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Bilal Abbas and Hania Aamir’s drama serial Meri Zindagi Hai Tu has split its viewers right down the middle after a deeply unsettling scene between Kamyar and Fariya in last night’s episode.

Over the past few weeks, the show had taken an upsetting turn. Much to fans’ dismay, the antagonist, Fariya (played by Vardah Aziz), succeeded in sabotaging Kamyar (Abbas) and Ayra’s (Aamir) wedding in the most vicious way imaginable. She drugged Kamyar, staged a scene in which he appeared to be physically involved with another woman — someone she hired for the job — recorded the assault, and made the video go viral moments before the couple’s long-awaited nikkah. To the world, it looked like Kamyar willingly cheated. The wedding was called off. His reputation collapsed overnight in Ayra’s eyes.

In the latest episode, the truth finally came out. The woman planted by Fariya confesses everything to both Ayra and Kamyar, clearing his name, but what followed was the most jarring moment the drama has delivered so far.

Kamyar confronted Fariya, violently forced a poison pill down her throat, and locked her inside a room as an act of revenge.

The scene has sparked an uproar online. While some viewers read it as the rage of a man pushed beyond breaking point, many others have called it deeply problematic, questioning the normalisation of such extreme violence, pointing out that Kamyar had other choices that did not involve becoming just as brutal as the person who destroyed him.

Instead of catharsis, the moment left a large section of the audience disturbed, and debating where the line between justice and cruelty should lie on prime-time television.

A user suggested calling out the writer and director of the drama.

Another viewer, even though they agreed that Fariya deserves punishment, shed light on how what Kamyar did was illegal.

Some suggested several alternative options that could have been shown in the drama: filing an FIR, getting Fariya arrested, and taking her to court.

One user just gave up explaining how problematic the scene was.

For many viewers, the scene crossed a line, turning a moment which could have served justice in non-problematic ways into an act that was far more disturbing. No matter what the reason, does it really give creators the right to justify such cruelty, that too, through a medium that reaches millions every night?

In a drama landscape that already struggles with nuanced portrayals of accountability, Meri Zindagi Hai Tu seems to have chosen spectacle over sense. Yes, Fariya’s crimes were calculated and cruel, but turning Kamyar into judge, jury, and executioner doesn’t restore moral balance — it only muddies it.

When heroes are written to mirror the violence of their villains, the story stops being about justice and starts becoming about who gets to be cruel with audience approval.