Sacred Games 2 Review: Let’s Start With That ‘Ending’ First!

Sacred Games 2 Review: In season 1, Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Ganesh Gaitonde considered himself as ‘sarv shaktishaali eklauta bhagwan’, but here he was mellowed down to have a reality check. This might spark a few debates because that’s what the season 1 was all about, the undying machoism of Gaitonde. Saif Ali Khan’s Sartaj Singh is in turmoil about where he has to go to next.

As the headline suggests, there will be spoilers ahead (and some abuses because why not?) but trust me none of them could kill your excitement to watch the show. So, let’s start with that traumatizing ending first. Makers have, with all their brains and balls, stepped into the ambiguous zone.

What started in season 1, those 25 days, finally ends with the D-Day in the climax. We see Shahid Khan (Ranvir Shorey) planning to explode a hell of a nuclear bomb in Mumbai, which apparently is 6 times larger than the one of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. It all concludes, in Utopia style, finding a pattern from a book called ‘Kaal Granth’.

The show doesn’t really start where it ended. With a masterstroke, best in business, non-linear storyline, we see, in a flashback sequence, Ganesh being forcefully transferred to Mombasa, Kenya by Kusum Devi Yadav aka Yadav Sahab (Amruta Subhash). She had certain plans for Ganesh and uses him to do well for the nation. But Gaitonde being Gaitonde, he manages to fuck everything up and leave the country.

All of these dots later get connected with Guruji (Pankaj Tripathi), who’s a root to all of this mess. This season excels for me, as far as the technicalities are concerned, because it’s rich on everything. From the austere appearance of production sets in the 90s to just a glimpse of the city post-Nuclear holocaust, the screenplay is unordinary.

This season is bold with its choices because it gambles with its lead character Gaitonde by presenting him in a way none of us predicted. It also serves as a part-prequel, shows the rise and fall of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s character. The Mombasa spin-off gifts a very interesting angle to the story. But, that’s just the start. The show gets darker by the second, starts messing with your mind big time towards the end.

“Do you have a single reason to save this world?” asks Batya Ableman (Kalki Koechlin) from Sartaj. Everything, in the latter half of the season, revolves around this line. The show lands in its prime when it forces you to think, whether you’ve any single reason to save this world. Mob lynching, a very strong and controversial commentary on the religion, backing up facts with the mythological references, there is much more to the season than meets the eye.