Special Ops - India's longest Manhunt

 My first experience, of a web series though had glimpses of others before. 

Created by Neeraj Pandey who along with Shivam Nair directed the series along with Pandey's Friday Storytellers attached as a production house for Disney+ Hotstar's label Hotstar Specials ; it keeps you hooked. The Eight episodes have names of eight hindi movies. 

Based on real-life incidents taken from the lives of officers working for the Indian intelligence agency. The series has eight episodes where Kay Kay Menon's character Himmat Singh tries to deduce the oncoming attack. The series begins in the present with the two-men audit team – played by Parmeet Sethi (Mr Chadda)  and Kali Prasad Mukherjee (DK Banerjee) – probing Himmat Singh about alleged irregularities in his department’s accounts.

Five terrorists were killed, but RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) officer Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon) believes there was a sixth terrorist, the mastermind, who slipped away.

We open at the 2001 attack on the Parliament of India, before jumping eighteen years forward to an internal inquiry into RAW agent Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon, from Shaurya). For nearly two decades, Himmat's been after a terrorist with the alias of Ikhlaq Khan — in whose pursuit he has spent vast resources on his team of five agents spread across Asia. Himmat believes Ikhlaq is the mastermind behind the aforementioned Parliament attack and several more across India. But here's the catch: no one believes Himmat. And with nothing to show for it after all this time, the investigators force Himmat to recount what exactly he's been up to with the millions he's seemingly wasted on chasing a ghost.

That acts as the gateway to introduce its supporting cast, and dive into Himmat's past. Amongst the former, we've Delhi Police cop Abbas Sheikh (Vinay Pathak, from Bheja Fry) who becomes close to Himmat post-2001. And then there's the said team of five: the Dubai-based Farooq Ali (Karan Tacker, from Ek Hazaaron Mein Meri Behna Hai), the Tehran-based “housewife” Ruhani Syed Khan (Meher Vij, from Secret Superstar), the Istanbul-based chef Balakrishna Reddy (Vipul Gupta, from K. Street Pali Hill), the Baku-based sniper Avinash (Muzzamil Ibrahim, from Dhokha), and the always-travelling Juhi Kashyap (Saiyami Kher, from Mirzya). Farooq is the only one whose background is properly sketched out though, with the others not getting more than a line or two. Sajjad Delafrooz as Hafiz Ali/ Ikhlaq Khan gave a splendid performance supported by Rajat Kaul as Ismail Hassan.

The ending of the series came as a surprise to many. It was something that no fan of the show had imagined. The audience was rooting for a good ending but director Neeraj Pandey went a step ahead and gave the fans a memorable ending. 

In the ending as Ikhlaq Khan gets killed, he says that he still has a trick left up his sleeve in his dying moments. The sisters Sadia and Farah Qureshi are shown in a very suspenseful tone throughout the last episode. Towards the end, it is shown that they are clean and did not carry the suicide bombing vests as they were expected to. In a surprising change of plans, they decide to not bomb the meet. This ending shows that there is still some humanity left even in those who have been hurt and that was the message to take from the series.

Worth a watch!