Your Honor Makes The Right Moves In Season 2

Your Honor(SonyLIV &Applause Entertainment- 10 Episodes)

Starring  Jimmy Sheirgill, Mita Vashisht, Suhasini Mulay, Richa Pallod, Pulkit Makol, Gulshan Grover, Zeishan Quadri and Mahie Gill

Directed by E Niwas

Rating: ***

Powerful performers, not at their  best but still good enough to carry  the sluggish pace of a series that’s clearly seen its best days in Season 1,make  Season 2 not just engaging   but  in parts, gripping

For those who came in late Season 1  of  Your Honor  chronicled the compelling and  tense saga of  a distinguished court judge  who uses every criminal  underhand method to get his son off the hook. The moral  of the immoral story was this:  at the end of the day, a father is a father.

So what  does Season 2 have to add  to that ageold  wisdom of patriarchal democracy? Nothing much,  I am  afraid. For me  the  highlight   of Season 1 was the  crackling cat-and-mouse  game between cop Kiron Shekon( Mita Vashisht)  and the  judge Bishan Khosla( Jimmy  Shergill). Season 2 underplays  that  knife-edged  conflict between the lawmaker and the  unlikely lawbreaker.

The brilliant Mita Vashisht enters  the  plot in Episode 3  in Season  2.Once she does , the  plot gathers some momentum. I found Jimmy Shergil curiously  apathetic  this time. He  is  a father and a distinguished  citizen  who has clearly reached the  end of the tether. Shergil’s Bishan Khosla is a  man ready to explode.  Shergil plays him over-calm ,under-impassioned.

Some of  the characters from Season 1 are  left high and dry in Season 2. Bishan’s Khosla  protégée Ruma(Parul  Gulati)   and his smoking-hot  mother-in-law(Sushasini Mulay) are just two among several  characters  who are casualties of a certain moral and structural uncertainty that shrouds Season 2.

Pulkit Makol as  Justice  Khosla’s incarcerated  son uses the plot’s  defining sense of  uncertainty to  his own advantage. He  plays the son Abeer as a  18-year old(that’s what he says , though he looks much older) who  doesn’t know which way  to move now that he is  declared a law-breaker.Besides Makol and Vashisht,  the  other  actor who  wraps his  sensitivities  around  his  wobbly character is Zeishan Qadri as Pandit, the scumbag criminal who  has certain redeeming qualities that  this  season has no patience or  wherewithal  to explore.

The new  pivotal characters  played by Gulshan Grover aand Mahie Gill are  out of their depth,splashing around trying to look relevant in a  plot that has no  proper place for them.

For all  its faults, Season 2 of Your Honor keeps us watching till the end to see  how far Shergil’s character would fall, and how  much of  a  plunge Vashisht’s character  is willing to take to pull the ‘honorable’ Judge out of the  cesspool. This time the  characters from the original Israeli series(Kvodo) are  not  as confident about their  moral ground as  they  were in Season 1. The moral ambiguity serves its purpose , but only  when the characters  are not trying to occupy a  high moral ground where they’ve lost the right to belong