There’s a cholera outbreak this week on Apple TV+ epic Shantaram, and impostor physician Lin Ford finds himself within the thick of it. If he saves lives, he’ll turn into a hero. If he doesn’t, he’ll be a pariah.
In the meantime, Lisa and Karla make enterprise preparations that threaten relationships with the folks closest to them. Abdullah provides Maurizio an ultimatum, Khan provides the competitors a scare, and Lin should make some very exhausting decisions.
It’s one other gripping episode of the Bombay-set thriller.
Shantaram recap: ‘Apo Vai Pranah’
Season 1, episode 7: Within the episode, entitled “Apo Vai Pranah,” Lin (performed by Charlie Hunnam) has an actual mess on his fingers. The slums the place he lives and works are newly racked with cholera.
He was about to depart city however he can’t now, particularly as a result of Prabhu (Shubham Saraf)’s girlfriend Parvati (Rachel Kamath) has the illness. Prabhu’s going guilty Lin if she dies, and Lin is aware of it solely too nicely. They dig in and begin making an attempt to stop the outbreak’s unfold and trying to remedy the handfuls who’re coming down with it.
Minister Pandey (Alvin Maharaj) has been caught by Khader Khan’s (Alexander Siddig) males having an affair with native intercourse employee Sunita (Tharanya Tharan). That offers them leverage over him and his puppeteer Walid Shah (Mel Odedra).
Karla Saaranen (Antonia Desplat) objects when Khan and Abdullah (Fayssal Bazzi) recommend giving her to vicious, crafty Madame Zhou (Gabrielle Scharnitzky) as a prisoner. However until she has a greater plan to kidnap the lady and squeeze Pandey into outmaneuvering Shah, that’s what they’re doing.
Extra sticky conditions
Lisa (Elektra Kilbey) and Modena (Elham Ehsas) are on the outs, understandably. She’s agreed to sleep with one in all his shoppers, Rahim (Justin Amankwah), as a result of she is aware of the cash’s going to get them away from Bombay. He felt pressured to not object when his good friend and enterprise companion Maurizio (Luke Pasqualino) steered this, nd she needs that he had.
Now that he hasn’t, he’s jealous that she’s going to sleep with another person. Whereas they’re having it out, Maurizio is negotiating bigger and bigger drug shipments with Madame Zhou behind their backs.
When Abdullah, Khan and Karla present as much as Zhou’s place, she initially thinks it’s as a result of they came upon about her heroin operation. They ask her to abduct Pandey’s mistress, however she causes a greater technique can be to purchase lots of her colleagues’ “contracts” so to talk. That approach, it gained’t seem like a kidnapping however relatively a wonderfully regular enterprise association between scumbags.
Karla sits tight with Zhou till the ladies are introduced in, and the 2 talk about their mutual enmity towards one another. They’ll should neglect they hate one another if they need this scheme to work and for every of their precarious positions to go unchanged.
The hazards of the drug commerce
Abdullah, as a favor to Karla, goes to Maurizio and tells him to cease promoting heroin. She doesn’t need Lisa damage, and if Khan finds out her boyfriend and his companion are promoting, they’ll be killed. So Abdullah tries to have them finish issues quietly and diplomatically.
Modena doesn’t need to hear any of this. He’s within the resort foyer ready for Lisa to complete having intercourse with their potential purchaser. In the event that they cease promoting, what would the intercourse have been for?
Lin feels hopeless because the dying toll rises from the cholora outbreak. So, in opposition to the needs of his neighbors, he goes to Khader Khan and asks him for clear water for the slum. There’s a situation, in fact — there all the time is.
Khan will give him the water for nothing however the general public data that he gave them the water. He needs the folks of Lin’s neighborhood to know he saved them. To be indebted to him as a complete.
Will they settle for this? A murderous gangster’s favor? A number of folks make their distaste identified (particularly Qasim Ali [Alyy Khan], who’s form of just like the mayor round these components). However largely everybody agrees to Khan’s phrases when he exhibits up with the water (plus rice and drugs). Lin doesn’t thoughts that some folks will hate him for this — he’s going to flee in a few days anyway.
The positive artwork of constructing offers with crooks
The funniest bit this week on Shantaram comes when, after primarily promoting out his folks within the slum to Khader, Lin says in a voiceover that he didn’t thoughts doing it as a result of his conscience is clear. Prabhu even principally provides him absolution for this transgression as a result of it would save Parvati’s life, however I don’t know that he sees this as a “win” precisely.
Lin’s put hundreds of individuals underneath the thumb of a pimp and a blackmailing assassin. That doesn’t sound like a lot of an answer. If the present had leaned a little bit extra into the inherent contradiction, it will have been even higher, however I don’t thoughts a lot as a result of, clearly, Lin’s worldview has been blinkered from the beginning.
He’s a very good man who needs to assist folks. However he’s additionally a criminal who didn’t suppose twice about robbing a financial institution. Thus, he continues to take the straightforward approach out of his issues by going to crooks for assist.
And we finish with a very touching second
The very best bit this week, nonetheless, got here when Prabhu tried to cheer up a really sick Parvati by recounting the plots and songs of Bollywood films for her via the partitions of her hut. It’s clearly a really touching gesture, but additionally it permits Prabhu a little bit extra interiority and emotional heft as a personality.
He’s one of many few characters on the present who doesn’t should make really underhanded compromises simply to stay (simply strange ones). So it’s good to see him work so exhausting for one thing he actually needs — and get rewarded for it, too. On the finish of the episode, her mother and father lastly let him are available in and go to her. He’s lastly acquired their blessing.
★★★☆☆
Watch Shantaram on Apple TV+
New episodes of Shantaram arrive on Apple TV+ each Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a movie and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay collection The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Movie Remark, The Los Angeles Evaluation of Books and Nylon Journal. He’s the writer of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Type of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 function movies, and the director and editor of greater than 300 video essays, which will be discovered at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
