When I wrote about the first season of Criminal Justice, I found myself drawn not to the obvious stars of the story, but to the silent backbone holding it together. Avni Parasher, with her calm faith in her brother amidst chaos. ACP Raghu Salian, who had the courage to revisit certainty and correct himself. That season, for me, became a meditation on justice as a process shaped by people who are rarely thanked.

I expected the second season to offer something similar. Another courtroom drama. Another strong performance by Pankaj Tripathi as Madhav Mishra. And another crime to be solved through testimony, contradiction, and legal theatre.

The second season does offer all of that.

But somewhere through the season, I started noticing something else. Beneath the murder trial, beneath the lawyers and police officers and prison scenes, another subject kept surfacing. This season, for me, was less about crime and more about marriage. Or perhaps something adjacent to marriage. Intimacy, dependency, ownership, emotional neglect. Power arrangements that call themselves relationships. The name “Behind Closed Doors” is apt for this season.

The courtroom case may be the visible story. But the invisible story is what happens between husbands and wives behind those closed doors.

We first meet Kirti Kulhari’s Anuradha Chandra as a frightened woman. She seems terrified of her husband, yet unable to fully articulate the shape of that terror. As the season unfolds, what emerges is not merely a troubled marriage but a relationship in which the wife’s body has become available by default. Her consent blurred by entitlement. Her distress normalized by domestic routine. We realize that some violence arrives through repetition. Through the assumption that marriage itself is permission. Kirti Kulhari handles this difficult role with remarkable control, never reducing Anuradha to either victimhood or melodrama. Fear, confusion, guilt, and buried rage all flicker through her performance. The ownership shows itself in the form of punishment. As the season progressed, I kept getting reminded of Jaycee Duggard’s memoir: A Stolen Life. What does it feel to be owned by someone?

Her husband, the owner, Bikram Chandra, played by Jisshu Sengupta, is one of the season’s most polished dangers. Charming, articulate, socially successful, and yet deeply coercive in the private sphere. Jisshu plays him with the kind of restraint that makes the character more disturbing. He rarely needs to shout. His sense of entitlement and his elaborate control structure do the work for him. In “A Stolen Life”, Duggard is kept captive, without any contact with the world. Here Jisshu has created a structure where Anu participates in the world, and even then is all alone. He is able to enlist everyone with whom Anu could speak in his control structure. Her father, their daughter, friends. And when Anu does what any cornered and terrified being will do, we have a murder.

The investigation for the murder is carried out by the police couple Harsh and Gauri under the watch of Raghu Salian. Kalyanee Mulay’s Gauri Pradhan appears sharper, steadier, perhaps even the better officer. Yet her husband Harsh, played by Ajeet Singh Palawat, carries the seniority and seems to expect the same hierarchy at home. She is sharp, and she wants to get to the answers – “Why kill?” While he has figured out everything and wants the wrath of the law to punish Anu. “How could she kill her husband?” Even in the prison, the inmates tell Anu that the worst crime to commit is to kill your husband. There is no pardon, no sympathy for a woman who kills her husband.

Competence belongs to Gauri; authority belongs to Harsh. It is an old arrangement, familiar in many institutions. A woman may be admired, even relied upon, so long as she does not disturb the order of male precedence. Kalyanee Mulay gives Gauri quiet steel, while Ajeet Singh Palawat captures the insecurity that often hides beneath authority.

Then there is Madhav Mishra, introduced on his wedding night. A comic image at first, the eccentric lawyer dragged away by a high-profile case. He returns to Mumbai while his new bride is left behind. Pankaj Tripathi plays him with such warmth that you could laugh and move on. But I found myself unable to do so. Seen from the wife’s side, what is this if not another form of cruelty? Not violent cruelty, but the cruelty of neglect. The wife reaches toward intimacy; the husband remains consumed by himself, by work, by distraction, by the assumption that she will simply wait. At one point, he casually suggests that she go live in the village with his mother. Many marriages, I suspect, are not broken by dramatic betrayal but by a thousand small dismissals.

Khushboo Atre as Ratna Mishra deserves mention here. She brings dignity, frustration, longing, and comic timing to a role that could easily have become ornamental. Ratna is not merely “the wife waiting at home.” She has agency and initiative. She travels to Mumbai where she forges friendships, finds a job, creates a social circle. While doing all this, what she seeks is Madhav’s attention. And Madhav Mishra seems ashamed to acknowledge her as his wife. She is the emotional ledger of Madhav’s shortcomings.

And finally there is Nikhat Hussain’s home. Anupriya Goenka plays Nikhat with intelligence and contained weariness. Her father has effectively moved on, taken a second marriage, and does not live there. Yet he remains strangely present through absence. A room is kept for him. A symbolic place maintained. Nikhat resents it, but her mother seems unable to imagine herself outside the orbit of the husband who has already left.

Komal Chhabria plays that mother, Rukhsana Hussain, with quiet grace. It is an understated performance, but an important one. She conveys the emotional habits of an older generation, women taught to organize identity around marriage even when companionship has vanished. There is sadness in her, but also discipline, routine, and a kind of inherited loyalty that no longer knows where to go.

What interested me was that none of these marriages are identical. One is openly oppressive. The other one is hierarchical. The third one is emotionally careless. And the last one is about abandonment and memory. Yet they all ask the same question: when does marriage become companionship, and when does it become structure?

That, to me, is the hidden theme of the season.

The murder happens early. The deeper injuries have been unfolding for years. The oppression results in the lashing out of the women. And the result –

One husband dies. Another loses his wife when she decides to leave. Another may soon receive legal notice. Imagine getting a divorce notice where your daughter is the legal counsel. Madhav, however, appears to learn before destruction fully arrives. He notices the woman beside him and he takes initiative. It is a modest redemption, but a meaningful one.

The season impressed me. Because while it presents itself as a courtroom drama filled with eccentric lawyers, policemen, accusations, secrets, and reversals, what I kept seeing was something older and more intimate: the struggle between love and power inside marriage itself.

Marriage, intimacy, or control structures?

Sometimes, the line between them is thinner than we admit.