Someone. Please stop this thing.
This one is a hold-over from premiere week last week, but I was going to run with it anyway because it seemed like an interesting idea at the time. Quantico was pitched as a supposed mystery/crime series where FBI Agent Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) is trying to decipher who caused a terrorist attack on New York’s Grand Central Station, which is thought to be an inside job that was done by her or one of her fellow trainees back at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The idea seemed to be a cross between several different shows, but what we got was an unmitigated disaster.
The Characters
Yes, but do we really give a damn, though?
The failure of this show comes from two issues. One of them is the fact that the characters are completely unlikable from top to bottom. We start with Ms. Parrish, who is traveling to Quantico, meets a fellow trainee on the plane, and has sex with him in his car after they land. To be fair, this could have been used as a narrative device to fuel a romance or to show that she is just that type of girl, but the writers ended up making Parrish into an obnoxious and incredibly conceited woman when she broadcasts their encounter to the entire trainee class. Oh, and he’s apparently not her type… even though she slept with him.
Way to try and make us like her, writers. You just made your lead character look like every negative female stereotype in the book.
The rest of the trainees are a mix of muddled cliches and her supervisor is not much better, either. We have the Muslim woman, the gay man who has his sexuality as an only character trait (but might not actually be gay), the blank slated woman, the man who got in on his parents’ merits but is a complete screw-up, and so on and so forth. Oh, and the Mormon, but we’ll get to that shit-show later.
Miranda Shaw (Aunjanue Ellis) is perhaps the worst of the bunch because she is used as the mouthpiece of the writers about the “glass ceiling” and how the idea that a woman can get around it is “exactly something a man would say”. Although she didn’t say it, you can tell that they were trying to play the sexism angle as a reason why she was never promoted above the Assistant Directorship at Quantico. Never mind that she ended up sacrificing her family for the sake of her own power or that she seems like a snarky and unlikable person, but at least she didn’t become an alcoholic, so she’s got that going for her, which is nice.
The Plot
Let’s face it. This girl would be either dead or severely injured from a blast like that. But no, she’s fine.
As I said before, the plot is centered around the terrorist attack and Parrish’s training days at the FBI. The narrative tries to fill itself with twists and turns, but it just becomes laughable because you can easily point out what is going on.
For instance, Nimah and Raina Amin (Yasmine Al Nasri) are apparently identical twins that are acting as the same trainee in Quantico. The show dresses this up as a misdirection because of the obvious ideas that would be in the mind of the audience about Muslims and the terrorist activity that defines our modern era. But wait! Is security at the academy so incompetent that they would be unable to notice two people that look alike in different places at the same time or are they FBI Agents that were assigned to see who would notice the little differences first (ex. her hijab is tied up the wrong way) and thus be a star agent in the making? As you can see, it’s either stupid or boring.
As for the terrorist plot, it seems like all of the evidence is pointing to the idea that Alex did the bombing, which is a set-up for an obvious frame job. Well, that leads to a couple of problems. For one, why would she be anywhere near the blast site if she were the one to set it off? For two, it screws with Alex’s character by turning her into a cry-baby when she is placed under arrest and a fugitive when she is freed by Shaw. For three, the evidence somehow got inside of her apartment and she never noticed that, even though she is supposedly a highly-trained field agent by then that can notice when things are not right. For four, there is no four! It makes zero sense!
The Mormon
Dur hur hur. I’m going to do a stupid subplot here!
This storyline is perhaps the worst part of the pilot and just shows you how little thought was put into this script. Eric Packer (Brian J. Smith) seems like a nice Mormon guy who wants to serve his country, right? Well, it turns out that there is an investigative portion of the training program that involves figuring out a secret that has been redacted from the file of a fellow recruit. Caleb Haas (Graham Rogers) took on the task of investigating Packer, which led to some unfunny jokes, but what follows was a secret that threw my B.S. meter into the red.
It turns out that Packer would, at least in a Western country, be considered a statutory rapist because he impregnated a 14 year old Malawian girl and she died after he took her to get an illegal abortion.
First, that got him past the background check?! Second, the lead-up to the climax of the pilot was so preposterous that it destroys suspension of disbelief. In the training program of the show, the recruits are required to switch out their fake guns with real ones for going out on the range and back again when they come back. Apparently, no one notices that Packer never returned his firearm, which allowed him to go into the interviewing room, shoot an innocent woman, and hold Haas at gunpoint before he blew his brains out.
Way to go, writers. Way to go. You just made our Federal Law Enforcement community look like obnoxious assholes.
Conclusion
Quantico is not just a trainwreck. It is a completely un-entertaining trainwreck that never should have made it past the pilot stage. If you want a better show (with great female characters, too!), stick with something like Homeland.
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