Progressing
Sartaj is abducted and forced to question his own past. Gaitonde’s downfall begins when he betrays his own code. The standout performance here is Pankaj Tripathi.
Directors and Anurag Kashyap split the duties: Motwane handles Sartaj’s present-day investigation, while Kashyap directs the flashbacks of Gaitonde’s past. This creates a fascinating stylistic contrast.
The season oscillates between Sartaj’s race against a 25-day countdown to save the city and Gaitonde’s rise to power in the 1980s.
The season follows two primary narratives that interweave across timelines:
To watch the complete first season in original Hindi:
Structurally, the season is a masterpiece of controlled chaos. The narrative bifurcates into two parallel timelines, weaving the past and present into a single, tightening noose. In the past (1980s-90s), we witness the meteoric rise of Ganesh Gaitonde (a career-defining performance by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) from a small-time chit-fund employee to a kingpin who dares to challenge the nexus of politicians, police, and rival gangs. In the grim, rain-soaked present, we follow Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan), a world-weary, honest-but-ineffective Sikh cop, who receives an anonymous tip that triggers a 25-day countdown to the apocalypse. The editing does not merely cut between these stories; it creates a dialectic. Gaitonde’s journey is a fever dream of ambition and nihilism, painted in gaudy neons and the crackle of analog video. Sartaj’s is a grey, bureaucratic slog through a city where justice is a bankrupt currency. The complete season reveals how these two men—the sinner and the stoic—are two sides of the same broken coin, both haunted by fathers, both searching for a code in a godless world.