District attorney Helen Weiss visits a medical examiner as he's finishing up an autopsy on a middle-aged black man. The scene opens on needles. The examiner picks one up and slowly inserts it into the lifeless man's eye, extracting a clear fluid he then squirts into a specimen tube.
Helen shows the examiner a picture of Naz's bloodied hand the night of the murder. She needs him to make a convincing argument on the stand that the injuries were consistent with wounds made by stabbing the victim 22 times. "You can set it down there," the medical examiner says of the photo, motioning to below the cadaver's waist. With only the slightest hesitation, Weiss rests the photo next to the dead man's exposed penis. "Look at it really carefully," she says. They both gaze at the photo while we can't help looking at the flaccid penis, which is really at the center of this conversation, just as impotency and masculinity are at the center of Episode Five of The Night Of.
As an inmate, Naz has been intimidated. He's been slashed. His bed's been set ablaze. And at the end of Episode Four he was scalded with baby oil and hot water by another inmate. Prison, for a young Muslim man who's been accused of rape and murder, is hell. So now, for Naz to survive prison, he's finally broken—he asks for help from Freddy Knight (played by Michael K. Williams). He learns to assert his own dominance. He beats the shit out of the prisoner who scalded him in the previous episode. Later, Naz changes the TV channel in the rec room to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and then intimidates the other prisoners who protest. He shaves his head. He starts working out. In prison, he's no longer the doe-eyed boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In prison, he becomes a criminal. It took a bulk of the series for Walter White to transition from Mr. Chips to Scarface in Breaking Bad. Like Naz, White made the wrong decisions for the right reasons—or his hand was forced by his circumstances. That Naz made this transition in a span of two episodes does not seem unrealistic. In prison he either had to adapt or die.
This entire series has been about the difference between the truth and a lie, or some sort of constructed version of both. The only way to objectively prove one from the other is by what you can physically see or hear. We saw everything Naz did the night of the murder in Episode One—well except for the most important part, the actual murder.
We saw the back door not shut in Andrea's apartment the night she was killed. We saw the small baggies of drugs go inside Naz's mouth. We saw Trevor walking with another man then lie about it. We've seen these facts, but the whole picture isn't clear—every character is working to obscure it for their own reasons. Which gets back to Naz standing in front of the TV. "You mind moving over a little bit, homie, please? So the rest of us can see? Thank you," the other inmate says. That's exactly what the viewers are craving—to see who killed Andrea Cornish.
And now we're beginning to get more clues, thanks in large part to John Stone. As a side effect to the most bizarre ongoing plot in The Night Of (see: feet, eczema), Stone becomes sexually impotent. "This is where the guy stares at the ceiling and says, 'This never happened to me before.' Then the girl touches his arm and says, 'It's okay, it happens.'" Unable to have sex—even when he attempts to pay his regular prostitute—he's forced to focus on reclaiming his masculinity through his work. You can see Stone's shame. He can't perform. He fails at being the cool dad who does important work at his son's school. The feet and now the impotency, John Stone is a tragic character—trapped in a prison that's his own body. What can he do? One of the few things he thinks he's good at: Be a lawyer.
Stone starts investigating. He uncovers an inconsistency with the case currently being built by the prosecution. Why'd Trevor Williams, who saw Naz and Andrea the night of the murder, say he was alone? At a coin-operated laundromat (the sign out front only has five letters lit—we're still not seeing the whole story), Trevor (J.D. Williams) and Stone (John Turturro) brilliantly balance humor and tension, matching wits in a casual chess match of an interrogation. Eventually, he gets a name from Trevor: Duane Reade (coincidentally, the ubiquitous pharmacy chain). He finds the man and ends up in a foot chase (don't forget eczema!) into a dark alley.
But back to that dead penis. It also represents humiliation. Naz, after being forced to smuggle drugs into prison, must chug castor oil and shit out balls of cocaine in front of Freddy's crew. Three come out, but there's one left. This is part of the system within prison. It's created to humiliate and subjugate.
Meanwhile, Stone is humiliated. He's mocked by a pharmacist in front of an attractive black woman waiting for her prescription when he can't get his Viagra. These characters are caught in tragic cycles of humiliation. The legal system is no less savage than prison or the pharmacy. It has no shame in exposing everything about every single person called to the stand. It leaves the characters bare and powerless. You can try to cover it up, but these detectives and lawyers will reveal every shameful detail about you, no matter if it's true or false. And in the end, even your flaccid penis will be out in the open for everyone to see.
