Hillary Clinton or a mug of scalding hot baby oil to the face, take your pick.

[spoiler alert: this post won’t make much sense unless you’ve watched all five episodes of The Night Of, and will contain spoilers if you haven’t]

Here it is America, the final word on why we must all cast our votes in favor of Hillary Clinton: we don’t want a mug full of scalding hot baby oil thrown in our collective faces. Don’t think that’s a likely scenario? Just ask Nasir Khan from The Night Of (no relation to Khazir Khan, the Gold Star parent who may very well have delivered the knockout blow to the Trump campaign). In last week’s episode, Nas, as he is known, came one raised forearm away from facial disfigurement at the hands of a deranged fellow inmate whom he had previously viewed as a friend and mentor. He got burned for trusting the wrong person, a false prophet offering protection who instead turned out to be a demented lunatic hell bent on revenge against enemies real or imagined, does that sound familiar? It should, and it should probably scare those of us inmates who heretofore haven’t wanted any part of our nation’s prison politics into running up to the second tier of the cell block and begging Hillary for her protection.

You see, I am not a Hillary Clinton supporter, far from it. Between the lying about her secret email servers (yes, servers plural), her six-figure wall street speeches (where are those transcripts btw?), and the oh-too-cozy relationship that existed between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department staffers during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, there’s more than enough to make the case that she is corrupt and unfit for the office of the Presidency. I was team Bernie from the jump. Unfortunately, Bernie turned out to be one of those bit characters in this electoral drama, one that doesn’t make it past episode 4, kind of like the inmate with the knife tattoo on his face who gives Nas advice until the mattress fire breaks out. He seemed like such a nice guy, he told us not to trust the corrupt powers that be, he shouted “WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU MOTHERFUCKER?” when we all needed a wake up call, but then he disappeared and left us all on our own. Actually, that’s not fair, neither to Bernie or to Knife-face. In fact, they both provided us with some important parting advice: when the alpha-dog running the cell block offers you a deal, you take it, period.

Just like Nas, I was reluctant to take the deal. I knew there would be a catch. What were we to make of Freddie’s gift of shoes? Better traction for the shower, he said, but for what? For fighting? Or maybe so as not to slip while getting fucked in the ass. What about the mattress fire? For all we know, Freddie could have put the other inmates up to it, a little extortion never hurt to really drive the point home that you need protection, and it seems to be working on any guards planning their daughters’ Quinceaneras in the Bronx. Just like Nas, we’ve got plenty of our own mattress fires to deal with both abroad (ISIS) and at home (yawning income inequality and a declining labor force participation rate) that seem to have Hillary’s fingerprints all over them owing to her time in the Senate and as Secretary of State. So at first we thought that maybe if we just kept our heads down and didn’t talk to anyone we could get out of this election cycle alive. Maybe John Stone would show up and bail us out, or maybe this Trump guy, with his promises of economic resurgence and decisive military victory over the forces of terrorism could be our friend, but then came the mug full of scalding hot baby oil.

Worst part is, it’s not like he didn’t warn us about the scalding baby oil either. He told us about how you could get the oil at the commissary and use the cup o’ noodles water heater (do they really have such a thing in jail?) to make it hot enough to melt someone’s skin right off. We thought it sounded ghastly, but we didn’t think it was going to be for us, not from him! And that’s really the point, we don’t know who Trump’s mug of scalding hot baby oil is really for, not yet. So yes, Hillary may ask us to occasionally swallow some balloon baggies of heroin in the form of sweetheart deals for her wall street pals and unfair trade deals that gut what’s left of American manufacturing (does anyone really believe she won’t sign the TPP the minute she’s in office?), but at least we can be fairly certain we won’t get a mug of scalding hot baby oil thrown in our faces.. And that’s more than we can say if we take our chances with the other guy. So yes, Hillary, we need your help.