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 age old 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 and 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.