“Allegiance” 🇨🇦: Standard cheesy cop show but with Sikh actors everywhere, lines in Punjabi, desi directors and lots in the production team. Set in Surrey, BC, with a large Sikh population. Starring Supinder Wraich, Stephen Lobo.
Premise: Sikhni cop recruit’s turbaned politico dad set up for terrorist smear by white supremacists who infiltrated the cops.
Has some inept lecturing to the camera (“the only people who don’t see color are those who don’t have to”). Slick enough production otherwise, just not my genre.
Absolutely wild seeing doyenne Shabana Azmi, who started out as a sloe-eyed naïf in Bolly romances, playing a ball-busting general in Spielberg’s Halo.
It’s the Shohreh Aghdashloo in The Expanse arc.
Indian female leader / general is a sci-fi trope: an evolved society does not discard the talented based on gender and skin; a small globe has a diverse world govt.
Shabana’s shrewd side-eye here is the same side-eye she gives as a tawaif / courtesan queen in Umrao Jaan. Her exasperated look, anger, coquettishness—all the same. Major flashbacks, just now in game-derived sci-fi.
Ali Khan 🇬🇧 as a haggling merchant selling salvaged mil gear, in a bad desi accent:
Nila Aalia
Starring Pablo Schreiber, Natascha McElhone
Spielberg also cast Naomi Scott, Shelley Conn 🇮🇳🇬🇧 in the short-lives Terra Nova sci-fi series (’11).
“Lazarus Project” 🇬🇧: 007 × “Groundhog Day.” Wild seeing a show with desi second and third leads, neither are techies, aren’t dating each other and both get to whup ass.
Hollywood took romantic lead Alia Bhatt and jammed her into the IT stock role 🤦🏽♂️ Bechdel test → Bhatt test.
Hermione type Anjli Mohindra probably should’ve been the main hero, sharp delivery and an air of competence. Along with Tom Burke, who’s a fantastic antihero.
They went with a more ambiguous actor, Paapa Essiedu, as audience bridge. His arc is interesting, from horrified at the collateral damage to murderous and complicit.
Grinding time loops are like filming shows, repeating with minor variations. Boring squared.
Strong, committed acting elevates the goofy premise, but it eventually peters out. The show suffers from stakes fatigue: after averting 30 nuke wars, where’s left to go? They have to keep raising the stakes with ludicrous plots (gravity wave!)
The time loop mechanic makes for cheap budgets, reusing actors and sets. But it’s like watching a Twitch stream of someone mastering a platformer, loading save points when they die. Jesus didn’t raise Lazarus 50 times.
Existential horror: “Shiv Reddy” (Rudi Dharmalingam) keeps waking up at the save point with a bullet in him, about to die.
The white guy’s the hacker, not Shiv. Free at last, free at last
Give me the Blue Steel. Now hold
Teen Shiv (Shobhit Piasa) gets recruited right in front of his home shrine
