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A weekly update on your favorite Ramadan TV shows
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Now that Awan Al-Ward is over, what are we going to do for the rest of Ramadan?
The grand finale of Awan Al-Ward was a highly-charged affair, a double episode that no one was expecting. For one thing, we all thought the series was going to last until the last day of Ramadan. After being a little disappointed at first upon finding out that we'd have to wait until the last episode to find out who had kidnapped the little baby, we'd actually gotten kind of used to being sent down wrong-way streets every night as the police and the family searched through Mahmoud's past to find out who had kidnapped the baby.
The biggest decoy, the TV announcer Randa (Safwa) whom Mahmoud had once gone out with (and who still loved him enough to follow him on his honeymoon), seemed to have the strongest motive. She'd aborted his child once upon a time. The whole way through we were under the impression that that was his decision. Then, in the decisive episode where Amal and best friend Nihal Assaad actually confront Randa, we found out that Mahmoud had been willing to marry her and have the child, but Randa is the one who refused. Her ambition came first.
Scriptwriter Wahid Hamid takes the opportunity to poke some serious fun at Arabic satellite channels, as we see that Randa's popular talk show discussing hot and controversial issues like children and wives running away from home is all made up. The guests who supposedly call in from different countries with questions are actually locals right there in the studio just putting on accents.
"Don't believe everything you see on TV," I suppose he's trying to say.
Another decoy was the mentally unstable fellow who had confronted Mahmoud on the street in an earlier episode. Turns out that he was big employee at a company whop had embezzled 25,000 pounds and was caught and put in the slammer by Mahmoud. Another perfect opportunity for scriptwriter Hamid to wax poetic about how all the big wigs who embezzle funds are left to go free while a little embezzler like this guy has his life ruined by the cops.
All the predictions people made (and probably phoned in at 50 piasters a minute in the "Who kidnapped the baby?" 5000 pound competition that accompanied the show) were wrong: it wasn't any angry relatives on the Christian or Muslim sides of the family, and it wasn't the mafia-like Bannoura who Mahmoud had put in jail. It wasn't his informant Shilbaya, who loved him unrequitedly, and it wasn't fraudster-turned-good guy Sobhi Barqouq, brilliantly played by Sa'id Saleh.
In fact, it was Saleh who actually saved the soap opera from total disintegration in0to a typically boring police action show, with his wise-cracks gags and hilarious gags. Amongst the most memorable: when he convinced the kebab store owner to give him a free lunch by pretending to be a film producer, and when he convinced a struggling actor to perform the soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet to an appreciative hara.
In the end, it turned out that the airline stewardess kidnapped the child. A former prostitute who had repented and become a pregnant, faithful wife, her marriage was shattered when Mahmoud came by asking questions about the murder of her former pimp. When her husband came home in the midst of the interrogation, he hit her in rage, causing a miscarriage, and then promptly divorced her, thus lending her the dramatic imperative to kidnap the child in revenge. In the final episode she is given the chance to air her grievances and gain the audience's (and her former husband's, who decides to remarry her right then and there) sympathy.
To wrap things up, Mahmoud ends up quitting his job as a police officer in order to become a lawyer instead, opening up a pandora's box of questions about justice and who is the true arbiter.
The series had a lot of problems and mistakes, not least of which was the misconception that it was normal in Islam for people to ask for the intervention of people like Al-Sayida Nefisa in times of trouble. This, even though one of the main tenets of the religion is that there can never be an intermediary between human beings and God.
But for all the mistakes and over-dramatic portrayals of national unity, it must be said that Wahid Hamid is a scriptwriter who knows how to keep viewers on the edge of their seats, mainly via dialogue and situations that are just close enough to real life to make them believable, and yet fantastic enough to elevate them to the level of drama.
Go to Big Guns Take Aim to see what the rest of the entertainment press had to say about Awan Al-Ward
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