Quantico

A Pilot Evaluation

Quantico seems to be adopting the formula of How to Get Away with Murder, but I don’t mind. I think both shows have smart premises and casts with chops that end up carrying them far. That said, you can see how ABC saw the cultural impact (just see Viola Davis’s Emmy win earlier this month) and ratings power of HTGAWM and wanted to see if the same basic formula could strike gold again.

I hope that it will.

Basically, Quantico is a story told in competing timelines. We open on a massive explosion where our lead, Alex Parrish, has woken up in the middle of all of it. She’s taken in by the FBI and says she was an agent working the perimeter at the time. We then flashback nine months earlier and go through her beginning training at Quantico, the FBI camp for new recruits. Basically, the show will flashback to her training and getting to know her classmates while, in present time, Alex is desperately searching for a way to figure out which one of them was a traitor all along and organized the terrorist attack on Grand Central Station.

I don’t want to give too much about the actual plot away, because the opening pilot has two or three twists that I didn’t see coming. Unlike HTGAWM, which was very hard to follow in the first few episodes, with the competing timelines, the transition between past and present time in Quantico is easier to follow and the plot a bit less murky; this pilot feels more accessible overall to people coming in. I will say, again without giving too much away, that the show does a great job of not pulling punches off the bat. I should know better being a Whedon fangirl, but you really need not to assume that, just because you meet seven recruits in the pilot, all of them will even survive the full forty-five minutes.

There are high stakes and the show’s not afraid to make you like a character and then kill them off with a quick gut punch.

I’ll focus, instead, more on the characters, themselves, as well as the feminist leanings of the show, and I’ll try to do it while being as spoiler free as possible.

The flashback portion centers on seven new recruits: Alex Parrish, our heroine, (played by Priyanka Chopra), the former marine Ryan Booth, the Georgian sharpshooter who lost her parents in 9/11, Shelby, the son of two special agents who basically sucks at everything and is an insecure bully, Caleb, the Muslim recruit who is a bit stand-offish, Nimah, the Mormon missionary, Eric, and Simon, the son of Jewish Zionist who, oddly enough, has spent four years in the Gaza strip but never told anyone about that part of his life. They’re supervised by the assistant director at Quantico, Miranda Shaw, the highest ranking woman in the FBI, and the lead teacher, Liam O’Connor, a disgraced agent who has been reassigned to Virginia in order to keep his pension. He did something horrible and messed up badly in Chicago, but we don’t know what yet.

The men of the show are interesting and they do try to give them more than just one trait. On the surface, Simon is sort of the nerdy gay guy (we see him first kissing what seems to be a blind date or a set up date) but is also established to have wicked language skills, still be a virgin, and have been hiding his travels from even his family. Caleb, at first, starts out as the class’ entitled brat and bully, but we see his insecurities mined a bit throughout the pilot. He knows he shouldn’t be in the FBI and that he only got where he is by his parents calling in favors. He’s dealing with his own inadequacies. Ryan’s established as a liar to an extent (more on this in a second), but he’s also a bit of a gentleman who tries to preserve Alex’s modesty in what could be an awkward situation. Eric’s a missionary with a dark past (can’t say more), and then there’s Liam. Again, he’s set up in the first half of the episode as the expecting and vigilant instructor but in the best scene of the pilot, he and Miranda have a private conversation. He’s spent the night getting drunk and is literally wearing the same suit from before. She chastises him about drinking himself out of a job and a family. This is a man who has lost a lot and we wonder how much desperation these losses have instilled in him.

Frankly, I’m thinking after the pilot, that O’Connor could stand to gain an awful lot by setting a recruit up as a terrorist and then bringing her to “justice” to redeem his name.

At least the show does try to bring forth characters, both in men and women, from a variety of cultural, racial, religious and sexual orientation backgrounds. Seriously, outside of South Park, when have you ever seen a Mormon character on TV?

Anyway, what we’re really interested in are the women.

1. Nimah Amin — (played by Yasmine Al Massri) is a character I can’t talk about too much without giving things away. However, I will say she’s shown early on to be incredibly smart and competent. She’s the one who ferrets out the information about Simon’s mysterious travels for a class assignment. She’s also a bit cruel. To be honest, the class project in no way required her to reveal Simon was still a virgin publicly but she did it anyway. There’s a lot going on with her and, frankly, I feel she’s been set up as the red herring here. She’s definitely involved in something but I don’t think it’s terrorism.
2. Shelby Wyatt — (played by Johanna Braddy) I was pleasantly surprised to see the actress because, pathetic confession time, I really enjoy her in the cheesy now-on-Netflix series, Video Game High School. Her character might be the least developed of the cast so far, but I like that she has a skill that sets her apart. She’s a gifted rifle shooter, a skill she developed while on hunting trips as a teen with her father. She’s also weathered a tough life because her parents were killed in 9/11 (she literally carried a chunk of the destroyed plane with her everywhere). So far, she says that’s her motivation to come to Quantico but we all know that appearances can be deceiving. She’s also a mix of both tough and kind. She’s the one to comfort Caleb after a tragedy at the training facility, even though he’s been cruel to basically everyone.
3. Miranda Shaw — The reason my favorite scene was actually the Shaw-O’Connor private exchange in the parking lot is because of the dialogue. Granted, some of it was a bit ham-fisted. It’s a pilot, so there’s only forty minutes to establish a ton so it does come off a bit as “Remember when you lost your career because you drank too much”/ “Remember we dated” or the typical “As you know…” dialogue. However, it shows a sensitivity to issues facing women that I think indicates that, with time, this show can be as unflinching as HTGAWM. During their argument, O’Connor points out that Shaw is underemployed and she should strive harder. Even if this is as high as any woman as ever gotten, she can still “break through” that glass ceiling. I like her point afterwards that “You’ve spoken like a man.” It’s a sharp slap that the glass ceiling is a real thing and it’s sometimes unbreakable and impossible to push through no matter the encouragement or platitudes. It’s a bit of a bleak outlook, but no less true. Miranda’s decided to take the highest appointment available and kick-ass at it when she’s reached that wall. She also has a great scene later with Alex, but again that’d be telling.

Alex Parrish is a multilayered character already. She’s of mixed race. Her father was abusive and a drinker. In one attack, he actually almost killed her mother until she wrestled the gun away from him. In a flashback, we see Alex (no more than maybe 11) shoot him before he can kill her mother. That’s the kind of psychological trauma that obviously must be haunting her every day. Her father was actually a Special Agent Park for the FBI, at least that’s all she knows of him, so she’s at Quantico to try and find out more about him.

She’s also someone who, while dealing with very mixed feelings on her father (“Was he good? Was he bad?”), is very smart and observant. She pegs about five inconsistencies in Ryan’s story on the plane the first time she meets him. She’s also very open sexually. She admits that she had sex with Ryan in his car “Because I don’t like you. If I liked you, I’d have gotten to know you first.” She’s not a prude and she’s open to relationships, but she’s also free enough and confident enough to have sex on her own terms. She also is not ashamed of it. Later, Ryan turns out to be a recruit as well and pretends in the halls to not know Alex from before. She’s the one who says “Oh we had sex in your car six hours ago.” She’s open and upfront about her sexuality, and she doesn’t need Ryan Booth’s “white knight” act to help save her modesty.

I love seeing a character this nuanced already. She’s far from perfect, as she’s lied to her mother about this job completely because she knows her mother wouldn’t approve, has massive father issues, and at first, tried to hide the fact she shot her father when she was ten. However, she’s smart and confident and won’t let someone “protect her honor.” She’s also allowed to be vulnerable. The episode culminates in present time with her on the run trying to find the real bomber/traitor but when she’s in the van, thinking she’s on her way to Gitmo, she’s in tears. I think it’s a sign the show isn’t just going to give us the “strong female character” cliche where all she does is act “manly” and hit things in leather. It’s a good start.

The Bechdel-Wallace Test — Yup! Alex and her mother have a conversation about her train arrangements, Alex and Shelby talk about the strictness of the regime, and she and Miranda have the second best conversation of the episode but I can’t say too much about this.

The Verdict — A. The pilot was both engaging and easy to follow. It had great twists that weren’t too out there to be ludicrous, and it sets up tension and intrigue in both the present and past timelines. More than that, it presents a diverse cast of characters who all have multi-faceted personalities and deep secrets of their own. Figuring out who is our traitor should be a fun and exciting ride with Alex Parrish leading us through it.

Love what you read? Want to follow us closer to get all the latest Legendary Women news? Then sign up for our monthly newsletter and also our Medium collection.

All images belong to ABC Television and are not property of Legendary Women, Inc.