‘Delhi Crime Season 3’ Series Review: Third Time’s Not A Charm

A hit series churning out multiple seasons is like a small startup that’s teased by old clients when it becomes a unicorn. It invites those classic jibes: “oh you’re too big for us now” and “boss you’ve changed”. After the success of Season 1 of Delhi Crime, most viewers went into Season 2 anticipating this change — maybe it’ll be safer, more templatised, splashier and simpler. But despite a creator shuffle, Season 2 not only reinforced an honest personality and forensic gaze, it also addressed criticisms of the first season by humanising its Delhi Police characters — warts, blind spots and all — rather than glorifying them. The popularity, if anything, made it more introspective.  

But I’m disappointed to report that Season 3 unfolds the way we expected the previous one to. It’s surprisingly generic, conventional, loose, and carries itself very much like someone aware of its own fame. In other words, Delhi Crime now looks and sounds like a franchise. One can imagine the show’s loyalists (such as myself) sighing sadly, not unlike the old clients of Rocket Sales Corporation after it gets absorbed by a ‘parent’ company in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year.  

Like the first two, this season too is inspired by a high-profile crime. Here it’s the 2012 ‘Baby Falak’ tragedy revolving around a battered toddler admitted to the AIIMS trauma center. The event is only the headline we read in newspapers; the show is designed to do a postmortem of the society that’s concealed by the headline. The 6-episode series opens with (fictional) DIG Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) on a punishment posting in Assam. Once she accidentally uncovers a sex-trafficking racket with roots in Haryana and Rajasthan, she returns to Delhi to lead the cross-state operation. And, of course, to link with her faithful team who still delight in calling her “Madam Sir”: ACP Neeti (Rasika Dugal), Inspector Bhupendra (Rajesh Tailang), sub-inspectors Jairaj (Anuraag Arora) and Sudhir (Gopal Datt), and others. Before she arrives, Neeti is already onto a case that may or may not be related — tracking down the couple who left an injured baby at the hospital. Simultaneously, we see a Rohtak-based kingpin named Meena (Huma Qureshi) and her pornstache-sporting partner Vijay (Sano Di Nesh) ‘recruit’ girls by luring them away from miserable lives with the promise of foreign jobs. This evil-looking lady wants to be the top supplier to wealthy clients abroad. She’s in her own entrepreneurial story (Sock-it Singh?), hustling to corner a market dominated by male handlers and seasoned pimps. 

The first episode clunkily sets this stage — we are introduced to the new players, and reintroduced to the familiar officers and their homes. Vartika and Neeti quickly realise that their investigations are connected. On paper, the broader ideas are there. The reason they’re the protagonists of a show that straddles the creaky fence between police propaganda and cop procedural is because they’re cursed with a sense of empathy. Vartika, Neeti and the rest are wired to feel too much, like bleeding-heart social media users doomscrolling and gasping at their timeline. Over the seasons, their detachment has been broken; they struggle to be distant, which in turn makes them exceptions to the norm of a force notorious for its brutality and bureaucracy. Their personal investment is supposed to be a superpower, not a weakness. But there’s something off about this ‘condition’ in Season 3 — the empathy looks a bit curated, woke almost, as if it’s the only way to convince us that they are different and worthy of heroism.

The sight of the baby alone is enough to shake the most cynical veteran out of their stupor. But the show flaunts Vartika and co’s compassion and trauma with a series of performative gimmicks. The film-making goes into overdrive to convey subtext that the screenplay cannot. Take the cinematography. The relentlessly tight close-ups of the women’s faces are jarring; the metaphors of societal scrutiny and the male gaze wear off, and all we’re left with are over-framed shots that show psychological flux even during regular conversations. The technique imitates that of the far superior Poacher, the eco-thriller led by Richie Mehta, the man behind Season 1 of Delhi Crime. There’s also the strangely flowery dialogue: “Nobody misses missing girls” or “I am alone, but not lonely”. A man approaches his ex-wife in front of his girlfriend and says: “you look nice, what’s the secret?”. Divorce, she promptly answers. “What did you see in me?” a tearful victim asks; umeed (hope), says Vartika. It’s flashy writing in context of the setting, and it risks yanking the viewer out of the shapeless urgency of their arcs.  

Early on, there are signs of shaky execution too. A car chase seems to be missing visual cues and vital chunks of continuity, and it’s obvious that the participants are shot separately and stitched together. The edit is missing a draft; a protracted climax at a container yard is dull and predictable. The series doesn’t do enough with its many character trajectories either. Apart from Rasika Dugal’s Neeti — the plot directly challenges her desire of motherhood — the toll of the job isn’t evident in the body language of others. For the first time, Shefali Shah’s Vartika appears to have go-to tics and formulas: those wide-eyed reaction shots, the silent shock, the curt replies. Whenever she encounters a gory truth or twist, it’s like she’s never encountered bad things in her career. I like that there’s marital tension with her loving husband (and fellow hot-shot cop), who doesn’t understand her idealism by virtue of his invisible male privilege. But it goes nowhere. I like that the daughter is now a journalist, but her curiosity is barely used beyond a surface-level byte. I like that Neeti gets a protege of sorts, like a chain of mentorship, but their bond is lost in the investigative haze. The show keeps showing us a roadmap only to live in its own potholes.

The antagonists lack a sense of mystery right off the bat. Anshumaan Pushkar’s character disappears after making an impact as a red herring. Meena’s escapades run parallel to the manhunt, but the stakes and cat-and-mouse game rarely emerge. Instead, it’s like two different tales searching for connective tissue and convenient intersections. The final face-off is heavy with exposition so that the meaning of it all — that everyone is a victim in a system rigged against both sides of the law — remains blatant. The trafficked girls are reduced to scared observers and reaction mediums, bringing to mind how mobile the similarly-themed Love Sonia (2018) was. The inability of the writing to juggle its tracks results in a kind of inertia that’s both geographically and narratively confusing. The story shifts across India — between Assam and Rohtak to Surat and Mumbai — which somewhat robs the series of its Delhi-coded identity. It’s reluctant to wade too deep into the capital again, turning the show into just another semi-atmospheric crime drama operating under the franchise umbrella.  

That’s not to say this season is unwatchable. It’s competent at best, just nothing we haven’t seen before. You don’t expect a series like Delhi Crime to resort to lazy commercial devices — like randomly revealing that a victim is good at maths so that her ‘talent’ can unlock an ending that paints itself into a corner. You don’t expect a shady white man (with a mixed-European accent) named London to be Vartika’s key informer. You also don’t expect Vartika’s main-character energy to keep puncturing the chase. One of the main issues is how stubbornly apolitical the series chooses to be. By “apolitical” I don’t mean naming, shaming or blaming the high command (it’s based around a 2012 moment because why risk it?) for systemic rot. The ambivalent period is fine, but it’s detached from the actual country and more interested in the concept of an India it incriminates. It opts for a low-risk problem to address a high-risk climate.

When in doubt, most modern Hindi stories use violence against women and gender politics as a crutch to be critical. It’s the most guarded and bullet-proof way to explore marginalisation in a culture that sees the cause as more of a party slogan than a bleak reality. It’s the diplomatic way to expose the complicity and power abuse of men from all walks of life, without committing to a side: an all-in-one nod to humanity over politics. With a closing slate offering statistics, Delhi Crime Season 3 comes dangerously close to being a basic and self-righteous mouthpiece. It doesn’t have the mind and heart of something like Khauf, the ambitiously staged supernatural thriller that reframed the culpability of Delhi itself as a genre. This refuses to expand beyond the fundamentals of exploitation and patriarchy. The approach cushions the voice of a show that pretends to point fingers only to be mistaken for half a clenched fist. 

When Vartika hears the confession of the person who hurt the baby, it’s a callback to the numbness of listening to the rapist’s confession in the first season. That was a haunting sequence, a wake-up call for an institution that was too busy following due process. Except this time her instinct is more of a franchise trademark; it’s there as a marker, the way The Family Man has its one-take action scenes. She can’t believe the irony of the oppressor being the ultimate victim. In a better show, this might have evoked parallels of faith and caste, where questions might be raised about why minorities driven to the edge aren’t viewed through the same forgiving lens. But Delhi Crime is too prominent to be that focused and interpretative anymore. It’s changed, boss. After all, with great power comes the greater urge to protect that power.