he left the house" is a very bad defense for murder!

Who was the actress playing the stalkee/realtor? She looked so awkward, like a high school kid in a power suit trying to look like a high-powered professional 

[Simba122504]

20 hours ago, SnazzyDaisy said:

Whitney Solloway in da house!

Anne Bedian is quite young to be Adama moment’s momma, don’t you think?

Really Mrs. Khalil??! He is a grown ass man with stalkerish behavior. Yes, you did push him too hard. You smother him with your expectations and controlling behavior. He’s a ticking time bomb ready to explode. Why Alice Baylor? She’s the total opposite of you.

I enjoyed Samir’s story more than Morgan’s. Thanks to Adam Bakri and Julia Goldani Telles. With JGT, of course we get to see her dancing. 😘

 

Too be honest for a moment I thought the mother was going to be the murder victim after I put Alice in second place. I don't think stalkers care about compatibility. They build on fantasy and obsession. Even if she were into him, it would never work,  but he doesn't care about that. Someone can actually be a good and a bad parent at the same time. Mrs. Khalil was that type of mother. He was never going to be what she wanted him to be. But he also wasn't a victim.  Yes, what's his face was an ass and deserved a knock out,  but Samir was jealous of him. He didn't do anything wrong. Yes, he cheated his wife, but that wasn't Samir's business. It's not like he [Samir] too was in an actual relationship with Alice.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

See, it would have been nice to have fleshed out "why so stalkery?"

Was it because of his religion or culture? They didn't really say that he was religious.

Was it because he was an incel all along?  When he snapped at the poor friend of his friend's girlfriend, it seemed like he might be. (And she must be like, Goddamn, I dodged a bullet. If he told a decent joke that night, I might have slept with his stalkery, murderous ass.")  We were told he hadn't been known to have a girlfriend. But why fixate on Alice? There are plenty of other fish in the sea.

Is it because he had mommy issues? Maybe it's just me, but there was something of a resemblance between mommy and Alice.

Is it because he perceived Alice as someone famous/successful like he wanted to be? I mean, initially she was kind of bitchy.

Did he take her leaving her cell as a sign it was meant to be?

And yeah, what was with trying to break into her phone with no clue as to what her passcode might be? 

Maybe I'm jaded, but Samir had to finish college to be eligible for med school, and it seems to me that it's hard to not be able to hook up with someone in college if that's your goal. 

[Simba122504]

30 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

See, it would have been nice to have fleshed out "why so stalkery?"

Was it because of his religion or culture? They didn't really say that he was religious.

Was it because he was an incel all along?

That's what I kept thinking. Is this a story about incels? Is he supposed be an incel because he had all the characteristics. 

[Halting Hex]

10 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

Maybe I'm jaded, but Samir had to finish college to be eligible for med school, and it seems to me that it's hard to not be able to hook up with someone in college if that's your goal. 

Riiiiiiight.  College women never reject men because they're not in their friend networks, they don't practice lookism, they're just waiting to hop on you and ride you all night long.  I had no idea how much fun I missed, DearPenthouseLetters!

I suppose the great thing about the internet age is now we have cool new ways ("incel") to insult kids for being uncool.  Yay?

(And yes, I know a small group of fringe rejects actually branded themselves as "incels".  Now anybody who speaks out about being lonely can be equated with the Toronto van murderer.  Clearly everyone was right  to reject you!  You're dangerous!  Mmm, progress!)

FFS.

[Chicago Redshirt]

Just now, Halting Hex said:

Riiiiiiight.  College women never reject men because they're not in their friend networks, they don't practice lookism, they're just waiting to hop on you and ride you all night long.  I had no idea how much fun I missed, DearPenthouseLetters!

I suppose the great thing about the internet age is now we have cool new ways ("incel") to insult kids for being uncool.  Yay?

(And yes, I know a small group of fringe rejects actually branded themselves as "incels".  Now anybody who speaks out about being lonely can be equated with the Toronto van murderer.  Clearly everyone was right  to reject you!  You're dangerous!  Mmm, progress!)

FFS.

I think you are misreading what I'm saying. Obviously, the complaints that Samir makes about women -- like any set of stereotypes -- has some basis in reality. And obviously, there are plenty of men who aren't able to find sex partners for any number of reasons while in college, whether it's due to their own faults/issues, those of the women they are interested in pursuing, bad luck or whatever.

[Halting Hex]

Well, whether it was your intent or not, I felt that your phrasing ("it's hard not to be able to") implied that virtually anybody could easily achieve such a goal, and thus Samir's failings indicated some deep deficiency and thus the story's attempt to have him appear empathetic was doomed to failure.  "It's hard not to be able to get a driver's license, if that's your goal."

The fact that Samir let his life be dominated by his anger is an issue.  The fact that he wasn't able to be a playa (I guess "Chad" is the term?) shouldn't be.

[marceline]

I think this was the first episode where I was thrilled to see the person go to prison.

[Chicago Redshirt]

10 minutes ago, marceline said:

I think this was the first episode where I was thrilled to see the person go to prison.

I think this is only the fifth where the accused is convicted. Maybe I'm missing some.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner's character (dad whose daughter was molested, who participated in the beating of the molester but didn't personally kill him and tried to call off the final blows) was the only (IMO) was the only unjustly convicted one.

The anti-gun mom who stupidly took the rap for what her son did deserved to go to prison for her stupidity.

The kid who was right about Evil Nurse all along still stabbed her and that was still illegal. 

The woman who stalked and ran over the murderous white supremacists deserved to be convicted, although I wouldn't say "thrilled."

I kinda hope that for some of these, they revisit the stories. But they probably won't.

Edited April 28, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Diana Berry]

9 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

I think this is only the fifth where the accused is convicted. Maybe I'm missing some.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner's character (dad whose daughter was molested, who participated in the beating of the molester but didn't personally kill him and tried to call off the final blows) was the only (IMO) was the only unjustly convicted one.

The anti-gun mom who stupidly took the rap for what her son did deserved to go to prison for her stupidity.

The kid who was right about Evil Nurse all along still stabbed her and that was still illegal. 

The woman who stalked and ran over the murderous white supremacists deserved to be convicted, although I wouldn't say "thrilled."

I kinda hope that for some of these, they revisit the stories. But they probably won't.

That would be an interesting thought to visit them when they get out of prison. 

[dancingdreamer]

At the start, I couldn't  guess who he had killed. He loved his mother,  but he was rough with her.

He was jealous  of the doctor.

Plus the girl he was stalking,  it could of been her. I usually  guess these things, which DH gets jokingly  po'd at, but not this one. We enjoyed  it.