S01.E08: The Call of the Wild

[numbnut]

7 hours ago, candle96 said:

I called the financial planner as the killer the second I saw him at the funeral. You don't put a recognizable actor in such a small role unless he has some bigger part.

Ah! That's probably why I didn't see him as the killer. I have no idea who that actor is and don't recall seeing him in anything before this.

[candle96]

On September 10, 2016 at 9:14 PM, numbnut said:

Ah! That's probably why I didn't see him as the killer. I have no idea who that actor is and don't recall seeing him in anything before this.

He was on "Royal Pains" for its entire run, and before that, dare I say it, he was on the short-lived Friends spin-off, "Joey." Yes, my brain is way too full of useless pop culture knowledge.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Late to the party but I want to post my two cents about the show. IMO, it had its moments but overall the creators seemed too in love with the "grand" messages they were supposed to be showing and forgot to work on "small details" like coherent plot and characterization. They gave me the impressions of not being able to make up their minds about so many things - on the one hand this is supposedly a more realistic story than your average mystery, yet this "night of" had so many contrived coincidences and a very implausible number of people without alibis who could be reasonably considered to be willing to be the possible murderer of Andrea. IIRC, she and Naz literally talked to only three people on their way to her home - and two of them "just happened" to be a violent criminal and a guy with a pathological hatred of women. Andrea remained basically an enigma to the end - sure, she wasn't the main character but you would think that someone, anyone, would have been more interested to find out what she really was like. She had money, she was taking drugs and had quite a few boyfriends/one night stands. That's about the full extent of our knowledge of her. Did she have friends, other relatives? We don't know.

Rikers was obviously supposed to be a "gritty" setting but Naz being under Freddy's protection never rang true. Even an amazing actor like Michael Williams couldn't save a character who was seemingly written mostly for the purpose of making cryptic remarks and accelerating Naz's transformation. Naz also adjusted to life in jail way, way too quickly and easily which, I feel, really undermined the message of "this might happen to you if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Moreover, as mentioned many times in the episode threads (which I probably enjoyed reading more than I enjoyed watching the show itself), there was the annoying discrepancy between this trial that all the media were supposedly talking about and the empty courtroom, the new witnesses, suspects and evidence coming out of the woodwork all the time, even though any half-decent journalist or even some bored guy on social media would have found at least some of those long before that. Also, what was the point of Chandra? I wanted to like her, I really did and I thought the actress did more than fine but she was so hopelessly naive and incompetent for someone working at a law firm run by a shark like Crowe. And that kiss with Naz would have looked silly even on shows like Pretty Little Liars. In the end it seemed the point was for Stone to be the one to make the big speech in the end because of the contrived change in the eleventh hour.

Also, Richard Price wrote some episodes of The Wire, so he really should have followed The Wire's example and not gone with the old cliche of detectives who work on cases for free because they just can't let it go (yes, I know McNulty did something like that on The Wire a few times but he was the exception). It was like Box suddenly remembered that the show would be over soon, so he might as well actually do something, even though he was retired.

IMO, they should have focused more on how the case affected Naz's family and their community or added more depth to the Rikers story or come up with a less plot-hole ridden court battle. They tried to do too much and wasted way too much screen time on the stupid eczema - and even so showed us next to nothing about Stone's past. If he is such an eloquent speaker as his final speech seemed to show and a better investigator than Box (not that this is much of a benchmark but in the show everyone thought Box was competent), why isn't he a big time lawyer?

[numbnut]

5 hours ago, candle96 said:

On 9/10/2016 at 7:14 PM, numbnut said:

Ah! That's probably why I didn't see him as the killer. I have no idea who that actor is and don't recall seeing him in anything before this.

He was on "Royal Pains" for its entire run, and before that, dare I say it, he was on the short-lived Friends spin-off, "Joey." Yes, my brain is way too full of useless pop culture knowledge.

OK, thanks! I haven't seen one ep of either show. I guess I'll identify him as the "Night of Killer" from now on.

[queenanne]

On 9/2/2016 at 3:36 AM, Chicago Redshirt said:

Not quite anybody. First, the person would have to be horny/naive enough to let Andrea wrap them around their finger, from taking various drugs to playing mumbletypeg to having sex with her despite the crazy. Then the person would have to not call 911 when awaking. Then the person would have to take the potential murder weapon and other things from the scene of the crime. It also helps if the person isn't white or Christian. 

 

Did I imagine that the mumbletypeg never made it into the court case?  I feel like I was waiting for it to be some sort of clincher ("Your Honor, he even forcibly and casually stabbed her and is now admitting to it!  like it's just a thing people do with strangers!"), and it never happened.  I also felt like I waited for it at the point where Naz had to recollect the events of his evening, hopped right over it, and outright said that nope, nothing happened over the course of that evening with Andrea other than those events which he already retailed to them.  We heard lots of speculation about how *Naz* got shafted in the hand by the knife, IIRC; but nobody ever brought up that Naz wasn't phased by skewering Andrea's hand, that I could recall.  I would have expected the medical experts to at least point out that the wounds were made at different times.

Also, eczema may have been an original plot point in the Gandolfini storyboarded, etc. version as well; but as an aside, I note that Price's Clockers quite notably featured a young drug dealer plagued by gastritis and ulcers, and had a lot of unlikely bystander type people (including once, I think, a cop), advising said drug dealer on various OTC methods of quelling the ulcer symptoms.  So I find the eczema suspicious from a writers' standpoint. 

[Gobi]

I believe someone posted that the eczema was in the BBC series as well, though not featured to nearly the same extent.

[ganesh]

I thought we were heading to a point where Naz finally remembers what actually happened. He flashbacked a few times to that night, so I thought it was going to build to that. I've blacked out from drinking and later on the memories fade back in. I don't know if TPTBs intended for us to never really know that Naz did it, but it was so clear that he didn't from the start. There's still an element of tragedy if Naz actually saw the killer but didn't remember and the guy killed again. 

[Drogo]

10 hours ago, queenanne said:

Did I imagine that the mumbletypeg never made it into the court case?

It made it in... the defense's crime scene investigator pointed out that there were skin cells in the table's scratches, "consistent with the defendant's version of the events" which the prosecutor's CSIs had missed.

[Milburn Stone]

10 hours ago, queenanne said:

Also, eczema may have been an original plot point in the Gandolfini storyboarded, etc. version as well; but as an aside, I note that Price's Clockers quite notably featured a young drug dealer plagued by gastritis and ulcers, and had a lot of unlikely bystander type people (including once, I think, a cop), advising said drug dealer on various OTC methods of quelling the ulcer symptoms.  So I find the eczema suspicious from a writers' standpoint. 

Not quite sure I follow the reason for your "suspicion." Are you saying that medical-sufferer-getting-OTC-advice-from-people is a trope that Richard Price has employed before? Good observation, but beyond that, revisiting favorite tropes is something writers do all the time. In fact, almost every writer who has created enough work has created recognizably repeating tropes. Film directors, too; Alfred Hitchcock revisited the same themes, and basically remade the same scenes, in film after film. It's not like Price started with a true story and imposed his fictional trope where it didn't belong. So his emphasizing the eczema that was apparently in the British original was well within the license granted any writer to write about what interests him.

[Guest]

I watched this six months later than you all but I'm going to add my two cents, anyway.  Maybe someone else is wrapping it up now, too.  

I liked it but I wish the legal details hadn't been so loose.  It bugged me that the blood was never an issue.  I'm guessing the set decorator went nuts on the murder scene.  I'm not sure 22 stabs with a steak knife would look anything like that.  The amount of splatter looked more like high powered gun shots to the head or an axe murder or something.  Though I guess if the killer hit an artery and it gushed straight at the wall and lamp?  I don't know, it was kind of OTT.

I also would've appreciated a flash of the murder happening, just so we knew for sure the financial planner did it.  I'm not into a season 2, at least not of this same case, so why not settle the whodunit question.

Naz breaking bad and Chandra's screw ups seemed too fast and somewhat out of left field to me.  But I thought the murder occurred in Oct. and Chandra was on the street buying drugs for Naz in Feb., based on the tape label.  Or maybe I saw the Feb. on something else.  

I seem to have had more suspicion that Naz did it than other viewers.  I was afraid up to the credits that we'd see him flashing back to stabbing her, or he'd send Freddie a note "Keep looking, I wasn't a unicorn" or he'd flat out tell Stone.  I even wondered if he manipulated Chandra into kissing him as an ace in the hole to try for a mistrial.  

Probably my main gripe was I'm so tired of this trope:  Lawyer/cop/whoever can TELL ON SIGHT that defendant is innocent and that motivates their action.  I think in real life there are commonly very innocent looking and acting people who do monstrous things.  There is just no way to look at them and tell.  I guess that's why I loved Primal Fear.  The twist was that the kid no one believed could do it, did it.  

I think a real defense attorney would have no problem answering that "would you defend Hitler" question.  Presumption of innocence is so fundamental to our system, it just doesn't matter the severity of the accusations.  I'm not sure why tv writers insist on writing defense attorneys like they have this moral dilemma.  I think people who don't believe in the system fully would not become defense attorneys.

The odd focus in so many shots annoyed me at times but I got used to it.  Like a person would be speaking in the background but he'd be blurry because the camera was focused on a chair in the foreground.  It got old to me. 

But overall I enjoyed it.  As a character study, it was great.  I loved Turturro and Ahmed and Berlin and Camp.  

I think the deer head was just a cool shot and a metaphor for something.  My guess would be death.  People take a dead carcass and decorate with it.  His glass eyes were dusty and he had tear stains and it was on a wall too small for it, in my opinion, so it wasn't even pretty as an object.  It was something formerly pretty made ugly by its death, like Andrea?  

It was such a masculine touch in a home owned by women.  I wonder if the suggestion too had something to do with her father still being a presence, solely in the decor?  Or it was just partly to show Andrea's house was decorated by someone else.  She was an orphan living in this palace of manly and antique looking decor.  She had too many problems to bother with decor, despite having the money to just hire it out.  Maybe it suggested she missed her parents, keeping their old stuff around.  

Edited April 2, 2017 by Guest

[aemom]

I just watched the series on demand.

John Turturro was fantastic.  The legal system seemed insane,  but I'm sure that many aspects of it are true to some extent.

I think that Naz started taking drugs and getting the tattoos because he stopped losing faith that he would ever get out of prison. His own mother lost faith in him and walked out of the courtroom. 

I can totally see the police department and DA office not digging too deeply into evidence a lot of the time because most of the time, the ones that look guilty are guilty and they want the win and the adoration of the public for putting another sick bastard behind bars.

Chandra's character was a loose end for me. I felt that she was inconsistently written.

Innocent until proven guilty.  Except that Naz gets out via a hung jury,  so the public believes he is lucky not innocent.  His family is destroyed by the debts and the experience.  Naz is now an unemployed drug addict who lived through way too much at Rikers. Naz is many things now, but the innocence is long gone. He needs to move far, far away.

When Stone left the apartment at the end, I said to my husband, "he's going to say goodbye to the cat." But he didn't.  "I'm sure he went back for the cat," I said. And then we saw the cat and I was happy. Stone was a good guy and I'm convinced that the eczema was caused by stress. I hope that he and kitty live happily ever after.

[paramitch]

I just bingewatched this over the weekend, and overall, I was very satisfied.

I get that some needed or wanted it to be a different show, or to detail a perfect criminal investigation and trial, but I also thought the imperfections were the whole point here -- that lots of bad luck was floating around on that one single night for poor Andrea, and for Naz. And I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna blame a college kid for "ruining his family's lives" simply because he borrowed his Dad's car to go to a party, met a pretty girl, and ended up falling into her world for a night (which was why I loved that Stone was so matter-of-fact in his summation about the crimes Naz did commit -- the car, the drugs, etc.).

For me, the title isn't an accident, and the show was about how so many things can go so wrong in a single night, and the ripples from that just went on forever. So that Naz panicked and did every stupid thing you shouldn't do. And that a detective may be capable but also tired, slightly distracted by his impending retirement, and also really convinced they have the right guy -- so he doesn't look further. That a DA would be equally oversure. And that... thank goodness... Stone walked past Naz, looked at his face... and went back. Because he knew what innocence looked like.

I felt like the show telegraphed fairly openly in episode one that it was going to be more of a character piece -- more an exploration of time, place, and people, than of "who killed Andrea," so that allowed me to just sit back and enjoy it. I mean, I cared about who did it, and whether it was Naz, but I also just loved the richly drawn characters and how believable I found them.

For me, the absolute greatest pleasure was the actors, who I thought all did great work. I can sometimes find Turturro somewhat grating, but I loved him so much here -- Stone's weariness, gentleness, his palpable loneliness, his defiance in the face of rudeness and disgust, his attempts to literally NOT care as much as he did... I just loved Stone and wanted only good things for him. And after this and "The Looming Tower," I have become a real fan of Bill Camp, and how naturalistic he is. Here, as Box, he reminded me so much of a homicide cop I used to know in Seattle back in the late 1990s -- he wasn't the cold cliche you see on TV, but one of the kindest, warmest people you would ever meet, and that kindness and civility extended to everyone, period. For instance, when I knew him, he had just retired and was still consulting, but for decades he still got cards from victims, suspects, and their families. And he was also a hell of an investigator (and, I am quite sure, like Box when he needed to be, "a subtle beast"). And I didn't mind that Box missed stuff, and I liked that the little cop-part of his brain wouldn't let him retire, but kept needling him to look closer.

I agree that there were elements that were missed by the prosecutors and cops. But that stuff happens all the time. I just went with it. I also felt that Chandra's story was along these same lines. She makes a few small mistakes, allows her inexperience to draw her in, and for single kiss, her life is now a complete shambles. Because of her arrogance toward Stone, I did love that final look of hers to him as they awaited the verdict. I just felt like she was looking at him with complete respect and appreciation, even as he's off by himself, trying not to scratch, embarrassed and ill at ease.

I know Stone felt that Naz testifying was the wrong move, and legally, I agree that it probably was. But I was glad he did it. To me, it provided us with a much-needed moment of actual understanding and accessibility, like, "Oh, hi Naz, THERE you are." I thought he came across as honest and believable, even when he had to answer that he didn't know if he killed her.

I do feel that the show tried to have it both ways and was sometimes coy on the character of Naz, to maintain that tension of "did he do it or didn't he?" And that as a result, the character of Nasir was, to me, the least accessible. I wish we had seen a few more flashes of that vulnerability in him later that we saw in the first episode. While Riz Ahmed is a beautiful young man, I did feel that his performance choices were occasionally a little colder or more inscrutable than I would have wished; I just thought it was interesting that by the end, I felt I knew FREDDY better than Naz himself. Although that final glimpse of him by the waterfront, back where it all started, stuck in a vicious circle, still dreaming of Andrea, broke me a little. It's horribly ironic that what was easily the worst night of his life nevertheless also included some of the most incredible hours of his life with a beautiful and lonely young woman who just seemed to understand him.

But the writing was so good. I loved the juxtaposition of Freddy's speech to Naz, and how it also paralleled Stone's summation. And what was so heartbreaking is that Freddy may truly care about Naz, and see him as a unicorn, but he was still willing to use him, risk him, corrupt him, and get him on drugs. I know he didn't do those things in order to be deliberately harmful, but it broke my heart that Freddy says, "So why would I not take care of you? What kind of a cold individual do you think I am?" even as they're about to light up the drugs. They are both in hell and escaping in the only way they know how. Freddy was probably the best thing that could have happened to Naz in prison. Too bad he's also the worst.

And Stone's final speech was just one of the most stirring and powerful moments I've seen in a long time. His humility and embarrassment, his honesty and emotion, all just killed me. And Turturro! Is so good there. I love that you can hear him wheeze slightly as he speaks, and how the camera is so often showing us Stone as he appears either from the jury box or from Naz's place at the table. And I love that he actually breaks down a tiny bit in the end, and the jury can see his tears. It is Stone's moment of true greatness.

The best part of Stone's summation, to me, is that Stone convinces more than half the jury. He convinces Naz himself. He convinces -- visibly -- the prosecutor (I believe it is absolutely why she gives him that assessing look and then declines to retry).

But I loved all the actors and especially appreciated such a richly diverse cast (in age as well as nationality). I loved Jeannie Berlin's gravely, no-nonsense prosecutor. I loved Glenne Headly (RIP, far far too soon) and her combination of flinty toughness and humanity. I also loved all the character actors -- Naz's parents, the judge, the front-desk cop (Shenkman!), the pharmacist, Trevor (BODIE!), etc.

I'm in it for the characters, so for me, meeting Stone, watching him navigate the cruelties of loneliness, of homeliness, contempt, revulsion, and affliction, and yeah, I admit it, watching him fall for the cat, really got me. I loved the way he'd play with the cat under the door. The way he'd talk to it and tell it good night. So I wasn't just devastated when he brought it back to the pound (and loved the little sound of dismay by the guy at the counter "No...") for the cat -- I was sad for STONE. Sad because it felt to me like he was giving up in a much bigger way. 

So when we see that final humane society commercial, and Stone just watching it, immovable, I was an absolute mess... and then he leaves and the cat walks slowly and happily across that hallway? I admit it. I flat-out ugly-cried. It's one of the most satisfying moments I can think of from a show in recent memory, and it absolutely moved me.

I know plenty found the cat stuff cheap or inconsequential, but I think it was vital. Everything in this drama has been fallout from that one night of Andrea meeting Naz, and Andrea's death. Her pet was a part of that. And Stone giving it a home meant that something from that night could be rescued and could be saved. People might look at him with loathing on the subway, but he can ignore that and go home to this animal that loves him unconditionally... so the cat saves him, too.

Edited October 2, 2018 by paramitch
forgot to finish a thought

[Drogo]

@paramitch now I want to watch this again.