REVIEW: Sacred Games S1E6 – “Pretakalpa”

In episode 6 of Sacred Games, “Pretakalpa,” the parallel lives of Gaitonde and Sartaj become more similar to each other than ever before. In the past Gaitonde is at his absolute lowest following the deaths of both Kuku and Paritosh in such a short period of time. Now married, he finds himself impotent and has lost all confidence and control. With the help of then-officer Palukar, Gaitonde has a tape of his rival Isa’s niece’s wedding and discovers one of his own men at said wedding, making him the mole for Gaitonde’s gang. The mole cites Bunty’s presence and religion as the reason for his betrayal. Gaitonde kills the traitor and his brother (despite promising that he would forgive the brother) for good measure. Taking back control, Gaitonde has regained his confidence and earned his wife’s respect and approval in the murder. The marriage is consummated that night.

In the present, Sartaj is back on the police force following his perjury about the young man who was killed. Patekar, who took on a missing persons case for a young man’s mother, solves the case after the young man was murdered. Enraged and disappointed in himself, he seeks to find the party responsible for the murder. He tortures a lead in the case in order to relieve his anger, and then “feels like a real cop” again. However, while investigating a routine theft, possibly related to the son’s murder, Patekar himself ends up killed by one of the thieves. Sartaj and his fellow officers end up shooting all involved with no hesitation, guilty or not. Shortly after Patekar’s death, Sartaj goes through his wallet in memory and comes across a picture of his favorite actress, Zoya. He quickly realizes that he had seen her picture before as someone associated with Gaitonde.

Speaking of Zoya, we last saw her giving herself a black eye and alerting Palukar, subtly, that it was her boyfriend likely high on cocaine. With this the audience is shown a manipulative side of her personality, making the character much more interesting.

Lastly, we’re only blessed with a small amount of Anjali but it’s a very significant moment. She and a colleague figure out who killed the man in the hospital way back in episode 3 and how the unknown assailant ties to Gaitonde.

For the previous 2 or so episodes the plot has stalled slightly, not to any detriment of quality as delving further into the characters is always a plus, but here things go full forward in the present day plot, particularly at the end. However, we are on day 17 and we still remain in the dark about Gaitonde’s plan and what happens on day 25. We’re also unaware of how Gaitonde knew Sartaj’s father, though we at least we’re reminded when Sartaj lightly interrogated his mother about it. With only two episodes left in the season, we are in for quite the exposition regarding these two plot threads.

One complaint I’ve consistently had, and wrote about here, is how Zoya is so far removed from the main plot despite having a tie to Gaitonde. It took six episodes but we finally are seeing her presence revealed to the series’ major player in Sartaj. It was nice to have an episode end on a such a positive note with Sartaj and Anjali’s breakthroughs. On to episode 7.