Undekhi Season 2 review: The series tries hard to reconstruct thriller vibes that made its predecessor an instant winner

Language: Hindi Season two of Undekhi leaves you with the disturbing reminder that although good still finds a way to win every now and then, evil almost invariably never loses anymore. The season tries reconstructing the thriller vibes that made the first season an instant winner but the impact is only middling this time. It doesn’t take you long to figure out why the new season is not a clear winner like its predecessor. Somewhere down the show, as season two plays out its runtime, a protagonist tells another: “This is not working. We need something more concrete.” Your sentiments exactly, as you sense the show is taking too long to come to the point, spending more time than needed to unfold the suspense drama in store.

What Undekhi 2 needed was tighter storytelling. Spread across 10 episodes of slightly over 30 minutes each, you begin to sense as it all ends that the tale could have been wrapped up in about half that runtime.

To say the first season of Undekhi was a surprise hit would be an understatement. The show came with no hype or marketing blitz and rode no star power. The suspense thriller came with undercurrent moral questions of right and wrong without getting preachy about it. This, even as the story reversed traditional notions of what heroes and villains were like on the Hindi screen, as the ‘hero’, a potbellied middle-aged cop with greying hair and an unassuming disposition took on the picture-perfect world of the uber-rich who arrogantly violate the law as if it were their birth right. As the season captivated with a saga that bared the ugly innards of the beautiful high life, the screenplay left the message of hope that no matter the odds, good will find a way to outwit evil. The new season starts off where the first ended, with only a hasty collage of scenes at the start being passed off as season one recap. It is impossible to understand or analyse season two of Undekhi without a comprehensive idea of what happened the last time, so here’s a quick flashback: A couple of tribal dancing girls from Bengal arrive in Manali to perform at a wedding in the family of the super-rich Atwals. The groom’s Papaji shoots one of the girls in a fit of drunken revelry. The other girl, the deceased’s sister, is a witness to the act and her life is naturally in danger now, so she tries to flee. DSP Barun Ghosh arrives from Kolkata to take her back alive to Bengal, because she is wanted in Bengal, too, for the murder of a cop.

Season two starts off with a few obvious advantages. For one, the cast and characters are familiar figures now. The show Undekhi is a brand name with a dedicated fan base thanks to its success the first time around. While the objective of the second season evidently lay in cashing in on all that the first achieved, the challenge was to sustain audience interest. The story this time takes off at the point where the efforts of Ghosh (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) to transport the girl Koel (Apeksha Porwal) out of Himachal Pradesh are thwarted by Rinku (Surya Sharma), a local don who is the foster son of Papaji (Harsh Chhaya). Focus shifts from the cat-and-mouse games between Ghosh and Rinku, which gave season one plenty of engrossing moments, as the story takes us into the world of the Atwals, where not all is well. Papaji’s son Daman (Ankur Rathee) and his newly-married bride Teji (Anchal Singh) are trying to expose Rinku and Papaji, and, in the process, bring down their empire of illicit drug running that they run in the garb of medicine trade. Meanwhile, Saloni (Ayn Zoya) and Shashwat (Sayandeep Sengupta), the guys videographing the fateful wedding of season one, are also on the run, with Rinku and his goons trying to hunt them down. The narrative moves on three parallel tracks in the second season, to expand the scope of storytelling. First, there is DSP Ghosh’s bid to take Koel back to Bengal. Koel, who ended up near-dead at the end of season one, is rescued by a karate expert named Abhaya (Meiyang Chang), whose back story lies in the Atwals’ world of crime. Koel’s mission now is to avenge the death of her sister. The second track, which sustains most of the season’s runtime, pertains to the Atwal household, and how the internal tension between Rinku and Teji escalates. The entry of Rinku’s wife Muskan (Shivangi Singh) further complicates matters. The third and the most weak-scripted track is of Saloni and Shashwat, who get embroiled in the dangerous game involving the Atwals and their business associate Samarth. Without giving away spoilers, their story frequently runs into absurd, larger-than-life twists. There are several loopholes in the plot, which often resorts to contrived twists in an effort to arrive at solutions. Unlike the first season, the climax isn’t exciting enough. The makers have resorted to an elaborate old-Bollywood style shootout sequence for the ending that hardly grabs eyeballs anymore. Technically, the show passes muster catering a screenplay (Anahata Menon and Deepal Segal) which needed to be tighter, dialogues (Anahata Menon and Sumeet Bishnoi) that are authentic, cinematography (Murzy Pagdiwala) which is adequate and editing (Saurabh Prabhudesai) that could have been sharper. Where series creator Siddharth Sengupta and director Ashish R. Shukla score is in the way they bring back many of the themes that clicked in the first season. Among these, the one that continues to impress is the equation that protagonist Ghosh and antagonist Rinku share. The two define authority in their own ways — one by being a keeper of the law and the other by continually breaking it. Dibyendu Bhattacharya’s DSP Ghosh and Surya Sharma’s Rinku together define a bond that is as much dictated by quiet admiration as by loathing. What makes Undekhi 2 interesting is also the rise of its female protagonists despite the storyline still being overrun by the sense of entitled male chauvinism that dictates the heartland milieu. Teji and Muskan are emerging as the new power points in the murky game for dominance in the Atwal household as well as in the realm of their family business, and a possible season three could use the angle to provide an interesting spin to the saga. In the current season, Koel’s character comes of age as she hits vengeance mode with action-packed vehemence. The element of women’s empowerment renders an unconventional twist to the menacing world of the Atwals. Undekhi season two should keep fans satisfied for now, and hoping season three creates a bigger, better bang. Season 2 is currently streaming on SonyLIV.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a senior film critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.