**Spoilers ahead** Last night, Richard Price and Steve Zaillian‘s fantastic and gripping miniseries “The Night Of” came to a close, with a lengthy 90-minute finale that refused any easy answers. And while some found the slightly ambiguous wrap up not wholly satisfying, we found it underscored the rich thematic texture of the series, which made it clear from the start there would be no pat resolutions. Still, there are many who were left unsatisfied with the conclusion, where the killer still remains a slight mystery (though, a very likely suspect emerges in the latter stages), one made all the more so intriguing by Naz’s admission on the witness stand, when pressed about whether or not he killed Andrea: “I don’t know.”
EW caught up with Riz Ahmed, whose outstanding performance anchors the miniseries, and they asked him point blank if Naz was guilty. A long pause followed….
“I’m not going to answer that question directly. I think one of the themes of the show is that we all have it in us to be anyone. We all carry the same seeds within us, give or take. And in the right or wrong circumstances, depending on how you’re looking at it, we can adapt to survive. So does Naz have it in him to be a killer?” he said. “…we see in the end that he’s an accessory to a murder in Rikers. Does that mean that he is a killer? And does that mean he is guilty? Something I love about the show’s writing is that it doesn’t essentialize characters — nobody is essentially good or essentially bad. In the right or wrong circumstances, anything is possible.”
“I think there’s an element of aggression and an edge to Naz that you might not immediately glimpse in the story. We start off with a doe-eyed version of the character, but if you go back and watch the series again now that you’ve seen the whole thing, there are lots of tells and little hints of that edge,” the actor added. “The show toys with those two extremes. Naz isn’t either of those and there are a lot of little complexities in there from the beginning.”
Meanwhile, there’s already been some talk of a second season of “The Night Of,” though Price and Zaillian have stressed these episodes are meant to be self-contained. And while Ahmed is open to it, he also believes Naz’s story is done.
“I’m only entitled to imagine that if Steven and Richard have something further they want to explore. But, to me, the piece feels complete. I think it’s come to a satisfactory conclusion. We made something that worked on so many levels and sometimes it’s good to just quit while you’re ahead,” Ahmed said.
Thoughts? What do you think of how things ended with Naz? Let us know below.