Gyaarah Gyaarah: K-Drama Signal Gets An Eleventh Hour Adaptation

“Past change ho sakta hai inspector. Bas himmat matt harna,” a policeman breathing his last tells a fellow cop on the other side of a miraculous, time-space warping phone call in Zee5’s Gyaarah Gyaarah. The scene lays the foundation for a narrative that then unravels the past as a corrective mission. Solutions are fashioned in the present and then applied to history. Of course, this has implications for the present day. The pseudo-science of it notwithstanding, it’s a pretty emphatic power to possess. Except, the show’s boxed interpretation of the supernatural translates to a functional dynamic as opposed to a transcendent one. It’s entertaining as a puzzle that makes itself up as you go along, but vacuous as a vessel for intergenerational trauma and grief. The series can see a lot but chooses to really look at precious little.

The show, an adaptation of the K-drama Signal, follows two cops working in entirely different decades, who happen to connect through a decommissioned walkie-talkie. The cue is a 15-year-old unsolved case. The title stands for the precise time in the night when this cosmic connection across generations takes place. Raghav Juyal plays Yug Arya, a young, righteous cop in the present timeline, who connects with the equally feisty and do-good Shaurya Anthwal (Dhairya Karwa) from the past. There are three timelines stretched across 1990, 2001 and 2016. In addition to the two cops, there is also Kritika Kamra’s Vamika Rawat, a tenacious leader of men who unknowingly shares a bond with both investigating policemen.

Off the bat, Gyaarah Gyaarah has a fair amount of intrigue to work with. It’s hard to predict where the show will go next, which also means the emotional guardrails are few to none. There is commotion around clues, grudges that have to be unpacked, and a whole lot of police work that feels… well, churlish. The thrill isn’t in the how, but in what next. An aspect of its own promise, that the show takes to heart. Two cops solving ‘a crime’ across different timelines is wildly fascinating as a close-knit yarn but instead the series turns the pair into prolific, episodic hunting buddies who drag every dust-gathered file towards closure. It all feels a bit hasty… like the privilege of foresight being applied clerically as opposed to clinically. Thus we get a conveyor belt of cold cases, rubbed together by the hysteria of wonder into heated, rushed, ecstatic catharsis.

What works for Gyaarah Gyaarah are the performances. Sufficiently energetic and compelling, they paint a fair picture of rugged, thankless police work. Juyal and Karwa are committed, but withheld from committing their personal selves. We see the cops race against time to solve crimes, at times with personal stakes involved, but we rarely get a sense of who they are other than a couple of good guys trying plainly to do good. The good cop routine’s weariness is probably not lost on the streaming age, and it makes for yet another tedious, reactive character study of the ‘best of us’. The antagonists, the anti-heroes, the complexities they would have offered are all sacrificed for the rudimentary thrill of watching the clock tick from one breakthrough to another.

Directed by Umesh Bisht (Pagglait), Gyaarah Gyaarah often feels like one of those run-of-the-mill adaptations that sort of do the job of upholding the original material, without careening towards a milestone of its own. The direction is suitable, without being notable. The performances and — in large parts — the writing, do their job, without ever fully exploring the mind-bending socio-political implications of a phenomenon so creepy yet riveting. That the show rarely pauses to consider the view, frame a charter for each of its characters, or even allow the two men speaking to each other develop a sort of chemistry across an inexplicable link, speaks of its intention to dispense with the titillation as opposed to extrapolate for meaning and substance.

An electromagnetic ripple in the cosmos, a knot in the time-space continuum, a supernatural crossed wire across generations. These aren’t exactly new tropes, but they can exact meaningful fresh stories. Gyaarah Gyaarah takes the middle-path of sticking to its lane, rarely foraying beyond the inevitable tag of ‘sci-fi’ it can claim, without ever trying to unearth the humanity behind it all: the world beyond the cramped stations, relationships beyond ranks, conversations beyond the locked-teeth world of police files. Who are these people, when they aren’t chasing cases or waiting for that 11:11 phone call from another world? Unfortunately, it’s a question that this eight-episode series neither ponders nor offers a framework to experience. It’s almost as if the excitement of looking into a crystal ball compels the eyes and the ears to externalise their anticipation compared to the mind and the heart, trying to tally a sort of emotional map into being. Meaning thus loses out to objective purpose, as a fairly promising show sacrifices the ‘feely feely’ for a whole lot of whirry but pointless ‘walkie talkie’.