Special Ops Season 2: Himmat Singh Takes On Cyberterrorism In A Satisfying Encore

INDIA'S premier AI scientist is kidnapped from a conference halfway around the world. One of its leading intelligence operatives is shot dead in the middle of the national capital. A bank has gone bust, time is running out, and institutions bump into each other as bureaucracy takes the shape of a high-stakes battle of tic-tac-toe. One axis anchors the chaos, the hysteria, the chase and the unravelling of a global mission — Himmat Singh. The return of Kay Kay Menon as the celebrated intelligence officer is a testament to the sublimity of performance. The fact that adrenaline need not be punched into the grammar of a story, but that it can be casually laid down as the guiding light of a narrative. If handed to the right torchbearer.

Season two of Special Ops, which arrived after a vacuum-filling mini-series about Singh’s origin story, wants to go big and bold. It is preset to the tropes of AI, cyber warfare and the digital tools that are now capable of destroying nations from the dim rooms of hostel-residing hackers. “It’s not intelligence, it’s decisions”, a senior officer bemoans at one point, to sort of push back on the keel of digital dystopia. Wars have shifted online, but the decisions are still made inside the heads of men. It’s these men who decide where power resides, how it functions, and, should it require, become the stroke of fate. It’s where men like Himmat Singh become both myth and matter. The surreal, unquantifiable blobs of energy that power nations from the hinge of something intangible yet essential — responsibility.

So while India’s foremost AI scientist, Professor Bhargava (Arif Zakaria), is bullied and dragged across eastern Europe, Himmat and his coteries race to solve the mystery of his abduction, which has its tentacles in history and a chokehold on the country’s future. Special Ops carries forward its usual tropes — missions interchange at lightning speed, countries and settings change like wet carpets, and there is plenty of decent action to chew on. Again, Singh does none of the fighting or the running around. His operatives — the excellent Karan Tacker and Muzamil Ibrahim — are his soldiers of what is a long-drawn, but glamorous battle waged at many fronts. There is also, of course, Vinay Pathak as the Delhi policeman who remains one of Singh’s trusted aides. The enemy has a new face in the suave, tech-savvy Sudeer, played by Tahir Raj Bhasin.

Watch Tahir Raj Bhasin in Sultan of Delhi and Chhichhore on OTTplay Premium.

Menon, whose ageing seems to be more visible than his peers, retains his crispness. His ability to mine the ordinary out of the extraordinary. Even watching him think, abruptly pause mid-step or turn around as if struck by an epiphany has its carnal pleasures. He seems to embody intelligence with a definitive ease. Intellect ought to be an invisible quantity, but in the hands of Menon and his deep gaze, it takes a visual dimension. No wonder then that the second season kicks in when Singh looks at the camera, focused, as if he’s remembered something. That he’s been away, that duty beckons with the urgency of a streaming landscape that has plateaued into a tranche of has-beens and also-rans.

That is not to say that Special Ops isn’t flawed. Its production design — bizarrely for a globetrotting series — still remains wanting. The endless action sequences give the impression of overkill. A compensation for Singh’s armchair theatrics, maybe. The 7-episode new season does a decent job of organising chunks and pieces towards a common goal, but it can often miss the forest for the trees. The science-talk, the brevity of it, feels insincere and forced. At times, set pieces feel rushed instead of being coherently crafted. And sometimes you wish that the show would just pause and breathe, especially in moments when Singh isn’t on screen. All of these flaws, however, are upstaged by Menon’s singular act of a career agent on the brink of retirement, somehow preventing the world from blowing apart with the help of the two or three cellphones he switches between with the tenacity of a prowling cheetah. Gen-Z would call this workplace toxic on day one.

Special Ops is obviously a Kay Kay Menon vehicle, but he is, for the part of his collaborators, assisted well by his fellow actors, including an excellent Prakash Raj. But when you carry the magnetism of a punch that enforces itself without ever leaving the body, anything and everything becomes an act of reassurance. It’s what Menon brings to the table. In fact, he brings the table too. He is euphoric, arresting and ever-so-in-control and single-handedly elevates a rudimentary show about global espionage into a thrilling experience of watching a retirement-age man operate a call centre. That’s obviously an oversimplification, but Menon would easily pull off either. Of all the “Ops” that happen, culminate in success or collapse, somewhere between desks and files marked confidential, Kay Kay Menon remains what’s truly special about them. Enough to revoke his plans for retirement — both inside and outside the world of this show. 

Watch Special Ops Season 2 on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription.