More Murderous Mayhem:
The first season of Duranga, based on the Korean series The Flower of Evil, directed by the late Pradeep Sarkar and Aijaz Khan, had the intriguing premise of a fugitive married to a cop, suddenly finding his past catching up with him.
Abhishek Banne (Gulshan Devaiah), son of a deranged (he pulls out his victims’ nails as keepsakes) serial killer Bala Banne (Zakir Hussain) escaped a coastal village called Sarangwadi, and was provided new identity by Dr Manohar Patel (Rajesh Khattar) and his wife Anupriya (Divya Seth Shah). They gave Abhishek the name and place of their son Sammit (Amit Sadh), who is in a coma and hidden away. The unbelievable reason for this is explained in Duranga 2.
As a grim-looking Sammit, a metal sculptor, Abhishek marries Ira (Drashti Dhami), supposedly an ace cop, who is blind to the strange goings-on in her own home. They have a daughter Anya (Hera Mishra), who in Season 2 is bullied by schoolmates, because her father works from home—which is strange, after the pandemic.
The last season had ended with the real Sammit waking up from the coma. In Season 2, developed by Goldie Behl, directed by Rohan Sippy and written by Charudutt Acharya, the suspension of disbelief generated earlier, goes out of control. A man who has been in a coma for 14 years, has no physical or mental decline. The psychopathic tendencies he had displayed as a kid, are even sharper. Amit Sadh plays him, with facial twitches, grimaces and hysterical giggles, like an old school Bollywood “pagal”. Mental health advocates would find plenty to get upset about.
Returning characters include TV journalist Vikas (Abhijeet Khandekar),who knew Abhishek as a child and in spite of suffering imprisonment and torture at his hands in the last edition, is overeager to help find Bala Banne’s accomplice and clear Abhishek. He doesn’t seem to have anything better to do, neither does the police force running behind an ancient cold case. There’re also Abhishek’s enigmatic sister Prachi (Barkha Bisht) and Ira’s loyal colleague, Nikhil (Kiran Srinivas) frowning away in bafflement.
Abhishek gets worried when Sammit befriends Anya, pretending to be a professor—overnight he acquires the computer skills required to create a fake identity; his parents are keen to send him abroad, but Sammit wants the life he lost because of the years in coma and a return to his real name.
There is not much suspense here, the audience knows who the accomplice is, but he is smarter and quicker than everyone pursuing him. If the plot of the earlier season was contrived, this one adds lazy twists to the mix. The killer always happens to be in the right place, and always evades capture. A crucial call comes when the accomplice is present, and in the clumsy manner of screen phone calls, the receiver repeats what was said, so the guy can hear and take preventive action. When Abhishek is about to get the name of the accomplice, another well-timed phone call stops his father’s cohort, the maniacally laughing pimp (Ganesh Yadav) from revealing the information. This happens often enough to be exasperating, because the series is pointlessly stretched over seven episodes, with mercifully short 30-minute episodes.
Ira puts her love for her husband over duty as a cop, which makes her somewhat unsympathetic, but the real dangers to society are the Patels, unhinged by guilt and parental devotion.
Gulshan Devaiah puts in a sincere performance, taking the ratcheting absurdity of the show into account. It ends with yet another cliffhanger, and the thought of a Season 3 is scarier than all the violence of the stabbing, nail-pulling kind, inflicted on the viewer.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
