Special ops 2: The short-cut for your 10,000 steps. Well, almost!

From one exotic location to another (yes, Hungary, Georgia, Bulgaria, Dominica, Greece, etc, all covered); from one mission to the next; from snazzy helicopter-pads to bureaucratic corridors; from airports to dam-walls- there is a lot of walking happening in Special Ops 2. Not surprised at all. After all, watching anything created by Neeraj Pandey should have you prepared for all those long-walking shots and thrilling plot-turns. In the much-awaited OTT series that was one of the first ones (like The Family Man) that had an Indian flavour (and not borrowed from the US), Shivam Nair and Mr. Pandey try to do justice to fan expectations and also move a step further by creating a story on tech villains. The production is Mission Impossible cadre. The locations are scintillating. The agents (thank God, females are included here) are always sure-footed. The spy boys and girls scattered all over the globe are invariably on the move, weapon-packed, action-ready and all set for another assignment. The background score joins them – and adds all that is left to the ‘edge’.

Himmat Singh, played by Kay Kay Menon to the T, is the suave, calm, stoic and ultra-clever Sherlock here. Matched well with his cyber-world nemesis, Sudheer ‘something’ (you will figure that out when you watch the series) by Tahir Raj Bhasin, who is so elegant and sly that he also reminds you of the slick Moriarty. The protagonist and antagonist are complemented strongly with seasoned actors like Parmeet Sethi, Vinay Pathak, and Prakash Ra, who do most of the heavy-lifting with just their screen presence, eyes and body language. The story starts with the abduction of an AI scientist and follows him on the global map till the climax unfolds on a huge dam (metaphorically right too) that houses the mothership server and comms-centre. It is not hard to guess why the good guys want to stop all the DDoS attacks and why UPI databases are on the bad guys’ dartboards. By this time, and after so many cybercrime shows and movies, that much is predictable.

You, however, hope for the real fun coming in the form of how these spies defeat the goons with their technological sparring and not so much with the physical punches, jabs, bullets and knives. We know these super-agile agents can beat anyone with their kicks and quick fingers. What we want (ed) now is to see the fingers doing their magic on the keyboards. After all, the key plot point here is an AI scientist who shows how much ‘AI can be dangerous’ by letting his hologram and AI clone talk at a keynote. And there is an AI scientist girl who does not shy away from partying and makes a hot guy say something to the effect of ‘Why not scientists - of all the people- are the ones who should party more’.

So even if China is planning a big cyber coup by trying to get access to the central UPI financial nerve-centre of the country, and even if nuclear power plants work as cyber-threats, an AI brain that the world worships should have been able to come up with some way out. Not sitting as a kidnapped and helpless victim. Not waiting for an extraction. But surprisingly, the abductor was surprised with a wicked counter-move done solely through his AI expertise. Full marks, however, to the idea of wrong-password use as a security protocol and the failover servers as a defence mechanism. But a series in 2025, and of this lineage, could have given us more delicious ‘aha’ moments of heroes beating villains by their sheer technological intelligence.

Also, it looked like the subplots of Himmat’s daughter and the Mallya-like bank defaulter on the run were going to tie in somewhere with the main story – eventually. Didn’t happen. The stealthy nabbing of defaulter ‘Dholakia’ was a fun track to watch, though (thanks to the surprise package Saiyami Kher).

As Himmat Singh says somewhere in the incipient parts – ‘We had all the intelligence but we could do nothing’. That’s a feeling this show leaves, too. Full of the spy-masala we love, loaded with new-age battles, and held right on the shoulders of deft actors and directors. Yet, something is missing.

It, perhaps, needed one extra step forward on futuristic cyber-warfare.

Or not. If we listen to what it tried to say with the blowing up of server-grids by petrol-leaking trucks as the ultimate solution (instead of some last-minute clever code coming as a saviour). And if we look at how (And why) Himmat Singh wields 2-3 phones in his hands like a juggler, one phone is too small or dull to be a smartphone.

The answer to beating modern enemies could lie in tricks that belong to the old and analogue world. The answer could be in walking two steps backwards.

And walk we must. At all costs. In all directions. In a Neeraj Pandey creation.