The law of diminishing marginal utility is perilously close to catching up with Delhi Crime. The Netflix series, widely regarded as the gold standard in storytelling, and not just in the OTT space, ups the ante in terms of scale — the new season travels from Silchar in Assam to Rohtak in Haryana, with Delhi as its epicentre — and players (Huma Qureshi features as the antagonist this time around), but doesn’t offer anything that is remotely novel. Why fix something that ain’t broke, you may ask. Truth be told, in this era of increasing competition for viewer eyeballs and decreasing levels of audience attention, bringing in something new, even within the limits of a tried-and-tested format, is #basic.
One may argue that Delhi Crime is its own competition. Even then, the third season falls short. Season 1, unfolding seven years after the gruesome 2012 Delhi gangrape case, felt like a sucker punch, its resonance being deeply unsettling even on a repeat watch. The second season — though far less compelling than the first — packed in enough intrigue in the form of a chilling narrative based on the bloodied modus operandi of the infamous kachha-baniyan gang, and Tillotama Shome’s spot-on villainy.
Season 3, more expansive (and probably more expensive) than its previous outings, combines two real-life crimes that find a meeting point pretty early on in its six-episode run. The first is the Baby Falak case, in which a two-year-old was admitted to the AIIMS trauma centre in Delhi with horrific human-inflicted wounds. Even as doctors fought to save her, the case opened a can of worms that pointed to a wide-scale human trafficking operation, with Falak’s mother being a victim. That set the cops on a chase in which a network with its roots in several countries showed how deep the rot has set in. All of this should have made for a riveting combination of chills and thrills, while also keeping its emotional core intact. And while Delhi Crime 3 does what it does best — take a real-life story and tell it with a mix of clinical precision and emotional resonance — the new season isn’t one with long legs.
The season kicks off with “Madam Sir” — aka Shefali Shah’s top cop Vartika Chaturvedi — making the best out of her punishment posting far away from Delhi. Not one to lie low for long, Vartika stumbles upon multiple instances of young girls being trafficked under the guise of lucrative jobs in the big city. That takes her to Delhi — where the girls are being sent before being trafficked to other centres, including overseas — and teams her with her former loyalists — Neeti (Rasika Dugal), Bhupendra (Rajesh Tailang), Vimla (Jaya Bhattacharya) and Jairaj (Anurag Arora). The collison of this case with the Baby Falak incident (called Baby Noor in the series) points to a large gang at work. In fact, right at the outset of the season, we are introduced to Meena Chaudhary aka ‘Badi Didi’ — the chameleonic mastermind with a twisted saviour complex — who will not even stop at murder to see her devious plans through.
The strength of Delhi Crime has always been in the way in which it has shown the impact of every crime and every case on its seemingly hard-nosed investigators. As the episodes unfold and so does the police procedural, the vulnerability of women — as daughter, sibling, spouse, mother, and as a woman as a whole — comes to the fore, especially this season, with the horror writ large in Vartika’s eyes, benefiting, as they have always done, from the fact that they belong to Shefali Shah.
In telling a story of crime against women, this season pits women (Vartika, Neeti) against women (Meena, Kusum, played by Sayani Gupta). And while director Tanuj Chopra, aided by a battery of writers and all-round top-notch performances, shows flashes of brilliance in parts — Vartika interrogating a criminal, who is as much a victim of circumstances as the others on the show is one of the most moving scenes in the series as a whole, while the final face-off with Badi Didi is also a standout — this is not a season that sits heavy on your heart and mind, like the first, or to some extent, even the sophomore outing did.
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