Rocket Boys · Season 1 · SonyLIV
Rocket Boys Season 1
Rocket Boys Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 8.8/10. 8 episodes on SonyLIV from 4 February 2022.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
Rocket Boys answers a question Indian biographical drama has historically fumbled: how do you make scientists compelling television without turning their work into CGI and their relationships into melodrama? Writer-director Abhay Pannu's answer is to ground everything in the friendship between Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai - two men who disagreed about almost everything except the conviction that India could think at the world's frontier. Jim Sarbh plays Bhabha as a man whose European sensibilities are permanently in tension with the country he has chosen; Ishwak Singh's Sarabhai is the gentler, more spiritually grounded counterpoint. The show's Nehru - Regina Cassandra and Saba Azad provide the female leads - is a quiet recurring presence rather than a monument. Season 1 builds to Pokhran I with enough narrative momentum that the test itself feels earned rather than inevitable. Film Companion's Suchin described it as 'the gratifying history class we all deserve' - an assessment that holds.
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The Room
“A sincere, soaring hat-tip to Nehru's mad scientists - Rocket Boys is a sprawling, heartfelt achievement.”
Film Companion
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about — premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1Lift Off8.6
The premiere introduces Homi Bhabha in Cambridge - already brilliant, already restless, already shaped by a Europe that will soon explode - before the partition era deposits him in Bombay where a country is being built. Sarbh's first few scenes establish the show's register: intellectual rigour worn lightly, ambition without vanity.
The moment: Bhabha and Sarabhai's first substantive conversation - two men recognising each other across different temperaments.
“Jim Sarbh announces himself as one of Indian streaming's finest performers in the first twenty minutes.” — Koimoi
- E8Smiling Buddha9.2
The season finale - IMDb's highest-rated episode of the series at 9.2 - follows the Pokhran I nuclear test and its human costs. The show resists triumphalism: the test is a success, but the episode is about what the men building the bomb understand about what they've built. Sarbh's final scene in this episode is his finest work in the series.
The moment: Bhabha processing the test results alone - scientific achievement and moral weight simultaneously present.
“A finale that earns genuine historical weight through the accumulated humanity of seven prior episodes.” — Film Companion