When a show gets progressively worse, we tend to look back fondly on previous seasons. Maybe the last one wasn’t so bad, we think. Hindsight is a deceptive beast. But I didn’t need to see what came after Breathe (2017) to appreciate it as one of India’s more daring web originals. Breathe starred R. Madhavan as a Mumbai-based football coach who, blinded by desperation, begins to kill registered organ donors in order to bump his sick son up the recipient list. Morbid? Probably, but also wildly fascinating. The middle-class father doesn’t become a mastermind overnight – his attempts to make these deaths look like suicides and accidents are shabby at best, thereby attracting the scrutiny of a haunted cop. The show worked as a solid morality thriller, largely because the writing wasn’t afraid to present a flawed – and distinctly human – protagonist who loses his bearings. There were no sociocultural crutches: The Catholic man’s victims were in fact noble people, while he grew increasingly irredeemable with each murder.
So what did Breathe: Into the Shadows (2020) – the spiritual sequel about another father who breaks bad to rescue his abducted daughter – do? Naturally, it abandoned all the risks of the premise. The Abhishek Bachchan-starring series dumbed down the ambiguity and succumbed to the uniquely Indian aversion to moral complexity. The design stemmed from an aim to make the plot more mainstream, yes, but also from a skewed cultural belief that the actions of every parent – no matter how problematic – can be explained. For starters, the central character, a psychiatrist named Avinash, doesn’t ‘choose’ to kill; he is blackmailed into doing so by the masked man who kidnapped his little girl. Secondly, his victims are conveniently awful people; they represent the ten qualities behind mythological villain Ravana’s ten heads (because what’s a homegrown serial-killing story without custom-fitted Hindu posturing?). But here’s the copout kicker: The masked murderer is also Avinash. Three words: Multiple Personality Disorder. It’s his sinister alter-ego, J, who is forcing Avi and wife Abha (Nitya Menen) to kill everyone who had once harmed Avi. In short, the writing wears mental illness as a mask to convince us that revenge is inherently a noble emotion.
I understand the idea on paper. The parent-child exterior of Breathe is used as a smokescreen to reveal an internal journey of closure and unresolved trauma. But the treatment is offensively simplistic. Season 2 of Breathe: Into the Shadows is eight more episodes of the same. It commits to the cuckoo-fest so aggressively that the tone-deafness of the series has become its own entity. Three years after being nabbed by brooding cop Kabir (Amit Sadh), Avi is locked in an asylum, while news channels insist that J is not done yet – the “Ravana killer” has six more heads to destroy after all. (One, you have to admire how everyone in the series sincerely refers to J as a separate character in its mental-illness-for-dummies quest; two, the previous season ran for twelve episodes and covered only four of Avi’s crimes. Sorry, I mean J’s crimes). To nobody’s surprise, the channels are right. J returns, declaring that he will permanently leave Avi’s body only after their eat-pray-murder mission is complete. So this time, it’s Avi who’s taken hostage by J, and the husband-wife couple must continue their spree to liberate him. The new addition is Victor (Naveen Kasturia), a bipolar-disorder-afflicted man who becomes an eager accomplice to J. Needless to say, Inspector Kabir – who puts to shame even Al Pacino’s troubled-cop caricature – returns for the chase.