Gurpal seems to be the smartest person in Samar Pratap Singh’s team. He is the only person focusing on what matters - trying to find out how Anuradha Kishore knew about the poisoning of Devki Nandan Singh. 

To that end, Gurpal meets up with his contact in the hospital staff. He is now tracing phone calls from the hospital 2 days before and 2 days after the death of Devki Nandan. His contact tells him that he’s already done the work and asks for more money. Impatiently, Gurpal agrees and is given his first major breakthrough. There is a list of 25 phone calls made that are suspicious. Gurpal begins dialling them and discovers that one of the calls goes through to Maithili, Anuradha’s PA. Honestly, the Shiva becoming a politician storyline isn’t really making sense. I think Gurpal is the only person with agency and on the right track. Of course, he’s a monster, but at least he’s enterprising. 

Anuradha goes over to Devki Niwas. She doesn’t really have any agenda other than to screw with Samar’s head. She’s there just to make sure that he doesn’t forget that she’s the one with all the power. 

The aftermath of the VNU students clash is that they have been taken in to police custody. The cop lets them go with a warning that this should not be repeated. I’m sure he has orders from Gurpal to not keep them in jail. Shiva is the one person that I feel like rooting for. He is smart and realises that Chetan wouldn’t respond with anger if he was truly guilty. He realises that something fishy is going on and shares his concerns with Sana. Sana tries at first to convince him that Chetan is to blame before falling into her own darkness. 

Sana Mir is a fascinating character. Why is she going along with this? She seems to be politically woke and active. However, she’s caught up in a trap of mostly her own making. Even the policeman she pays off is surprised that she paid him off. He asks her how she was able to get the money. It’s almost comical. She probably could have gotten away without paying him his bribe. But now she’s stuck in a situation where the good and bad sides of her are in constant battle. The actress Kritika Kumar has portrayed this dilemma beautifully. In this internal confusion, she encourages Shiva to go to Samar for recourse. It’s not clear whether she’s aware of the implications of her actions. But she’s pushing Shiva straight into the lion’s mouth. 

Gurpal after hours of watching the CCTV realises that one of the doctors appears fishy. He confronts Dr Pathak who confesses that his guilt led to one slip. He called up Maithili the day before the murder and told her that it was about to happen in the hopes that she would stop it. However, after she didn’t act, he realised that he had no other recourse to action and went along with the plan. He promises that he didn’t give them any proof of the murder - how could he? The call was made before the murder even occurred. This means that he is not our anonymous caller. Who is it? That’s the only thing that has me interested in the show at this point. 

After this confession, I thought that Gurpal was certainly going to kill Dr Pathak, but somehow that doesn’t happen. 

The rift in SAI is exploited for political gains by CJLD, the youth wing of the JLD party. People want to know if Shiva is still running in the election.

This questions gets answered when Shiva goes to Samar’s house and tells him that he’s withdrawing his nomination from the election. He requests a free and fair enquiry into the murder of Vishal. He doesn’t know that he’s asking the man behind the murder to investigate the crime. 

We instantly go into flashback mode. Vishal was asked to take Chetan’s things - cigarette butts with DNA, etc and plant them around the room he was murdered in. CBI’s inquiry has one clear conclusion: Chetan Kranti is behind Vishal’s murder. He gets picked up by the police. 

Samar calls up Shiva and lets him know that they’ve found the perpetrator. Shiva goes to Samar’s house to thank him only get invited to join JLD as a party leader. Shiva hears him out patiently and then reaches a decision. Since he can’t trust the folks at JLD or SAI, he has decided that he will form his own party and contest the election by himself. 

Maithili on the other hand is running an investigation of her own. She trying to track the anonymous caller. She gets a tip from her IT person that the call came from an address in Old Delhi. She goes to the address dressed prettily in a sari, alone, in the middle of the night. This makes no sense. Any woman living in Delhi would never undertake such a trip, especially one who is the personal assistant to the Prime Minister of India. Sometimes logic takes a backseat in Indian show biz when plots have to be forced into progression. 

She lands up and finds none other than Gurpal waiting for her. After his track record, I was scared that he’d try to murder her but he doesn’t (that’s two mercies for Gurpal in one episode). Instead he asks her to join him for a drink. 

Episode Rating 2/5