The Family Man 3 review: Come for Manoj Bajpayee, stay for Jaideep Ahlawat

North-East India is having a moment on streaming. After Pataal Lok 2 and Jaane Jaan, Jaideep Ahlawat returns to the Seven Sisters a third time within two years, this time as an assassin for hire with more to him than is expected of a franchise gangster.

Though the show revolves around the escapades of the ace TASC agent Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee), in the third season he isn’t the only family man juggling ferocity and fatherhood. Despite his obvious villainy, through the seven episodes Ahlawat’s Rukma emerges as the other, rather unexpected family man—a lone wolf who slowly, reluctantly warms up to the presence of an orphaned child he didn’t want.

In a dizzyingly busy season crammed with multiple interjecting arcs jostling for space, Rukma’s growing fondness for his dead girlfriend’s son serves as the soft anchor that tethers together a show exploding at the seams. Ahlawat embues Rukma with such kaleidoscopic complexity that it never feels like a template character. Such is his ability to shape-shift that despite an eerily familiar surrounding and narrative, Rukma is so remarkably different from Pataal Lok’s Hathi Ram Chaudhary who is so wildly dissimilar to Jaane Jaan’s genius mathematician Naren Vyas, it’s difficult to fathom they are all played by the same actor.

That’s not to say that Srikant Tiwari’s wry, straight-faced humor has dimmed. An aging hero, he’s on the run this season, persecuted for being the only man to return alive from a secret mission that entirely derails his professional and personal life. But even when his world is falling apart to bits, he finds ways to be the homegrown spy-next-door who has carved a special space for himself in our cultural consciousness, the only ‘minimum guy’ in a crowded genre obsessed with alphas.

The trademark one-shot action sequences aside, watch out for his scenes with his children and his playmate JK (Sharib Hashmi). Whether it be learning the plurality of pronouns from his son Atharv (Vedant Sinha) or trying to explain the unraveling of his marriage to his daughter Dhriti (Ashlesha Thakur) or his unfaltering bond with JK coming through in most exacting circumstances, it is these moments of brief quietude that are most rewarding in a season which spreads itself too thin in trying to show off everything it can do.

Among the relentless backstabbing, politicking, killing and avenging is an NRI billionaire trying to push for an arms deal with the Central government whose stalling forces him to use the volatility in the North-East to build pressure. To keep it busy and engaging, creators Raj & DK rope in an army of dependable actors—some recurring, others new—such as Nimrat Kaur, Seema Biswas, Shreya Dhanwantri, Jugal Hansraj, Aditya Srivastava, Vipin Sharma and Dalip Tahil.

There’s also a starry, delightful cameo in the sixth episode. A beloved character from another popular Raj & DK Prime Video offering gets Srikant and Co. out of the frying pan and into the fire. It suggests an intermingling of different worlds. Is a multiverse in the making here too? Let’s hope not.

The neat flourishes, emotional detailing and metaphorical parallels notwithstanding, The Family Man 3 has inarguably one of the most abrupt and dissatisfying climaxes in the short history of streaming. After about seven hours of building stakes and tension, directors Raj & DK, Suman Kumar and Tusshar Seyth decide to pack bags and go home. A cliff-hanger doesn’t mean leaving the viewer stranded in the middle of nowhere feeling duped. The ending of this season—if it can be called that—promises more. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another four years.