Delhi Crime season 3 review:

I have to confess. I wasn’t much enthralled by the opening season of Delhi Crime when it came out in 2019. The Emmy Award winning series, in the first watch, felt like a police puff-piece, conveniently side-stepping around the systemic lapses surrounding the Nirbhaya horror. It might have been less critical of authority but it made the viewer introspect into how their apathy contributed to this rotten system. Watching it for the second time, however, while ignoring the pro-authority narrative, the series housed in me a hopeful hopelessness. It was desolate, a tale of a losing fight worth fighting for. The sophomore season though again failed to impress me. It was technically at par with its predecessor but often seemed like a balancing act. It tried to explore class divide but didn’t see it from a caste lens. All these issues though were more at a thematic level, open to varied opinions and debates. The third outing, which released this week, however, has drawbacks on a storytelling plane. It is unable to keep you hooked. It seems like Delhi Crime has now become a product whose display on the store shelf is more important than its quality. A cash cow which has run dry.

Cast: Shefali Shah, Rajesh Tailang, Rasika Dugal, Huma Qureshi and Sayani Gupta

Director: Tanuj Chopra

Streaming on: Netflix

We open in Assam. Madam-sir Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) is here on a “punishment posting.” Like most cinema cops who do their best work on a suspension, she too gets her hands on one thread of a “big case”. After intercepting a truck carrying a load of girls, Vartika starts piecing together a countrywide human trafficking network. To investigate further, she returns to Delhi (no clear explanation on how or why the punishment posting was revoked). The capital also has another incident. A two-year-old girl, with bite marks and a fractured arm, was abandoned by her 15-year-old “mother” at a hospital. This case too has its tributary going into the big black sea of the larger trafficking conspiracy. The spider at the centre of this web is Badi Didi (Huma Qureshi), a Haryanvi trafficker who would rather describe herself as a social worker.

While the previous seasons were whydunits delving into the rot of society, Delhi Crime 3 mostly functions as a drab cat-n-mouse chase. It has a straight storyline lacking enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. Going against its title, the show erratically jumps from one location to another. Rohtak, Surat, Mumbai, big, loud text on screen keeps reminding us where the action is unfolding. The result is disorienting and it often imparts the feeling that the plot has been uprooted. The investigation too isn’t exactly revealing and the show proceeds to dilute itself into an ambient watch.

Also, we don’t explore the internal lives of beloved characters of Vartika, Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal) and Bhupendra (Rajesh Tailang). The series lacks tender moments that say more about the people inhabiting it than the plot. Except a scene where Neeti, in a different city while investigating a case, checks into a police guesthouse. She spots that the latch on her room’s door is broken. In a telling sequence, she puts her licensed gun on the bedside table before proceeding to push a sofa to block the door. In a man’s world, men can be anything, cops, criminals, saints or sinners, but women are always women first.

The women of the show though don’t get much to chew on. Shefali Shah as the fan-favourite Vartika Chaturvedi seems lost and Rasika Dugal’s Neeti Singh gets a half-baked character arc. New entrant Huma Qureshi gets a solid role but she overwrites the Haryanvi act with a thick, distracting accent. Her character comes across as plain and predictable with easily decipherable motivations. Sayani Gupta, as Badi Didi’s right-hand woman Kusum doesn’t get much to do except wearing flashy West Delhi coded attire and pulling young girls by the hair. The biggest victims of the series unimaginativeness, however, are the non-Indian characters who are clichédly written and even more lazily named John and London.

From being a riveting mystery in the first two seasons, Delhi Crime now has attained the qualities of a daily soap-like procedural. It has lost its chisel and charm. This season, however, in a strange way has elevated the reputation and the necessity of the first one. And has also made me look at it in a softer light.