‘Special Ops 2’ series review: Kay Kay Menon heads a middling mission

In 2020, when the first instalment of Special Ops was released, it coincided with the countrywide lockdown. Maybe the sudden quarantine helped paper over some of its rather simplistic takes, and helped declare it a ‘lockdown watch’. The latest instalment comes five years later, and just months after India’s military conflict with Pakistan. Time has also passed for R&AW officer Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon), and the sequel opens to him masterminding the release of his agent from Nepal. His grand plan? The rescue is carried out by Pakistani boots on the ground, who help free this Indian agent from the hands of Chinese kidnappers. The show’s intentions may be generously called ambitious, if not a bit comical.

Much like its opening sequence, the rest of the show condenses and oversimplifies complex diplomatic crises to fit them over seven days, playing out in seven episodes. Singh is soon tasked with bringing back an abducted Dr. Bhargava (Arif Zakaria), the country’s foremost authority on cybersecurity, and solving the murder of a fellow agent. A successful prevention of a large-scale cyber attack emerges to be Singh’s main goal this season, as the show fails to hide its obsession with this new breed of tech warfare. It may very well be quick and savvy, but it does little to inspire a thrilling chase or mind games; instead, it increasingly makes the show cut away to people furiously typing away at their laptops.

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Singh also, unofficially, takes up the extraction of a fugitive businessman hiding out in some Caribbean Island after defrauding the company’s banks. This plot, not particularly fitting in with the whole cyber-spy schtick, tends to run parallel as Himmat’s team is sent to retrieve this man to avert a domestic terrorism incident – courtesy a cameo by Prakash Raj.

A stil from ‘Special Ops 2’
| Photo Credit:
JioHotstar

All of this begs the question of just how Singh, and the showrunners, can handle these issues all at once. Well, the script answers this by handing him three phones, each of which he picks alternatively to coordinate an “op”. Therein lies the problem for Special Ops; in its exercise of taking us deep into the nerve centre of R&AW, it takes us so far within that we are left waiting for phone calls to unravel the mystery. The show’s eagerness to fit in so much plot, in such little time, has a domino effect on other metrics, including the acting performances.

In the five years since Special Ops first released, Hindi cinema and television’s obsession with spycraft has burgeoned to new heights and eerily similar scripts. Spies on television have historically, mostly, reflected the socio-political anxieties of the time. Often in Special Ops, Singh ends up cleaning the mess left behind by the political class with gritted teeth, swallowing down some choice curses. Yet, as he moves forward, he repeatedly defers to this abstract idea of “Bharat” — divorced of any meaning and simply existing as a placeholder for his motives. The spies on our Hindi screens today, including the ones running around in Special Ops, end up reflecting their own lack of clarity.

All episodes of Special Ops are available for streaming on JioHotstar