Farzi: Ending Explained (In Detail)

After the enormous success of the Manoj Bajpayee-fronted espionage-family drama The Family Man, filmmakers Raj & DK turned to the murky world of counterfeiting, first envisioned as a film headlined by Shahid Kapoor, and subsequently turned into an episodic show for Amazon Prime Video.

Despite the change in format, Kapoor stayed on, and the filmmakers recruited the likes of Kay Kay Menon, Vijay Sethupathi, Zakir Hussain, Raashii Khanna, Bhuvan Arora, Kubbra Sait, Regina Cassandra, Chittranjan Giri, and Amol Palekar to play major roles on the show. Regular collaborators Sita R. Menon and Suman Kumar joined the director duo in the writers’ room, with Hussain Dalal contributing dialogue, for the eight-episode show.

The Artist and The Agent

Sunny (Kapoor) is a Bombay-based artist who lives with his grandfather Madhav (Palekar), the owner of a printing press. Firoz (Arora), Sunny’s childhood friend, works alongside him at the press. Rendered desperate by their financial struggles, the friends decide to produce counterfeit notes, which brings them onto the radar of criminal kingpin Mansoor Dalal (Menon), a fugitive who has only just evaded capture and is now on the lookout for a big score.

The man Dalal is trying to escape is a government agent by the name of Michael Vedanayagam (Sethupathi), an officer of the Indian Police Service deputed to a Special Task Force to hunt down criminals of the Dalal variety. Michael is in the middle of a custody battle with his estranged wife Rekha (Cassandra) and is desperately trying to get the Union Minister Pawan Gehlot (Hussain) to sanction a financial crimes unit: CCFART (Counterfeiting and Currency Fraud Analysis and Research Team) is soon born and they quickly find one of Sunny’s counterfeit notes. Things really go awry when Megha (Khanna), a former officer of the Reserve Bank of India who has joined Michael’s team, decides to investigate the artist.

The Plot Thickens

The first suggestion of trouble for newly-minted counterfeiters Sunny and Firoz is when they decide to transport a shipment of Rs. 20 crore to Surat themselves. At no point do the duo consider this a problem, and when they get away with it, things clearly become easier.

Megha, whose expertise lies in the security of printed currency, is instrumental in launching a scanner termed “Dhanrakshak”, which Gahlot hopes will propel his hopes in the forthcoming elections. It so happens that the scanner is extremely successful, and the detection of counterfeit currency starts to get on Dalal’s nerves. It is then that he decides to bring in Sunny and Firoz, aware that their product is immune to Dhanrakshak’s abilities.

Sunny is soon put to work to produce a Rs. 2,000 note, but Dalal suffers a setback when Michael captures one of his associates and, unknown to Dalal, turns him into a mole. Concerned by the CCFART’s crackdown, Dalal orders Sunny to infiltrate the organisation (which is baffling because Sunny is an artist, not a Srikant Tiwari-esque spy). But because Sunny is the hero of the show (strange use of an actor who has mostly played characters and not heroes), he carries out Dalal’s orders without a hitch, even managing to bug Megha’s phone before proceeding to lure her into his web of love and lies.

Soon, with the access Dalal and Co. have to CCFART’s plans, they manage to smuggle a shipment of Rs. 12,000 crore into the country. This leaves Michael in dire straits because his obsessive behaviour, coupled with the moles and resources at his disposal, are still not yielding results, and because he is on the verge of exhausting what goodwill he shared with Gahlot.

The Castle Collapses

Sunny and Firoz enjoy their newfound wealth, moving into the opulent flats they once gazed at longingly. All seems to be going well until Sunny, who has fallen head over heels in love with Megha, decides to remove the bug from her phone.

Megha, meanwhile, has found the most significant bit of information gleaned from Sunny’s notes: his signature – an “S” – is hidden in each note. With this new lead, CCFART step up their operations. She tracks the note down to Surat, where Sunny and Firoz had made their first delivery. With some pressure from Gahlot, the politician who placed the order places another. He insists that Sunny and Firoz execute the drop, which arouses Sunny’s suspicion, but they go ahead with the scheme, only to find the chosen location swarming with CCFART agents.

In making their getaway, the duo let loose some of the counterfeit cash, nullifying the possibility of the police and CCFART chasing them down. But in the mayhem, Michael has managed to see their faces and can now identify them.

Meanwhile, Dalal is infuriated by the fracas and the loss of the merchandise, and his bosses turn the screws on him for the fiasco. He has Sunny’s grandfather’s press destroyed, an act in which Madhav is also killed. A vengeful Sunny now hunts down Dalal’s operatives, killing them and also destroying what is left of the fake notes whilst vowing to Dalal that he will complete his revenge soon.