читать дальшеAgree with everyone about Ankit & Meenakshi's performance.
I didn't exactly see Lakshman's departure as a blooper: on Friday, they showed him return to Ayodhya and inform the rajmatas that he failed to bring back Sita, and Sumitra expressed her embarrasment at having such a son. Then while Kaushalya retired to her inner chamber, Lakshman turned away and left. He may have been embarrased at what Sumitra said, or he may have been following through on what he vowed to Rama when he said he'd abandon him, or he may have decided that if he couldn't serve Sita, he wouldn't be serving Rama or Ayodhya either. So he (following the train of thought here) may have returned to the forest and decided to take agni-samadhi.
The other thing here, as was noted earlier - the division of opinion on pure gender lines: would Rama have taken such a decision had it been so divisive and caused such unrest? The reason he took that was that the population at large didn't accept Sita. Here, they're showing a huge portion of the population pretty much ready to revolt at her exile.
The other notable thing - one of the very convincing explanations here about why Sita was sent to Valmiki's ashram, rather than to Mithila, was to shelter her from such gossip, and here, there would be no such atmosphere. Yet they show her overhear the villagers laud Rama for exiling her, thereby demolishing this argument at least in this serial. (I accept that the argument itself was credible, but here, it looks like Sita might just as well have been taken anywhere else.)
The other incredible thing Sita said - there was no better place than this ashram. But I thought that in her final vow, she says that no-one but Rama was ever in her mind, in which case, this ashram, where Rama is absent, should not be the best place for her. Now this I call a blooper.
So Lakshman lights a pyre? Well, we all know that in the end of the story, Lakshman gives up his life, albeit for a completely different reason, but hey! This wouldn't be the first time the sequence of events have been re-shuffled in the story. Just a small change in detail - instead of dying at the end, he'd die now, and instead of dying by adapting a meditative posture, he'd commit agni-samadhi. Since this is soooooo different from anything I've read anywhere, it provides a very compelling reason to watch it
So aside from the fact that this entire episode is fictitious, today was a great show