The first thought I had while watching the second part of Aarya season 3 was, “Something feels off.” It felt like a lot of the show’s charm had been sucked out of it and now viewers are just along for the ride as the makers try to piece all the threads together.
Ever since the beginning, Aarya Sareen (Sushmita Sen) has been presented as a woman forced to take up the mantle of a drug cartel to protect her family. Since then, the wounded sherni analogy has come up time and again and because of how regal Sen looks on screen, it hasn’t seemed trite. Maybe that’s also why Aarya laying down the Queen piece on a chess board as a sign of dignified defeat doesn’t feel tacky.
But there’s still that feeling you just can’t shake off – something feels off.
In the final season, we aren’t just watching Aarya’s story as the sole character around whom things happen. Her children Veer (Viren Vazirani), Arundhati (Aarushi Bajaj), and Aditya aka Adi (Pratyash Panwar) are all older and have separate story arcs of their own. Aarya is now stretched as thin as ever – her domestic and professional problems continue to get more complicated but also more intertwined.
She is losing her children’s trust (a monumental loss to a character like Aarya), the police keep circling, she’s lost the massive heroin consignment she’d taken over which puts her in the Russian cartel’s crosshairs. If that wasn’t enough, she is running out of people to trust – everyone seems to be acting of their own accord. The once powerful Aarya Sareen is rapidly losing control and not always reacting to it well.
Seemingly, this premise is a delicious one for the final season of a show like Aarya but it isn’t handled nearly as well as the delectable plot twists and turns of the first two seasons. To be fair, I did like the first few episodes of the third season more than I liked season 2. Maybe that’s what makes the middling returns of the concluding episodes even more disappointing. Is it too many cooks or too many arcs all struggling to survive in what has always felt like a one-woman story?
What feels off then? The massive tonal shift. For instance, from being an omnipresent character in Aarya, Rajasthan becomes a setting. The bright hues of red and yellow that brilliantly contrasted the grays and blacks of Aarya’s world have been replaced by more black. I can’t help but think that the Aarya Sareen we’ve watched so far would have chosen an outfit far more regal than the one she does for the final showdown (Can you tell I miss the magic of the Holi celebrations in season 2?).
It is perhaps this tonal shift that takes away massively from some of the show’s best moments (and it does have several good moments). The powerful image of Aarya wielding two swords with a foot on her opponent’s chest, clearly inspired by the Durga epithet Mahisasuramardini, derives all its power from Sushmita Sen and her feral screams; none from cinematography or setting.
If you haven’t put it together already, Sen is brilliant as always. The show presents her as both reluctant perpetrator and victim but she’s at her best when Aarya gets to finally break down from the rage and grief she is carrying. At her weakest, Aarya had to seem like a woman cornered and at the end of her fight – a regal figure reduced to a mere mortal by her grief – and that is a tough act to pull off. Sen does.
It is also a relief that Sikandar Kher is there to compliment her act with his stoic loyalty as her right-hand-man Daulat. The kids all get their share of scenes but the story arcs are so trite that it doesn’t feel very impressive. Aarya’s relationship with Veer was perhaps the most fascinating of it all but in trying to do too much, that arc gets lost in the noise. And yes, the slam poetry narration is as annoying as ever.
Ila Arun as the drug kingpin Nalini sahiba and Shashwat Seth as her son Abhimanyu are presented as formidable villains but never really get the chance to live up to their potential. Both their characters are over-the-top and this worked in the first half when the lack of maximalism in Aarya hadn’t become as evident but now, it feels like wasted potential.
Something else (other than the actors’ acting prowess) that the show also retains is the way tension is built. Everything seems to unravel so rapidly that you tend to feel immersed in the action. The background music (though a tad repetitive) lends itself beautifully to the scenes that feel like they’re leading to a crescendo.
The screenplay sets up several interesting arcs but the issue is that the rise and fall becomes very predictable. Maybe Aarya would have benefitted from an anti-drop. How fun would it be if all the excitement and energy would actually lead to….nothing from time to time?
It’s also good that the show didn’t lose sight of who Aarya is – they didn’t take away her love for her family and friends to make her a ‘good gangster’. She was always meant to be someone doing bad and good deeds for the greater good. It would’ve been so easy to make her a ruthless killer and ride on the massy appeal of that trope but Ram Madhvani and his team chose to keep Aarya true to her essence.
Aarya will never be an intolerable show, let’s be honest. It is still one of the best shows in the OTT space and the larger-than-life character at its helm – the humane Aarya Sareen – will always be remembered. Maybe the show fell trap to its own success – when you create a show so good, people expect you to go out with a bang. I wish we’d had that but I’m still glad we have Aarya.
I almost expected the Maleficent voiceover to end the show, “In the end, my kingdom was united not by a hero or a villain, as legend had predicted, but by one who was both hero and villain.” But the kingdom had crumbled from the very start and true unity is a privilege only granted to Disney characters.
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