The stakes are higher in the second season of Inspector K, something I deduced from watching its upbeat trailer released in February. Mind you, this is a crime comedy that had an unevenly shambolic first season, and felt like I was watching a compilation of bad spoofs stitched together. Unlike its first episode that opened with a murder in a Lagos night club, the second season, which premiered on REDTv yesterday, opens with an orchestrated heist that takes an oversize chunk out of the episode’s run time.

The robbery is at the Imperail Fund, a kind of bank-adjacent establishment that’s known for saving the wealth of affluent people. With around-the-clock protection, featuring a laser beam security system to guard a Persian diamond, robbing a place like that should be impossible. But a smart group of robbers pull it off. A drone is launched into the air to cover the perimeter, and they infiltrate the building with the help of an insider. They make communications with walkie talkies and their objective is to steal the Persian diamond, which they take and together slip into a bullion van.

All these, of course, is accentuated with cheesy, pantomimed humour. But dialogue is sometimes atrocious, or amplified into gaudy, greasy overacting. Also, I’m yet to figure out why most Nigerian comedies use the same sound effect, the pulsing, blippy rhythm that drowns scenes into an oft-tasteless comic soup. We don’t see the longsuffering, crime-pursuing eponymous character Inspector K until the next day, when he bombastically barges into a disused warehouse at which the diamond is to be sold.

I don’t want to spoil how he got to know about the location of the illicit dealing, but the suspense is not worth it. From there, everything devolves into a cringey farce. The bad guys are shot, which I thought was highly irresponsible and impulsive on the part of the police since they weren’t threatening at first. But then, Inspector K has been built on ridiculous chaos and senseless logic. Nothing seems to have changed this season. And if subsequent episodes are like the premiere, then our wait for the next installment of the show would have been for nothing.

Bernard Dayo

When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.