“I HATE it when a season ends in a cliff-hanger! Don’t the producers understand that we binge-watch for a resolution, not for continuance! If we can wait a year for the next part, can’t we just wait a week for the next episode, why binge watch, why release all episodes at once?”
I ranted out the above sentences in the uppermost tone of confidence. Dishing out at the most recent web series, Pataal Lok. My audience of one, my sister, with a rather bemused look, asked, “What cliff-hanger?”
Her tone was full of confusion, taken aback by my confidence. With the same confidence I replied, “The cliff-hanger with the police inspector!”
Convinced that she missed something in her viewing, inquisitively she asked, “What about the inspector?”
I replied, “Is he dead or alive, he was finishing the case, he could have done it in another ten minutes, why wait for a season?”
She said, “But he did get his job back! Was he going to be attacked again, by whom, the anchor?”
I was like, “He got his job back!”
The conversation took several steps back, back to the start, “are we talking about the same series, Pataal Lok” (Nowadays web series generally look and sound the same)
Indeed we were, and apparently, the series has nine episodes. Yeah, even when I watched it, I had wondered, what grain of creativity is expressed by having eight episodes. Now I know better, Nine is a better expression of creativity than eight!
The next day, I watched the ninth episode and the series does conclude the plot. Thankfully. Lesson learnt. I should refer to Wikipedia before commencing to download a series.
Back to Pataal Lok, the highly meme-fied series of the second week of May of the year twenty-twenty. Dramas of this kind, suspense, crime, grit, realistic(!), by default are compared to the gold standard in Indian web series, Sacred Games. I mean, the first season of Sacred Games is the golden standard, the second is more of the coal standard, more of the lignite kind.
Pataal Lok has all the elements of Sacred Games, a multi-layer plot with several moving pieces, a cop clueless about the larger conspiracy. Thankfully the conspiracy is not global, nothing threatening the world, small-time, just threatening a small constituency somewhere in the northern plains of India. Where else other than the northern plains, that’s how can you get the dosage of cuss words deemed essential in every Indian web series, along with the right amount of believable lawlessness.
Basically, it is an easy watch version of Sacred Games, and now with the glorious ninth episode, little probability of screwing the whole concept in the second season.
It is a watch for the performances, primarily of the cop and his wife, the dimensions of the cop’s relationships with people around him. Otherwise, it is fatalistic (system wins), cliched (Hindu Muslim unity), a passionate bad guy, an irrelevant looking prop later proving to be pivoting the plot (a dog). The great advantage of such a series is that you can breeze through them by skipping large portions of it. Instead of eight hours it takes only four hours of your time. Four hours and then another forty-five minutes to be more precise.
Ha Ha, I too have had experiences where I thought the series was over,, however in my case I had skipped some episodes in between and the ending didnt make any sense for days