In the second season of Vadhandhi, M Sasikumar, yet again, takes up the mantle of the “nice guy”—stiff kindness and earnest intention buoying his character through narrative pretzels. Here, he plays Moosa Raaza, a Muslim Investigating Officer (IO) in Madurai—a punishment posting. He cooks, he is kind, he is deeply religious. A namazi who gets to his knees at each of the five bends of the day—in a court, at the police station—his faith is expressed through actions that dot the show’s landscape. He vowed not to shave his beard after coming back from Hajj, in the hopes of his wife conceiving. This rankles his superiors, who think the beard goes against their decorum. He fights them in the court and wins. His wife gets pregnant and is nursing the unborn child elsewhere. These fights and systemic traumas soon recede into the background as the central plot kicks in. Being a Muslim character does not serve any narrative provocation. Instead, two skeletons found when a mound is dug up to build a highway usher in Moosa’s character arc as he is brought in to investigate. He has the full support of his superior SP Rathika (Anagha Maruthora), who not only trusts his intuitions, but takes responsibility every time it backfires.
In parallel, in the first episode, we get the story of Mani (Yashwanth), a Jallikattu champion, and how a girl from his village, Nilavathi, is courting him. But soon, what is considered a parallel timeline is revealed to be a flashback. The two bodies are those of Nilavathi and Mani’s sister. Mani is carted off to jail, accused of murder. Now, given the body’s discovery and their identity, he is given life imprisonment. Mani neither questions nor challenges this punishment. But Moosa, the kind, perceptive man that he is, somewhere feels Mani is innocent. But to prove that, he needs to use the traces of DNA on the skeletons and issue a manhunt to find out who the actual murderer is. He brings a bumbling friend, Ramar, to help solve the case.
Now, this is an eight-episode show, with a single investigative track—as in, any sub-plot that arrives disappears just as quickly, thumbed under this singular track. The show has a dry texture as it moves from evidence to evidence, building a case. There is an arthritic clarity to the procedure. We see all the paraphernalia that goes into DNA testing. The patience between demanding a DNA test and receiving its report is felt in the pace of the show. Conversations go to great lengths making sure we know what exactly is at stake at each level of the investigation. This verbose clarity is necessary because the show lacks the heady pace in the flow of which we sometimes tend to forgo logic. In the absence of this pace, we get an almost aching level of detailing. This dryness rankles initially. You wait for the larger picture to take shape, and for these characters to feel like more than the sum of their intentions—you want to slip into the world, even as it is kept at an arm’s length with its showy camerawork and droll, literal dialogue.
As the episodes trickle on, you slowly slip into the procedural—its rhythm feels hypnotic, and its characters’ kindness begins to look less like a “lack” of character and more of a soft narrative lubricant. The performances, too, don’t feel saccharine, but have a frank goodness, especially that of Sasikumar and Maruthora. The show’s brutal landscape feels tender, softer than it is. Even Raaza’s name—people keep pronouncing it Raasa, as in darling— has an unintentional softness to it.
But the bane of the longform makes sure that as soon as you slip into this procedure, it explodes. The show ties itself in knots in proving itself wrong, then right, then rightly wrong, then wrongly right. The individual murder becomes a lightning rod for collective conscience—and this is where all that is intimate and contained about the show leaks, becoming a formulaic story that is riding the coattails of its evidence.
Why do shows over-stay their welcome? Within the longform I can sense a deep dissatisfaction with the genre itself. The force-fitting of false starts, of constant swerving, and worst of all, the desire to have a final, clenching twist that comes out of nowhere, completely upending everything known about the investigation. In a film, these tricks might work. In a show that prioritises pace over procedure, these shocks feel rhythmic. But in a show that goes out of its way to re-frame the procedural, soften its hard edges and hollow center, this bowing down to cheap thrills feels like an undoing of everything it built with such care. You cannot possibly watch seven hours of a story patiently only for the show to wink at you, rendering all the previous hours redundant—a frustrating culmination of what could have been a new kind of thriller. At the end of the day, ambition is that which can survive formula.