'Special Ops' Season 2 Series Review: Kay Kay Menon, Neeraj Pandey Give Us A Thriller Twice As Strong

Special Ops is one of those shows that will keep getting made, not because they are particularly good, but because they fulfil an appetite for slick violence and quick flips of character, location, and characters in locations, a global trot that is tied to so much of the world’s rot around us. The first season followed the 2001 Parliament Attacks and introduced us to Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon), a R&AW agent, and his team who work overtime across countries, bungling some operations, and birthing others with great, quiet success.

Then, there was season 1.5 which followed the life and times of Himmat Singh—“Himmat Singh, Himmat Singh kaise bana?” Hazily dangling between fictionalized truth and truthified fiction, these stories come from the annals of R&AW’s missions, “a work of fiction inspired by true events”. They turn action into interiority—everything you know about these agents is only through what they do during an operation, how stressed, flirty, calm, and tortured they are. These are people who do not have time to be people, for they are called upon to be saviours—saviours who cannot be celebrated, for everything they do cannot be public knowledge. Well, sort of. There is a successful Jio Hotstar franchise on their exploits, and that is about as public as it gets. Still.

The second season—third really, but who’s counting?—is a surprisingly dense, rat-tat-tat paced thriller that, with its seven hour-long episodes, is a significant improvement over the first. If the debut season was about the aftermath of the parliament attacks, the sophomore stab is about the prevention of a cyber attack—the stakes have now changed, and the perspective, too, has changed from hindsight to foresight. 

It begins with the murder of a senior R&AW officer (Tota Roy Chowdhury) in Delhi and the kidnapping of AI scientist Dr. Piyush Bhargava (Arif Zakaria) from a tech summit in Budapest. One needs to be retrieved, the other needs to be avenged, and both need to be solved, by Singh and his coterie of agents, played by Karan Tacker, Muzammil Ibrahim, Saiyami Kher, Shikha Talsania, and Kamakshi Bhat, flung across the globe from Vienna to Nepal to Budapest to Georgia to the Dominican Republic. 

When we first meet Dr. Bhargava, he is delivering a public lecture on how he will always call India “Bharat” and how ancient Bharat had the first robot maker, and it hard to put a finger on whether the show is poking fun at his righteous babbling demanding he be kidnapped, or is it foregrounding his deep knowledge making us hope he stays safe. Such is the ambiguity in the writing and the comical looks of speechless awe on white faces, which play out like some decolonial parody. Until the show clarified itself, Zakaria, with his wide eyes and slow speech, has a touch of villainy. But the villain is introduced a bit later, listening to ghazals in Georgia—Sudheer (Tahir Raj Bhasin), a man whose surname is a revolving door of names, with his control room that can hack into and change the course of civilization, selling Indian data to China, which wants to destroy India’s social fabric. There is even a small aside where a Chinese kidnapper tells a wounded, kidnapped R&AW agent that India can ban TikTok but it cannot stop its trade with China—it still needs Paracetamol. He isn’t wrong. Again, the show’s intent is rendered ambiguous. 

Who is the villain and whose villainy is being mistaken for convenient politics?

On the one hand is Sudhir, a man “who is always at the right time at the right place with the wrong intentions”, and then there is an absconding Gujarati bank owner who flees India after his bank defaults, a sharp nod at Nirav Modi, who needs to be extradited, and then there is Himmat Singh’s daughter finding out she is adopted. 

This last bit is not writer, director, and creator Neeraj Pandey’s particularly strong suit—he revels in action, not character, in response, not intention, in doing, not being, so when the plot of the show pauses to circle around human emotions like love, lust, loss, or even when it pauses to establish character, giving them dregs of dialogue, like it does with Dr Bhargava or the Chinese kidnapper or Singh’s daughter, the show topples, and you wait for it to find its next mission, so the camera can swoop into locations from a bird’s eye, follow characters, overtake them, and circle back behind then as they gun down guards, and engage in hand to hand combat. 

Pandey does not deploy the frenetic cut. He lets the camera’s gaze remain uncut as the men pummel each other, and sometimes the choreographed nature of the action slips up—we can see the actor reacting to the next punch, the body moving in time, and the mouth turning into an expression that is less reaction, more foresight. The camera’s lubricated motions following characters walking into places—so much walking, so many places—can often feel like the makers salivating with a new playtoy, a new way of telling stories where you build tension in the walk towards the enemy, not knowing when the perspective of the camera becomes the perspective of the attacker. Some of the set pieces, pushing bodies down staircases, where action and impact is shown in the same frame, some bodies turned upside down, toppled and cracked at the neck, are furiously clean stretches of filmmaking. This is what gives the second season an edge—not Pandey trying to cover up his flaws, but him digging deeper into what he is exemplary at crafting. 

What is most exceptional about Special Ops 2, though, is Himmat Singh, the hero, the central force of the show, whose “heroism” is behind a desk, his mode of action is the phone call, his three cell phones like a brick being tightly clenched. His calm demeanour never lets slip his true feelings—except when it comes to his daughter, a sloppy side-plot. Menon’s performance of Himmat Singh, too, is menacing and unpredictable, the sudden rip of expletives can feel like a satisfying bomb falling on a villain. Unlike, say Srikant Tiwari, the secret agent in The Family Man, Singh is an office-bound mind, and his mind is the show’s torchbearer. It is in Singh’s small gestures that we locate his thrust—when he walks into one of his colleagues sitting on a computer from behind, and they get up and he pushes his hands on their shoulder so they sit back and get on with their work; or when he pulls a seat to sit beside them; or when he taps their shoulder so they get up and he can sit in front of the computer. 

Though, what made The Family Man stand apart was its aura of tension, where the personal, the political, the existential all wound up, feeling like shrapnel about to unhinge. Special Ops does not have that tension, even if it has the propulsion. Its scenes don’t tease out possibilities, but push plot along quickly. Its action often feels like a consolation for the lack of interest in character-building. But more crucially, there is, always, a hierarchy of needs—what is more important, and what feels trivial—when the abiding logic of the show is how all of them become one tangled mess, with no time to slot them according to their importance, each demanding not a brain that can analyse and slot, but one that can act and slaughter. Now.