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Not to be the kind of person who responds to outlandish and outrageous events with “So, that happened” or anything, but, well…

So, that happened.

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.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s time that could have been spent better establishing any number of the shoes that dropped this episode without prior warning. Naz sold Adderall? That hasn’t been brought up since the pilot, during which you could have blinked and missed it. Naz hospitalized not one but two other kids at his school prior to his transfer? That hadn’t been mentioned at all. Naz’s defense team was aware of the game of erotic mumblety-peg he and Andrea played prior to her murder? Not a word of this had ever been spoken since it happened; the only info we got about his incongruous knife wound was the misleading testimony from the DA’s medical examiner. A knife was missing from Andrea’s silverware? Who knew! You could waltz in and out of Andrea’s house without breaking in due to unlocked doors? Another surprise. For a show that clearly prides itself on its painstakingly detailed depiction of the criminal-justice process, to breeze through so many pivotal points of evidence feels almost deliberately antagonistic, to put the best possible spin on it. “It’s just not well-written” would be the less charitable approach.

And, perhaps, the more accurate one. How else to account for Naz’s mom’s dramatic flouncing from the courtroom in the middle of the trial? Chandra points out to her how bad this looks, and is blown off because Mom clearly now thinks her darling boy is guilty. Perhaps she received the same signal that this is now the appropriate viewpoint that his dad’s fellow cab drivers got, since they too went from supportive to “your kid’s a murderer, deal with it” overnight. But either way, bolting in the middle of crucial testimony is an impossibly stupid thing to do, and given past events it reads more like an extension of the show’s thesis that Naz’s parents are hopelessly naive than a gut-felt reaction to the horror of the crime — just the umpteenth idiotic thing Mom and Dad have done since the start of the case.

That’s barely scratching the surface of the stupidity. Andrea’s stepdad physically assaults John Stone in a gym, in full view of god knows how many people. Way to deflect suspicion, dude!

And on top of another joke about the name of the missing eyewitness-cum-suspect, Duane Reade — as if it were a pair of real parents who named him this, and not the two screenwriters determined to impress upon us that this is the height of whimsy — we discover that the sinister hearse driver is named, hand to god, Royal Day. Well hey, why shouldn’t black men’s names be as ridiculous as their behavior, right?

Perhaps some of this would be redeemable were the filmmaking any stronger. Alas, we’re back to the pointless closeups on inanimate objects and self-consciously artsy scene-to-scene transitions that have marred most of the show to date. Get a load of this transition from the bar of John’s weights to a bar in Naz’s jail. What does this communicate, beyond “Hey, bars exist”?

Or this appearance of a good-luck cat when John’s milling around trying to find a cure for his cat-induced asthma, because “Hey, cats also exist”?

Next week’s finale will be 95 minutes. Somehow, that will be both far too long and not nearly long enough. The Night Of remains the most baffling night of television there is.
[Watch the “Ordinary Death” episode of The Night Of on HBO Go or HBO Now]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.