Sacred Games series premiere recap: Ashwathama
Netflix’s first Indian original series Sacred Games hit the streaming service yesterday. Here is a recap of the first episode in the new crime drama.
The Sacred Games series premiere opens on an ominous shot of a dog thrown from an apartment window. An unknown narrator asks the audience if they believe in God. He answers his own question for us, God doesn’t care.
The anonymous narrator hovers over a bleeding woman trying to crawl away from him. He raises his gun and fires his weapon, a telling sign about his character. He’s a man with an unpleasant, ruthless identity and a God complex.
In the next scene, an unknown antagonist guns down some men who appear to be in communication with the narrator. The antagonist is searching for someone. Before the title sequence rolls, the narrator demands to talk to a man named Sartaj.
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Sartaj (Saif Ali Khan) is an honest cop who is committed to serving Mumbai City. He is frustrated with the lack of success at his job and with the fact that his wife left him. After leaving the scene of a murder, Sartaj and his partner head to an important meeting.
It is a hearing to determine the circumstances of a crime that ended with a dead suspect. Sartaj was there during the crime and disagrees with the story being told by his fellow officers. Following him soon after, the three officers involved in the case shove him around and threaten to blame him for the murder if he talks.
One man tells Sartaj to Google the name of a former officer who was found dead in an apparent suicide.
At a bar that night, Sartaj tells his partner about his father, the man who inspired him to become an officer. While there, Sartaj gets a phone call from an anonymous caller. The mysterious voice asks Sartaj if he believes in God, but soon hangs up.
Back in his apartment, he gets another call. “You have to save this city, I heard you love this city,” the voice says. The caller, and our narrator, is a former crime boss named Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who has been in hiding for 15 years.
While Sartaj tries to locate the caller, Ganesh tells him about his priest father, his boss, and a smuggler. Through a series of flashbacks, Ganesh talks about the demise of all three men. RAW, the foreign intelligence agency of India, intercepts the phone call while Sartej zeros in on the location of Ganesh.
Sartaj searches the police records and finds that Ganesh is responsible for 158 murders. He tracks the phone call to a nearby mall and approaches a locked door with an intercom.
Through the speaker, Ganesh tells him that everybody will die in 25 days and only a man named Trivedi will be safe. He offers up little additional information but recounts the story of the smuggler, who once told Ganesh that he would be immortal if he were to ever kill him.
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In the morning, Sartaj enters the room. He finds Ganesh sitting in the corner but, before they can arrest him, he shoots himself in the head. However, the narration continues after he’s dead. “I won’t die,” he tells Sartaj. A sinister line coming from a dead man.
The series premiere is a gripping and intense beginning to the first Indian original on Netflix. If the crime drama can maintain the quality of the first episode, then the series will surely take off.
What did you think about the premiere of Sacred Games? Comment below! All eight episodes of the first season are available on Netflix now.