The crime thriller web series launched by Netflix has made India and its citizens proud. Thanks to it garnering recognition on a global level, India has now gotten into the world of web series with the inception of Sacred Games.
The stunning acting by both Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui has managed to collect critical appreciation, along with the ones of the side characters. Sacred Games is basically a series that weaves the web of prejudices and manipulations manifesting due to religion, and other such societal constraints. It builds them in front of the audience’s eyes and deconstructs it at every step of the way – starting from the Hindi Muslim feud.
If you have not watched Sacred Games yet, trust us, you’re missing out on a lot. The exact reason why we’ve come with an article that outlines the detailed recap of both seasons aired up until now, to prepare you for the up and coming season. Here’s an index of Sacred Games, check it out!
Index of Sacred Games
Index of Season 1: The Beginning of the End
Episode Number Episode Name Link to the Episode
1. Ashwathama Check here
2. Halahala Check here
3. Atapi Vatapi Check here
4. Brahmahatya Check here
5. Sarama Check here
6. Pretakalpa Check here
7. Rudra Check here
8. Yayati Check here
One of the first-ever Indian web series to be ever created and aired on Netflix, Sacred games has made Indians proud with its inception. The series not only caused havoc in the media industry (in a good way, of course) but has now become a household name. Starting from the cast to the crew, everything is top-notch, raw, and as authentic as it could get.
The pilot episode introduces us to Saif Ali Khan playing Sartaj Singh, who quite contrary to a cop was not taken seriously. Neither at his workplace, nor by his colleagues, and well, sadly, not by his own wife either.
His wife left him for some other man, boiling Sartaj’s life to sleeping pills and stress. He and his right-hand man, Constable Katekar have been waiting for a significant case to get their big break; to prove their potential.
And soon opportunity comes knocking at their door when a known gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde contacts Sartaj and tells him that he has twenty-five days to save the city from its impending doom. The 25 days get set as the basic timeline of the season.
Delving deeper into Ganesh Gaitonde’s life, we get to see that his mother practised adultery when his father wasn’t home, who’d mainly be found on the streets begging for money as he was a pandit.
As a young child, seeing his mother living a secret life away from his father was a sight that did not help his already sore eyes. At the mere age of six, he picked up a rock and killed his own mother, ran away to Mumbai and started working at the Hindu restaurant.
He then met a peddler Mathu whom he grew close to, and both of them joined forces and entered the underworld.
Sartaj traces the phone call and finds Gaitonde’s whereabouts and meets him there. And to everyone’s surprise, Gaitonde confesses to Sartaj of having some connection with his father, following which he shoots his own brain out.
Gaitonde’s now dead, and the mission is set to motion. Flashbacks into Gaitonde’s past show how he came in contact with a gold smuggler, Salim Kaka – someone he looked up to and considered to be his second father.
However, he was always hungry for power and thus loots his consignment and shoots him one fine day. He digs a hole and hides it, and keeps coming with Mathu to check on it. Eventually, he recruits more people to help his cause, such as Paritosh Shah, who buys the gold from him and helps him launder money; and Kanta Bai who helps him run his business of bootleg liquor.
He soon learns about the king of the garbage mafia, Momin and immediately buys ten plots from him – only to set them all, along with Momin on fire.
Soon we get to know about Gaitonde’s love interest Kukoo, and his arch-enemy Isa. The latter two were dating and were once followed by Gaitonde to a nightclub where he wasn’t allowed to enter.
When Bunty, Bada Badariya and Chhota Badariya get bailed from jail and join his gang, he soon gains immense power – way more than most other gangsters. Soon he is able to get a necklace worn by Parveen Babbi which he stole from Isa; gets allowed into the nightclub, and finally gets his shot and wooing Kukkoo.
Isa and Gaitonde engage in a fight, the latter wins and celebrates his victory during his birthday party. An eminent guest to grace this incident was the politician Bipin Bhosale, who also went onto becoming the Home Minister, Trivedi.
It is he who plays an integral role in the lingering doom upon Mumbai. Later in the season, Gaitonde approaches Trivedi to make him a man of power – to which Trivedi refuses. And this is where it all starts.
Kukoo dies due to Isa, something that hatches a never-ending fight between Gaitonde and Isa – along with their men, bloodshed and backstabbing throughout the season.
Fifteen days have passed by the end, and the city of Mumbai has been destroyed. Even after repeated attempts by Sartaj to stop the case, it goes all in vain and he is seen carrying water to draught places of Mumbai instead.
One fine day when he was on a train, he gets abducted and brought to Malcolm. His thumb gets cut and he gets severe;y tortured before the police come to his rescue.
Meanwhile, Gaitonde is in jail being tortured to death; both he and his associate Mathu. It was eventually that Gaitonde realizes his condition wasn’t the doing of Isa, but that of Bipin, Parulker and Trivedi instead.
13 days in and the city and Sartaj are still lost with no clue whatsoever. Sartaj goes back home to visit his mother with a failed case, when he sees a Pandit preaching about how every father must sacrifice his son, with Mandala art in the background.
That’s when it strikes Sartaj – the main lead – and he rushes back to Gaitonde’s place and digs a tile with the Mandala art, to find a tied up Trivedi inside. It all now made sense, how the nuclear attack was being serviced.
The season ends on day 12, with season 2 picking up right from where season 1 ended.
Index of Season 2: Piecing the Puzzle Back Together
| Episode Number | Episode Name | Link to the Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Matsya | Check here |
| 2. | Siduri | Check here |
| 3. | Apasmara | Check here |
| 4. | Bardo | Check here |
| 5. | Vikarna | Check here |
| 6. | Azrael | Check here |
| 7. | Torino | Check here |
| 8. | Radcliffe | Check here |
Season two had a bombastic start, with Shahid Khan activating the bomb that is set to piercer Mumbai into pieces. Just a matter of moments later, he gets a call from his mother who lovingly, quite yearningly asks his son as to when he would take her to see the Golden Temple – her lifelong wish. Shahid promises her that it’d be soon while sealing the fate of the city of dreams. Little did Shahid’s mother know what her own son was up to.
The show rushes into a flashback where it depicts a scene from the time when India and Pakistan had a partition. A family is seen secretly rushing over the border during the Partition of India, in Lahore 1947, and the border was known as the Radcliffe Border. However, just as the family was near the border, one of their daughters called Navneet gets kidnapped then and there.
And then we see Sartaj’s mother, Prabhjot, yearningly looking at a very old family photo of her’s. She looks intently at the girl in it, longingly and wondering where she might be. Turns out it was Navneet, who got kidnapped that day from the border – and it was Sartaj’s family that was fleeing over to the other side.
Sacred Games has by far been a show that describes and highlights how religion is used to control the behavior of the masses, whether it be prejudice or pride. This while scene justly fits into the context the same, showing that religion has forever been one of the major causes of manipulation.
Later, a scene of Shahid speaking to the police crops up – where he confesses that the bomb was actually planted back in 1947, and has been actively ticking for seventy years now. Under the authorities and citizen’s nose, and without anyone ever having a clue.
However, the way Shahid puts the same into words brings about a different effect in the show. His words seem more metaphorical than literal, in a way implementing that the city’s doom was brought when India and Pakistan decided to split – not the bomb that was planted years back.
Shahid then goes on to proudly conclude his hypothesis, that the Partition was always going to be the main cause of India’s doom, thus fitting into the main crux of the show’s theme itself.
All the missing pieces that Season one left behind was picked back up by season two and pieced nicely back together into a sensible, solved, satisfying puzzle. It’s in this season that we learn that it was Ganesh Gaitonde who shot Jojo Mascarenas, who also happened to be the reason why he took his own life.
Ganesh realizes a little too late that he was a mere pawn in Guruji’s (Pankaj Tripathi) mastermind plan, and has been nothing more than just a mere casualty in it all. Over the past two decades, he has only been manipulated into doing things he otherwise would have not, so all that he achieved stood redundant now.
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Trivedi reveals to the gangster kingpin that he was never the man behind the wheel of his fate, and that the wheel was always driven by Guruji himself. Even though there were riots and protests that he was immortal or ashwathama, Trivedi confesses that he had been in the middle of Guruji’s web too.
So all the pieces come together – when Gaitonde came to know about Trivedi, he got enraged and killed him – which explains the reason why Sartaj found his body in a bunker. In a similar way, he also killed Jojo when she confessed that it was she who sent Jamila or Zoya to him while he was in jail, thus revealing that she was also in on the conspiracy.
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This was the reason why he killed Jojo, who technically meets a poetic end as she was the one who kept on going about how she wanted to die the entirety of season two. And Gaitonde took his own life because he thought it was needed to stop Mumbai from being damned forever.
However, there are anticipations and guesses that a season three ie set to come out, given that season two ended on a cliffhanger. In the last scene, we see Sartaj trying to input the code into the bomb to diffuse it, with the help of the book he took from the ashram. Technically, he had only three attempts to do so. The last scene shows how he inputs the third code, and the code is incorrect.
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Conclusion – A Third Season To Come
The official date of season three hasn’t surfaced the news yet, and given the current situations, the casting and shooting have been kept under wraps for the time being. However, it’s sure that a season three has to be there since season two clearly left us with a lot of pending questions to be answered. It’s yet a small one, with hardly 16 episodes – so binging it would be a piece of cake. It’s that one Indian web series you wouldn’t want to miss out, so get your binge-spree mode on and hop onto our links! Happy Binging!
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