The Last Hour on Amazon Prime Review: What gets the series going is a shaman, Dev (Karma Takapa, the only actor who belongs to the milieu, although the series does not answer why Takapa, for the most part, looks as if he suffers from flatulence), with mystical powers that also include talking to wandering souls and letting them cross the sea to the other world.
There are other things that we would like the viewers to watch and deduce. Like the supremely dull romantic episode between Dev and Arup Singh’s daughter, Pari (Shaylee Kishen), the only one who could see Dev and talk to him, in his transcendental state. Or the backstory about how Arup’s wife died. Or the dreamy, sepia-tinted after- life portion involving Dev and a boat. The Last Hour raises a critical question revisiting the events of the past, to change the future. By the time it arrives, there is too much time that has been wasted and the gaps yet remain.
The amazon original series first season is set in a fictitious city somewhere in the North East. The recently widowed police officer Arup arrives there from Mumbai with his teenaged daughter Pari. Assured by his superior that the posting will be uneventful since there is barely any crime to speak of, Arup finds himself investigating an actor’s death soon after he has set down his bags.
The Last Hour on Amazon Prime
The case leads Arup to Dev, a shaman who can connect with the newly departed. Dev can reach out to a soul soon after it leaves the body and journeys to the afterworld, pictured here as a water body bathed in nuclear-yellow light.
Arup recruits Dev as a spiritual Sherlock and uses him to solve crimes that might have otherwise required brainwork. Also keen on enlisting Dev, but for nefarious reasons, is a hoarse-voiced adversary with a blood-red eye. His name is Yama Nadu, and he appears to have walked off the sets of a Ramsay Brothers movie.
Yama Nadu can foretell the future, but is really in search of a hidden power that Dev doesn’t yet know he possesses. Accompanied by his sidekick Thapa, Yama Nadu arrives in Dev’s backyard, leading to a chain of events that links back to Arup’s late wife Nyima and his disturbed daughter Pari.
The often confusing and overwritten narrative includes heavy lashings of mumbo-jumbo, domestic drama revolving around Arup and Pari, and romantic sub-plots involving father and daughter. Shahana Goswami, the best performer in the cast, plays a local policewoman who starts to develop feelings for her new boss.
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Sanjay Kapoor is competent as Arup, who may or may not have his own secrets, while Karma Takapa has an awful lot of heavy lifting to do as the sensitive and troubled Dev. Shaylee Krishen, as Pari, has a similar load to carry, but is too raw and one-note to convey her character’s inner turmoil. Robin Tamang, playing Yama Nadu, can never quite be taken seriously. More convincing is Lanuakam Ao as Thapa, Yama Nadu’s henchman.