Charlie Chopra and the Mystery of Solang Valley Ending Explained: Revamping Agatha Christie’s novel The Sitatfford Mystery in a Hindi web series adaption, director Vishal Bhardwaj has returned to the land of dark mystery while going all out with a star-studded cast including the talents of Wamiqa Gabbi, Priyanshu Painyuli, Naseeruddin Shah, Neena Gupta, Ratna Pathak Shah, Lara Dutta, Vivaan Shah, Chandan Roy Sandal, Gulshan Grover and others.
The series was released on the evening of September 26, 2023 (IST), on SonyLIV and consists of 6 episodes, all running under the 1 hour time mark. It has been written for screen by Bhardwaj, Jyotsna Hariharan and Anjum Rajabali, with cinematography by Tassaduq Hussain, and Vishal Bhardwaj Pictures, Priti Sahani, and Agatha Christie Limited serving as its producing team.
The mystery thriller flags off with the death of the affluent Brigadier Meherbaan Singh Rawat (Gulshan Grover), that is initially also forewarned during a seance setting at the very beginning of the series. Ultimately, Jimmy Nautiyal (Vivaan Shah) is implicated in his formerly mentioned uncle’s murder as he officially happened to have been the last person who sat down with Meherbaan before the fatal blow.
Charulata ‘Charlie’ Chopra (Wamiqa Gabbi) drops in at Jimmy’s family home at Solang Valley (especially since he’s also her fiancee) and starts pacing after the truth. The closer she gets to it, the farther it seems to be getting away from her with even newer secrets tumbling out of the pot hot that leave all of Jimmy’s family members’ narratives unreliably full of loopholes. Who really killed Brigadier Rawat? Did the truth ever come to light, or did Charlie end up being the next victim of this mystery shrouded in cold snow of murk.
Charlie Chopra Ending Explained Contains Spoilers
Charlie Chopra and the Mystery of Solang Valley Ending Explained
In the final episode of the season, Colonel Barua is found dead at his home after the police and Charlie race up to the location on joining all the dots and realising that he’d been Brigadier Rawat’s murderer all along. Eventually, a suicide note is found on his computer as well, but Charlie still feels restless about the way things unfolded. While the whole community is ready to put the case to rest with the “killer” now being dead too, Charlie continues to dig around, but ever so slightly.
At a celebratory get-together at the Nautiyal house, where everyone is gathered up to praise her for having cleared up Jimmy’s name, she finally reveals that the “killer” was in fact killed by someone else too, who had staged his suicide to put everyone off the case. She first gets down to the nitty gritty details of the whole thing and that lets us know that Barua had actually reached Meherbaan’s place by skiing, when he’d actually told everyone that he’d be walking to the place initially.
Cutting the 2-hour long journey short, skiing helped him reach earlier than how long it would’ve taken him to reach via foot and then he walked in and had a chat with Brigadier Rawat only to smash his head with the Jimli honey bottle later. He did all this because Rawat had already warned him about snatching away the ski resort he’d previously gifted him. However, after getting into a relationship with his much-younger partner, Nicole, he changed his mind, which left Barua feeling hopeless again as he’d found his life’s only purpose in running the ski resort.
On reaching the Brigadier’s residence, he killed him and then sat and awaited the arrival of his help, but way before that Jimmy made his way back to the place to collect the hotel keys he’d left behind. Moreover, he spotted Barua through the peephole, but mistook him for his uncle. Barua then went on to hide his ski boots in the storage room upstairs, which were eventually spotted by Charlie as well, but Barua took them away before she could come back to collect them.
He later stole one of the Brigadier’s pair of shoes, which were identical to what nearly everyone in the snow-clad Solang Valley wore. Barua sat there till the help arrived and then from the back door, slid out and pretended to walk up to the front door as if he’d just arrived at the spot.
Charlie even figures out that he’d been handing out fake medicines for Schizophrenia to Wasima, and the lack of right medication was exactly what led her to being manipulatively hypnotised on the night of the seance by Janki (Neena Gupta), who’d also been putting up the pretext of counselling her, when all this while she’d just been trying to win control over her mind.
Charlie had hung on to the original recording of the seance and had noticed an additional whistle on tape that was not meant to be a part of the seance music put on by Dr. Rai (Naseeruddin Shah). She later found out that such interventions were often used as triggers for hypnosis, which led her to Janki’s connection to it all.
Who Killed Colonel Barua?
However, that wasn’t all that did. During their initial toast at the family house, Charlie purposely toasted in the honour of the Brigadier’s name, and while everyone referred to him as either “Rawat” or “Brigadier” or by any other term of endearment, it was Janki alone who called out to him as “Meherbaan”, which is exactly how Barua’s suicide note also addressed the Brigadier. She instantly caught on that Janki was the only person who called him so and therefore, she had killed Barua.
How Did Charlie Confront Janki?
During the final get-together, she urged Dr Rai to initiate another seance to find out who killed Barua. It was her ploy to distract everyone while implementing actions that would prove everything she’d deduced so far. During the seance, she again blew a whistle similar to what she’d heard on the recording, and as expected, it caused Wasima to lose control and behave in the same terrifying way she did before. Janki is coerced into stopping the unstable attack and she whistles to put Wasima out of her trance.
Why Did Janki Mamiji Join in on Barua’s Plan to Kill Rawat?
She was Brigadier Rawat’s ex-lover, and once she got pregnant, he’d abandoned as he was a mere artist back then who couldn’t support this decision. He desperately pushed for her to go ahead with the abortion, but Janki decided to have the baby against his will. She’d always known that Meherbaan’s younger brother had liked her, so she went on to get married to him, and eventually even started loving his doting nature. On the other hand, Meherbaan decided to join the Army in time, and her son Varun followed in his footsteps and did the same, but ended up getting severely injured for life.
This change brought in a whole load of dilemmas for Janki as she couldn’t cope with the never-ending medical bills. She had to beg the Brigadier to support his own son while he had already been lost to the young love of Nicole. Once Barua showed up on Janki’s doorstep with his problems, together they came up with a way to resolve their issues by getting rid of Rawat all together.
Is Lady Rose’s Ghost Real?
Towards the very end of the series, i.e. in the final moments of the last episode when Charlie walks away from everyone after having solved the mystery, she boards a cable car to descend the snowy hills. At the same time, when she’s sitting, thinking all disorder was past her, she suddenly overhead an uncanny voice of a lady who called out to her. When she turned around, she saw a lady dressed in red, standing in the woods, looking out to her.
It’s the same image of Lady Rose as she was painted in her life-size portraits, only this time she was in flesh. However, we never see this person up close, but only hear the distinct voice, in a way, threatening Charlie that she’d had yet to bury her mother. In a previous flashback, the series relayed that Charlie’s mother (Richa Chadha) had been abducted during an investigation while a young Charlie saw it all happen in front of her eyes.
The whole scene is built up in a way that it sets a foreboding tone, making us almost believe that Charlie’s mother had been murdered by the mysterious car owner. But we never truly see her dead body. So, this either lights up the possibility that she’s still alive or a more obvious takeaway is that not much of Charlie and her mother’s past life is known to us. She could’ve conjured up Lady Rose’s image as a hallucinatory manifestation of her own past traumas that she’s for so long suppressed down within her, but now that she’s finally officially taken on the same path of a detective as her mother, her past is also catching up to her.
No matter the truth is, the series has pointed towards the hopeful possibility of another season in the future that may push Charlie in the midst of similar chilling mysteries to solve. This would equally offer her room to come to terms with her past, further revealing what truly happened to her mother and how Charlie herself was brought up and by whom.
The Charlie Chopra web series is now streaming on SonyLIV.