Kuttram Purindhavan Recap & Ending Explained: How Does Bhaskaran Catch The Culprit?

Justice and human conscience are inseparable, and in a world where evil seems to prosper, where being a terrible person almost feels like an advantage, there’s still a flicker of hope in the few who refuse to bend to this new, twisted norm. Zee5’s mini-series “Kuttram Purindhavan: The Guilty One” stands as a sharp commentary on how frighteningly unsafe society has become for the powerless and how the very system meant to protect us is decaying from within. The moral tug-of-war between protecting your own blood or doing what’s right, the desperate attempt to keep an innocent girl safe, and the sheer backwardness of a community too terrified to challenge the powerful—all of it is portrayed here with unflinching honesty. So, if you’ve just binged the series and walked away with a dozen burning questions, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Here are the biggest ones, answered by yours truly.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the show?

On a normal night of a religious festival in their village, Bhaskaran is going back to his house with his sick grandson, Rahul. He finds a drunkard man named Solomon, who’s also his neighbor. When Bhaskaran’s wife comes back from the festival, she finds Solomon dying in front of their building. Next morning, cops arrive to investigate, and Solomon has passed by then. What’s worse is that Solomon’s wife, Esther, can’t find her daughter Mercy anywhere. Bhaskaran tells the cops that last night he saw Mercy going to the church, and there was a suspicious man lurking around the bushes. The cops mention that just like Mercy, three other young girls aged 10-12 have been missing from these religious festivals in the last three years, but the DSP feels like instead of making these conspiracy theories, they should focus on finding the missing girl. DSP’s personal driver is a cop named Gowtham, and he’s responsible for driving the DSP around and running errands for his wife, fixing their plumbing, and anything you’d book Urban Company for. Gowtham was once given the responsibility of protecting a girl who’s been sexually assaulted by the MLA and his people, and when a truck ran her over, the DSP saved his job and made sure that he exploited him for this favor. The cops suspect Solomon’s brother, Venkat, who’s been beefing with Solomon over property, to be the one who took Mercy, and they even find the girl’s bloody undergarments set on fire in the jungle. But when they arrest Venkat after a long chase, it turns out that he only performed some black magic ritual to get Solomon off his back, and he wasn’t in town when the kidnapping happened. Days pass by; Esther is severely depressed after walking around the village and asking everybody if they’ve seen her little girl. The real reveal happens when Bhaskaran, the kind pharmacist who’s well respected in the village for helping people in need, opens his fridge and we see Mercy’s dead body inside of it. 

What happened to Mercy? 

In a flashback, we see that Bhaskaran completely lied to the cops to avoid any legal action against himself. Solomon knocked on his door on that night with Mercy; she was unconscious. Somebody raped the little girl and she was dying, and despite Bhaskaran pleading Solomon to take her to the hospital, he asked Bhaskaran to try and save her. Bhaskaran sees blood coming out of her body, and he tries performing CPR, but it is all too late. Legally, only a female doctor is supposed to treat a child in this scenario, and even if a man tries to save the kid, it’s essential that a woman is observing the process. Solomon went outside to find a woman from the village, but everybody’s gone to the festival, and Bhaskaran sees that Mercy’s ears are bleeding out. Moments after that, Bhaskaran goes outside to look for Solomon and finds him lying on the ground, bleeding to death. Him getting in any trouble with the law would mean that his voluntary retirement would be in vain, as he’s only retiring for the retirement fund, which he’d need to save his grandson, Rahul, who needs critical brain surgery. Bhaskaran sees his wife coming back, and he just leaves and wipes the bloody floor and his hands, and after hiding Mercy’s body, he pretends to not know anything about all of this. But Gowtham gets the sense that something is wrong when he goes to the hospital when a fellow cop is sick and in need of blood, and he sees Bhaskaran’s name in the recent donor list. Gowtham remembers that Bhaskaran told the cops that he was a bit drunk that night, and you can’t donate blood the very next day if there’s alcohol in your body. When he goes to Bhaskaran’s house, seeing his and his wife’s reaction, Gowtham realizes that Bhaskaran must know something. Gowtham is pretty helpless in this situation, as the DSP doesn’t want him anywhere around the case, and his little girl at home is asking him to find her friend. But when Gowtham finds himself alone in Bhaskaran’s house after they leave in a hurry to take Rahul, who suddenly collapses, to the hospital, he sees a piece of furniture having traces of blood. Gowtham had access to a pencil that Mercy used to chew on, thanks to his daughter, and when he sends both the samples to the lab, it’s confirmed that the DNA matches Mercy. 

Why does Bhaskaran want to confess? 

Bhaskaran gets a call from an unknown number, who knows about him having Mercy’s body. His retirement fund isn’t going to clear fast enough for the surgery, and this man gives him an advance in exchange for Bhaskaran burning the corpse and erasing the evidence. Bhaskaran gives in, knowing that he has to save Rahul, and burns the body. He has all the money now, and the surgery is successful. But even after that, Rahul ends up in a comatose state, and there’s nothing Bhaskaran can do to change it. He thinks of confessing his crime to the police, but Gowtham stops him. Gowtham knows that Mercy won’t get justice if all Bhaskaran thinks about is clearing his own conscience, and they need to find the real culprit who’s been exploiting young girls. They start investigating the case together, which leads them to the unknown caller’s identity, a college girl who’s been missing for a year. The records show that a man named Anton used to visit her, who turns out to be the pastor of the local church. Bhaskaran also smelled spirit from Mercy’s body, which tells us that her rapist was addicted to it. They find the same spirit in the pastor’s office, and the pastor even has a second phone. Gowtham intimidates the pastor, who gives a legit alibi that he was in the church when Mercy was abducted, but he mentions that the local teacher, Raghu, was running around the church that night. Raghu also supplies the spirit to the pastor, and upon further investigation, they find that all the missing girls are linked to him. Every school Raghu has worked in has had a missing case, and he’s immediately resigned. The cops catch Raghu, and they find a lot of pictures of Mercy in his phone. 

Is Raghu a pedophile? 

Gowtham talks to Raghu in jail, and he freaks out when Gowtham accuses the man of raping Mercy. Raghu breaks out in tears and denies doing such a horrible thing. The reality is, Raghu and Esther were dating before she got married, and they even eloped to start a family together. But Esther’s family swooped in to beat Raghu up and got Esther married to Solomon, despite knowing he’s an alcoholic good-for-nothing man. Esther got pregnant and found out that Solomon can’t become a father due to the unreal alcohol consumption. Years later, when Raghu comes to her village, he finds out the truth; hence, all the pictures in his phone. Mercy also got to know that Solomon isn’t her father, and she stopped talking to Esther. On the night of the festival, Raghu comes to see Mercy, and that’s when Solomon attacks him, and in that altercation, Solomon falls from the first floor and dies. Raghu tries to come clean, but the cops think that Raghu killed Solomon and Mercy to be reunited with Esther. 

How Does Bhaskaran Catch The Culprit?

The body Bhaskaran burnt turns out to be not Mercy, and we see that he used his connections to find a skeleton of a young girl to show the actual murderer that he burnt it. Now the murderer threatens Bhaskaran, and he’s kidnapped Gowtham’s little daughter. When Bhaskaran goes to retrieve Mercy’s body, it’s been stolen, and he cuts some tree branches and wraps them in a blanket to make it look like a kid’s corpse. Bhaskaran also practices to stab the guy once he hands over the fake body, and he also takes his dog, Jackie, with him. Meanwhile, Gowtham convinces the cops to go with him to save his child. Bhaskaran goes in the middle of the forest to get the killer, and the man has a towel wrapped around his head. A fistfight follows, and Bhaskaran manages to unmask him. The man turns out to be Chandan, the local doctor whose own girl also went missing. Gowtham uncovered a pattern where all the missing kids were born out of wedlock, and the mothers kept the secret. Being a doctor, he has always been a creep, and when he figured out that he can’t exploit older women, Chandan started touching young girls. Chandan tested their blood to spot his victims, and when he found out his own girl wasn’t his. So just like the others, he raped and killed the girl he brought up as a father. Chandan tries to drown Bhaskaran to death, and Jackie sees everything going down, and the cutie remembers the time when he was a puppy getting drenched in rain and Bhaskaran saving him. Jackie lunges at Chandan, saving Bhaskaran just in time. But Chandan is now mad at the dog and kills him, and my blood boils seeing this hero of an animal die. But Bhaskaran nabs Chandan with his dead dog’s leash, and Gowtham and the cops get the culprit. 

Bhaskaran then confesses to everything that went down that night, and Esther slaps him for hiding the truth. But the cops let him go since Mercy’s body is yet to be found. In the last scene of the series, Rahul is recovering, and he remembers seeing his grandmother burying Mercy in their garden, where she’s now grown huge plants. The woman knew that the law can’t catch her husband if Mercy’s body is missing, and she’s the one who stole the corpse and hid it in time. 

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