It is worth exploring why shows streaming on OTT platforms are dropping shows with over 10 episodes these days. Hostages Season 2, now streaming on Disney+Hotstar, is 12 episodes long, and a laborious watch. Ironically a stressful situation like a hostage drama should have been tightly edited and kept to an engaging single digit number of episodes. But sadly, creators Applause Entertainment and Banijay Asia Productions stretch the sequel endlessly.
Season 2 picks up exactly where Season 1 ends after Prithvi (Ronit Bose Roy) successfully kidnaps Chief Minister KL Handa (Dalip Tahhil), who we realise is Prithvi’s wife Saba’s biological father. Saba needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life and Handa is the only one who can help.
Season 1 saw Prithvi take Dr Meera’s (Tisca Chopra) family hostage and demand that she kills the Chief Minister whom she is scheduled to operate on. After many twists and turns and the revelation that Handa had raped Saba’s mother, Meera agrees to help the kidnappers and Prithvi’s goal of saving his wife seems achievable. Prithvi, his brother-in-law, Aman (Aashim Gulati), Saba (Shriswara Dubey), her nurse Sarah (Faezeh Jalali) and the morgue attendant Peter (Amit Sial) who helps them kidnap Handa from the hospital, are all set to take a flight to Nepal where Saba will receive a bone marrow transplant forcibly taken from Handa. We know of course that this plan is going to go awry because it seems far too perfect, and it does.
Prithvi and his group get holed up in a dilapidated old building after Handa attempts an escape and Saba’s health deteriorates, and before they know it, an entire a battalion of police officers has surrounded them. This includes expert negotiator, Ayesha Khan (Divya Dutta), Prithvi’s replacement Dutt (Sachin Khurana) and the head of the police force Karnail Singh (Kanwaljit Singh).
While in Season 1 the stakes were high for both Prithvi and Meera, Season 2 lacks any surprise element or novelty factor. It is revealed slowly that there is a bigger game afoot which involves new characters Isha Andrews ( Shibani Dandekar), her murderous partner Ranbir (Dino Morea) and a young intelligence officer Shikha (Shweta Basu Prasad) who starts looking into the mysterious demise of Prithvi’s father-in-law.
There is also a second contract killer, a wanted terrorist who is named Professor (hat tip to or blatant copy from Money Heist) and a bunch of other supporting characters who don’t really help to take the narrative forward or give it any deeper layers of meaning.
While the main plot focusses on the interaction between Ayesha and the team of police officers and the ‘terrorists’ holding people hostage in the building, there are far too many subplots that dilute the central crisis. There is also a rather unnecessary attempt to connect an inadvertent hostage drama to a half-heartedly written global conspiracy. Many of the new ‘twists’ are developed in an ad hoc manner and never really serve in building tension. In fact, a countdown timer suddenly appears in the last few episodes as if to let us know we need to be at the edge of our seats and not fast asleep.
Hostages Season 2 has some well-executed and fairly authentic-looking action scenes, and an ensemble cast of talented actors. Unfortunately, they get very little to work with as characters. The actors mouth the lines in an entirely rehearsed manner and seem very aware that they are saying dialogues from a script. This is perhaps because none of their characters is really fleshed out or developed in detail. There are also absurd moments that stick out like weeds. Like when Saba, knowing the dangers of using a phone, keeps hysterically asking to speak to her daughter. Or when Dino Morea tells Shibani that he will help her because, and I quote, “I want to screw you again”.
It is also a good time for content creators to decide when we are going to stop or limit the use of mother and sister as prefixes in slurs? Though the show is based in Delhi and its surrounding areas where such slurs are common, for a character to actually add the F word to mother sister, aunt, daughter and think it’s funny was shocking, to say the least. There is also another supposed joke where a male character says to a woman, that if she plans to rape him, he is already committed. Such humour in a day and age where we are attempting to be sensitive towards victims of sexual assault really leaves a foul taste in the mouth.
While Hostages Season 1 was not a perfect show, it had a great premise that kept the episodes engaging. Hostages Season 2 has too many distractions and plot entanglements to keep us invested in the ‘hostages’ and their safety for 12 long episodes. Skip this and watch a good film instead.