Does It Matter Who Killed Andrea Cornish In 'The Night Of'?

Who killed Andrea Cornish? As HBO's critically acclaimed series The Night Of veers toward Sunday evening's finale, the more apt question is "Does it matter?" After weeks of watching lone suspect Nasir "Naz" Khan fruitfully adapt to the gray Darwinian existence of Rikers Island, of reveling in the rom-com-worthy affair between John Stone and an orphaned feline, of watching a "young urban woman," Chandra, find her footing as a litigator, isn't it past time to acknowledge that The Night Of is least of all a whodunit?

Who killed Andrea Cornish? Who didn't? Since Naz's fateful encounter with the stabbing victim in the series premiere, credible suspects have announced themselves with a regularity that the No. 2 express train could only dream of achieving: the stepfather, the hearse driver, Duane Reade and Naz himself. At the advent of the eighth and final episode, I'm only willing to rule out Andrea's cat and Colonel Mustard.

After the scintillating and suspenseful series premiere on July 10, which played like the misbegotten love child of the 1985 sleeper After Hours and Hitchcock's Rear Window, speculation as to who killed Cornish ran amok. Was it the hostile stranger Naz and Andrea encountered outside her apartment on West 87th Street, later revealed to be a homophone of Manhattan's most popular drugstore chain? Was it the creepy hearse driver? The possibly voyeuristic middle-aged neighbor who called the police? The stepfather with a financial motive (who was introduced in the next episode)? Was it, perhaps, the criminally naive protagonist himself?

As the series evolved, The Night Of distanced itself from any comparison to NCIS or even Law & Order, opting instead to consciously draw a parallel between its narrative and real-life murder cases. To wit, as time elapses, the victim becomes a forgotten character in the story. Life goes on, and as much as Cain's sin is a blight on society, everything is a racket: Rikers, police work, prosecution, defense and even the healing of eczema.

One of the series's most revealing scenes involves Assistant District Attorney Helen Weiss interrupting an autopsy to have a frank conversation with her pathologist about his testimony. Weiss (brilliantly portrayed by Jeannie Berlin) coaches the coroner on what she needs him to say on the stand without ever actually speaking the words herself. Weiss is far from a sinister figure; she's just a weary, aging prosecutor who has seen too much to believe in extraordinary circumstances. There's a reason that Agatha Christie resides in the fiction section.

There is no Atticus Finch doppelgänger in the guise of Jack McCoy here. Our nemeses, Detective Box and John Stone, are middle-aged loners who barely have more of a life than Cornish does. The scene of Box stopping and sighing in the winter chill as he girds himself, like a prisoner walking the plank, to enter his own retirement party, is hardly a space-filler. Nor are the moments of Stone desperately attempting to connect with his biracial son, or gradually finding an emotional connection to an orphaned cat. These are lonely men, characters from a Billy Joel song, who could just as easily be seated next to Paul, the real estate novelist, if they weren't already seated alone at the bar.

In fact—and this is far from unintentional irony—no figure in The Night Of is more charismatic or more in control of his environment than Freddy, the convict boss in Naz's cell block. Freddy is a pragmatist, not an idealist. It is unlikely that Freddy will live to see a day outside prison walls, but he has learned to adapt to, and even thrive in, his environment. It would make for a fascinating film if someone remade The Shawshank Redemption subbing in Freddy for Morgan Freeman's Red.

Freddy is one of the few figures in The Night Of who has an airtight alibi for the night of October 23: He was inside Rikers. Each week, however, the plausible list of suspects who might have plunged a knife into Andrea Cornish 22 times grows. First, it has been established that the ground-floor gate leading into the brownstone home was open, granting any malefactor easy access to the victim.

In the past three weeks, viewers have been given a similar opening into the souls of three suspects besides Naz. Reade, who had multiple assault charges pending against him, fled when Stone attempted to speak to him. He has not been seen since. The hearse driver, Mr. Day (should we read anything into a surname that is the opposite of the show title's lone noun?), reveals himself as a creepy misogynist who, by profession, is no stranger to the staging of corpses. And the stepfather, Don Taylor, who stood to benefit most from Andrea's death, is such an obvious suspect that it would feel like a storytelling cop-out if he were the murderer.

The stepfather. The hearse driver. The man on the street. Naz. Any and all of them had the means and the propensity for violence to end Cornish's life. Does it really matter which one of them plunged the knife into her as if he were a wannabe Manson family member? Finally, it's worth remembering, as the opening credits reveal each week, that the late James Gandolfini is an executive producer. Gandolfini was best known as Tony Soprano, the central figure in a highly acclaimed Sunday night HBO show that had the most opaque final scene in TV history. Would it surprise you to see The Night Of provide no more clarity, or simply fade to black as a Journey tune plays in the background?

"Who killed Andrea Cornish?" is not even the right question. The Night Of is not a whodunit; there is no Yellow King of the Carcosa awaiting a battle royale with Rust Cohle in a Southern-gothic thunderdome. The Night Of is the most fascinating forensic examination of the grimy underbelly of the criminal justice system since you stopped binge-watching Making a Murderer. Much as with that series, you may finish watching this no wiser to who committed the dirty deed. And there's no crime in that.