When the first season of Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein came out in 2022, it was a show that balanced elements of pulp with darkly comic storytelling. There were some genuine moments to cherish in seeing the unlikely and incompetent protagonist, Vikrant Singh Chauhan (Tahir Raj Bhasin), who doesn’t exactly live up to the heaviness embedded in his name. He is an ordinary guy stuck in extraordinary circumstances, where he is forced to marry someone he doesn’t love. It was how he reacted to the situation that lent a certain humorous unpredictability to what he did, where he is not aware of the fact that he is the joke. In season 2, however, all of it takes a plunge. The tone of the show goes for a toss as it loses out on its original edginess. Characters merely react to events and the plot gets thinner with each episode. All that Vikrant gets to do here is damage control, and what it leads to ultimately is a forgettable experience.
Beginning exactly after the events of season 1, Purva is kidnapped by the contract killer played by Arunoday Singh, which sends Vikrant into disarray as he tries to get hold of the situation. Purva’s father, Akheraj Awasthi (Saurabh Shukla) calls Guru (a poker-faced Gurmeet Choudhary), a tough special agent and Purva’s old friend, to look for her. Meanwhile, Shikha has got married to a cop, and lying in her bathroom is the injured body of Akehraj’s short-tempered henchman Dharmesh (Surya Sharma). Further, a new character by the name of Sherpa (Varun Badola) is told to be the mastermind behind the kidnapping. He is also revealed to be an old enemy of Akheraj, a detail that doesn’t really make a difference for how casually it unfolds.
Creator and director: Siddharth Sengupta
Cast: Tahir Raj Bhasin, Shweta Tripathi, Anchal Singh, Saurabh Shukla, Arunodoy Singh, Bijendra Kala and Anant Joshi
Streamer: Netflix
It becomes all about Vikrant as Purva stays kidnapped for the most part and others try to settle out a deal to rescue her. It is definitely not the Vikrant we know from earlier. Seeing someone get beaten to death doesn’t disgust him anymore. In fact, now he doesn’t think much before cutting a dead body to pieces after stabbing it multiple times. It is a shift from his awkward and fearful demeanour in many ways, yet there is nothing more to him than this. He doesn’t grow any further into becoming an even darker shade. Rather, there is this constant hesitance to explore him more. The writing becomes heavily dependent on the plot while choosing to leave its characters underdeveloped. Vikrant’s friend Golden (the inimitable Anant Joshi), who had a unique presence in the first season, becomes merely a tool of forced comic relief this time. Shikha has little agency of her own and doesn’t take decisions for herself. Akheraj is always angry and there is no room to connect with him emotionally. It’s as if they are merely there, more as characters stuck in a plot than ones leaving an impact with their presence.
Creator, writer and director Siddharth Sengupta goes for a straightforward tone this time, spending more time in the mundanity of the kidnapping than letting the story build richer on the themes touched upon before. There is no playfulness in the frames, no quirk in the dialogues (written by Varun Badola). It is not the pulpy manipulative love triangle this time but becomes more of a generic rescue-thriller with low stakes.
Tahir plays Vikrant with ease, reflecting his self-doubt and weakness just through the slight changes in expression on his face. Yet, it never feels as visceral as some of the violent acts that he is forced to do. There is clearly a lot more that he can do with the character, but it feels that the show doesn’t really allow him to go there. Shweta Tripathi does justice to her role, embodying the fear and vulnerability of her situations quite well. The natural shrewdness that Anchal Singh carries is not put to the right use here. There is an attempt to give more complexity to her character as we see a flashback sequence with her mother, but it leads nowhere. Even Saurabh Shukla stays subservient to the plot and there’s little out of the ordinary that he gets to do.
Ye Kaali Kaali Ankhein Season 2 ends again with another cliffhanger, promising to return to mend things for better or worse. Despite its flaws, season 1 offered much to admire in how it subverted the genre and brought life to the characters. While here, it feels more like a bridge to get to the next one and there’s little to hold it together as it does. There is a need to retrospect and reinvent as it comes back with the third season.