Summary
“1996” delves into the past once more as we get a bit of explanation integral to our main character, but what it really explains, and what that means for everything we’ve seen, is really anyone’s guess at this point.
This recap of Amazon Original series Breathe: Into The Shadows episode 10, “1996” contains spoilers.
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It’s time, in Breathe: Into the Shadows episode 10, for the long-awaited escape attempt of Siya and Gayatri. But it isn’t just the sinister J-as-Avi they have to contend with, but the stifling prison of dumb thriller tropes, so a bowl of hastily concocted acid isn’t enough. They can’t leg it quite fast enough to outrun a slow limping man, and both are captured again. Probably for the best.
It’s all getting a bit much for Avi, who’s trying to avoid his wife and hide scratches on his hands and stave off more dominant alternate personalities, and things aren’t easy for Kabir, either, who “1996” finds himself chucking up at crime scenes and lengthily debating what to do next.
Avinash holds the answer, obviously, and helps him work through it, even though given various bits of scattered evidence – the limp, the size of the perp’s feet, a picture from 1996 of Avi and the latest victim, Angad, together in medical school, Meghna having seen him outside the apartment, and so on and so forth – position Avi as not just the obvious suspect but more or less the only one. I suppose you can’t give Kabir much credit for how long it took him to deduce all this, but he finally starts to get there in this episode, visiting Avi at home in that awkward way cops always do when they’re onto someone.
“1996”, fittingly titled as ever, ends with some backstory explaining Avi and more specifically J’s past with Krishnan back at the boarding school. A father figure once upon a time, he was the one who told Avi the truth about his alter-ego, and it was J who took over and sped him along to death. So, does Avi know about J after all, then? Doesn’t that undermine a lot of what we’ve seen? Is anything about this show going to make sense at any point?
There are, quite amazingly, only two episodes left of this codswallop, and Breathe: Into the Shadows episode 10 still hasn’t bothered to make any motivations clear. It’s such a bizarre story that sticking with it now is simply morbid curiosity about how dopey it can really become before the end.
