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After 34 episodes and a timeline sprawling over two decades and beyond, Kafeel finally wrapped up two weeks ago. Despite being an engaging drama, well written and directed and with some wonderful performances — for the most part, at least — the last two episodes unfortunately were a let-down. Mainly because it felt as if the writer and director glanced at the clock, panicked and hit fast-forward on the last two episodes.

For the uninitiated, the drama centres around Zeba, who is stuck in a toxic marriage for over 20 years and has four children (how two people who can’t stand each other end up having four kids is a whole other drama for another day). The early episodes are set in the ’80s, if not the ’90s, before we’re suddenly brought to the present — where the kids are all grown up.

Warning: Spoilers ahead as this piece is mainly about the last two episodes.

When Zeba finally chooses to leave Jami (after what feels like an eternity), it should be a triumphant moment. Instead, you mostly just think: it’s about time. To give credit where it’s due, Sanam Saeed’s brilliant and nuanced performance makes you believe in her and root for her, even when the script falters. Such as when secures her khula — a major victory — around that time, almost on cue, Jami 2 (or is he Jami 1?) appears and proposes — while she’s still in iddat.

The good part is that for once, her children — especially her son — and even her mother and siblings urge her to consider the proposal. Zeba, however, stands her ground and says no, making it clear she refuses to leap into another marriage where she must answer to someone else. We’re mercifully spared the tired “how can a woman remarry?” clichés, which is a breath of fresh air. In fact, the fact that her remarriage is treated relatively normally says a lot about how audience attitudes towards divorced women remarrying are slowly changing. So far, so good.

But then, in what feels like the blink of an eye — after just one encounter with Jami 2’s late wife’s mother, whose acting is so awful that you’d expect the opposite effect — Zeba is suddenly persuaded to say qabool hai, qabool hai, qabool hai.

It’s a letdown, because this was the moment the story needed to pause and breathe. Zeba deserved time to reflect, to hesitate, to truly consider what a second marriage meant after all she’d endured. Instead, decades of pain are swept aside in a single scene. 

It feels less like a genuine and well-thought-out decision and more like the drama just needed her to say yes so it could quickly move on to the next wedding. (More on that later.)

Ultimately, Zeba’s journey, which should have been given the most importance, gets diluted in the rush to wrap everything else up.  

The same hurried logic hits Saif and Varda’s storyline. Varda, sulking at her mother’s house, suddenly has an epiphany because her mother leaves her a lone slice of bread to eat and heads out to dinner. That’s all it takes for Varda to realise how cherished she was by her husband and his family — so she returns to her hubby’s and indulges in sasu maa’s dinner. (Foodpanda, anyone?) 

Back to Zeba — she remarries, and suddenly her beloved son Subuk decides he can now marry Daneer, despite all his earlier detailed and lengthy protests about being poor and unable to provide for some of her ‘isstatus’. What changed? Did he just assume his new daddy-ji would foot their bills? And while we’re on that note, isn’t Gen Z supposedly delaying marriage and concentrating on themselves? Kafeel clearly didn’t get that memo!

Interestingly, writer Umera Ahmed later clarified that the original time lapse in the script was actually 27 years, with the children meant to be fully grown adults. According to her, casting changes compressed the timeline, which explains why viewers were left wondering whether the drama was marrying off people who still looked like teenagers.

What’s also missing is any reaction from Jami 1 — her now ex-husband. And honestly, after all his constant comments about how she’d end up alone, miserable, or “out on the streets” without him, the audience earned the right to watch him suffer a little.

We deserved at least one scene of him properly seething at the sight — or at least the thought — of Zeba happily remarried and moving on without him. Instead, the drama skips over his reaction completely, which is ridiculous given that he was ever present in all the previous episodes.

Ultimately, Kafeel falls into the same trap many Pakistani dramas do: dragging on for months, only to rush through the resolution at record speed. Characters spend episode after episode crying, arguing and suffering, but when the emotional payoff finally arrives, it’s squeezed into a hurried finale.