In the first season of the ZEE5 series Mithya, Hindi professor Juhi Adhikari (Huma Qureshi) was locked in a dangerous battle with student Rhea Rajguru (Avantika Dassani) after she failed her the young woman for plagiarism and branded her a cheat. The entitled daughter of a tea estate owner and college trustee, Rhea became obsessed with seeking vengeance, sometimes with violent results.

There was enough intrigue in the first season of ‘Mithya’, in which a troubled author is left on the edge of a sharp wedge, for us to want to return for another round. However, the new season, which comes from the same production house (Applause Entertainment) but a different director (Kapil Sharma) is everything that the first wasn’t: contrived, unconvincing, and, the worst sin, dull.

One of my pet peeves features Hindi cinema’s toxic relationship with technology. You know how, in the middle of a public event, every single cellphone in the hall simultaneously beeps with a headline alert because the famous person it’s about is also present? Everyone turns to dramatically look at this unfortunate person; whispers and gossipy glances hijack the scene. This is how news spreads in such stories. It can be at a press conference, a panel discussion, even at a party. In Mithya: The Darker Chapter, it’s at a business auction that comes to a standstill. My questions are simple. How is it that nobody’s phone is on vibrate mode? Why are the shock and awe so coordinated? Why is it that no other message or app on the phone has a pop-up sound? The closest I’ve experienced as a real-world viewer is when, during a press screening of Super 30 (2019), most journalists in the hall audibly gasped when Dhoni got run out in that World Cup semifinal.