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Questions of motive swirl around pretty much every interaction this episode. Why did Naz throw that kid down the stairs as a teenager, then chuck the Coke can at the other? Why did that charming-like-a-snake defense crime scene expert Dr. Katz (Chip Zien, a musical-theater actor who knocks it out of the park here) praise the prosecutor's expert at a dinner years ago if he thinks the man's work is so lousy? Why is Naz freebasing coke?Oh yeah, Naz is freebasing coke now. The series' main character becomes more inscrutable as time goes on. In this episode, he's almost entirely silent, growing harder and more taciturn thanks to his time in jail. In the most brutal scene of this episode, he barely speaks to another inmate's mother in the visiting room as she hands him baggies of drugs she had stuffed in her vagina. He tells her that her son is "fine," then expressionlessly swallows the baggies. Her son is not fine, of course—Naz comes across his body in the Riker's bathroom a few scenes later. That leads to him telling Freddy (Michael K. Williams) about how one guy in Freddy's crew was forcing the woman's son to have sex with him. That brings us to the episode's second most brutal scene, where Naz distracts a guard while Freddy cuts the sexual assaulter's throat.Whether or not Naz killed Andrea, it's disturbing to watch him slip so easily across the barrier between citizen and criminal, and the way Ahmed plays him, a tightly wound ball of doubt and anger, you don't get the sense that the show is telling us that anyone would do the same—Naz has something dark in him, whatever the jury in his case decides.Naz has something dark in him, whatever the jury in his case decides.
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