🔫 Mirzapur season felt like it lost the plot a bit this time

Watched the latest season over a fairly quick weekend binge, mostly because I genuinely enjoyed the earlier seasons enough to want to stay caught up with where the overall story was actually heading next, but came away feeling like this particular season lost some of the sharper, tighter focus that made the earlier seasons genuinely work so well in the first place for me personally. The earlier seasons felt like they had a genuinely clear central tension driving nearly every single scene forward purposefully, while this latest one felt considerably more scattered, introducing several new specific subplots that never quite got the proper development time needed to feel genuinely essential to the actual larger story being told across the whole season overall. Some of the performances remain genuinely strong regardless, a couple of specific actors clearly still understand their characters deeply even when the actual material itself feels somewhat weaker than what came before it in earlier seasons. But a few pivotal moments that were clearly meant to hit hard emotionally landed with noticeably less actual impact than similar moments managed to achieve in earlier seasons of the exact same show. Discussed this with a couple of friends who also watched it recently themselves, and opinions were genuinely split fairly evenly, one felt exactly the same specific way I did about the overall season, while the other thought it was actually a natural and reasonable evolution of the story rather than any real genuine decline in overall quality this time around. Part of the specific challenge with a show that built such a genuinely strong reputation across its earlier seasons is that expectations naturally climb correspondingly higher with each new season, which probably makes any season that is merely good rather than genuinely great feel more disappointing by comparison than it might have otherwise actually felt on its own merits. Did this latest season work better for other people who watched it themselves, or is this actually a fairly common reaction among longtime viewers of the show generally at this specific point in its overall run?

Wonder if part of this is simply streaming pressure to keep a successful show running well past its own natural point, sometimes a story genuinely has a finite amount to actually say and stretching it further just visibly shows up on screen eventually regardless of how talented the actual cast involved actually happens to genuinely be in it this specific time.

The performances genuinely carried this season for me more than the actual plot did if I am being fully honest about it, a couple of scenes worked purely because of specific actors elevating fairly thin material rather than the writing itself doing much real work to actually support them properly in those particular emotional moments this time around unfortunately for everyone else involved.

Agree completely on the scattered subplots this season, felt like the writers were setting up considerably more than they could actually properly resolve within the specific runtime they actually had available to work with this particular time around. A tighter, considerably shorter season might genuinely have served the actual overall story quite a bit better here in the end honestly.