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Quantico: The Complete First Season
R1 - America - ABC Studios Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (23rd September 2016). |
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The Film
 At ground zero of the deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11 – in this case, the bombing of New York's Grand Central Station during the Democratic National Convention – new agent Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) emerges from the rubble and is informed by incident commander Jiminez (Tropic Thunder's Anthony Ruivivar) that they believe the attack to have been an inside job and that an anonymous tip suggests the perpetrator to have been among the Alex's own graduating class at Quantico, someone who entered the academy for the purpose of this attack. It is not long before Alex finds that she is indeed their prime suspect, with even her former teacher/lover Assistant Deputy Director Liam O'Connor (G.I.Jane's Josh Hopkins) believing the mounting evidence over what he knew of her as the live video feed of a raid on Alex's apartment reveals bomb-making materials and gravely-injured fellow agent Ryan Booth (In the Valley of Elah's Jake McLaughlin). Arrested for the bombing and attempted murder, Alex finds an ally in Miranda Shaw (The Help's Aunjanue Ellis), former Assistant Deputy Director, who springs her from the convoy en route to jail warning her that if she goes into jail she will never come out alive and sacrificing her own personal freedom to give Alex the chance to find the real bomber. To do so, Alex will have to look back on her nine months of training at Quantico and her fellow classmates in order to determine who is setting her up and what they have planned next using all of her academy training and the analytical skills that got her accepted into the program in the first place. Suspects include Natalie Vasquez (Anabelle Acosta) – who was a complete nonentity in the film's pilot episode – who was her main rival at the academy and the agent now hot on her tail, Shelby Wyatt (Easy A's Johanna Braddy), an attorney driven towards law enforcement after her parents were killed on 9/11, "gay virgin" Simon Asher (Sinister 2's Tate Ellington), a Jew who spent time on the other side of the Gaza strip during a particularly contentious period after 9/11, devout Muslim Nimah Anim (Yasmine Al Massri), legacy FBI recruit Caleb Haas (Love & Mercy's Graham Rogers) nicknamed "golden boy" more for his hair and sprayed-on abs rather than his ability, along with ex-marine Ryan Booth who Alex slept with hours before arriving at the academy on the first day, and even and her then-instructor Liam who is now so gung-ho about capturing her and closing the case in spite of Miranda's impassioned defense (although he may be overcompensating out of a sense of being deceived by Alex and for whatever behavior on his last assignment landed him at rock bottom). In the course of their training, the NAT's (New Agents in Training) are taught that not everything is as it seems, and each and every one of the recruits have plenty to make them suspect. Alex herself confided in Liam that she only discovered after shooting her abusive father in self-defense that he may have had a double life as a special agent and has asked him to look into it; although she is unaware that Liam for mysterious reasons has placed undercover field agent Ryan among the recruits to get close of Alex. Nimah is actually twins Nimah and Raina, assuming a single identity as part of an experiment by Miranda, and both twins have conflicting feelings about their place in the academy and their other loyalties. Caleb is sent home after his attempts to get under the skin of one of his fellow recruits ends in a tragic suicide but turns up once again as part of the analysts' trainee program. Shelby is not only a surprising crack shot, but there may be a strategic bent to her promiscuity (which extends to hopping in the sack with Caleb's father). Initially attracted to Simon, analyst trainee Elias (The Flash's Rick Cosnett) becomes suspicious of what he discovers about the other man when given access to the FBI's databases. Burnout Liam was rescued by Miranda after an operation went south and given the opportunity to keep his pension and count down the clock to retirement, while Miranda believes that the Deputy Director is looking for excuses to get rid of her. On the run, Alex must convince Natalie that she is not guilty and seek her help as well as hope that Ryan will recover and vouch for her before someone silences him.  It was in the theater that the likes of The Silence of the Lambs that audiences were introduced to the procedural aspects of FBI training and investigation with a plucky trainee with a traumatic who soon finds herself in the center of a major case. Quantico - from Joshua Safran, whose writer/producer credits on Gossip Girl, Smash, and the watered-down recent adaptation of Endless Love do not inspire confidence - on the other hand feels like ABC's attempt at smashing together Grey's Anatomy, How to Get Away with Murder, Homeland before , and the like before Shonda Rimes could think it up. The show at first seems like it is going to use its soapier aspects to strategic advantage with characters sexually-attracted to one another and inadvertently making suspicious discoveries about each other; and, to an extent, this is what the show does in the first half with the co-ed dorm taking on a lockeroom atmosphere of blatant ogling, flirtation despite a "no fraternization" rule, and hookups. The training sessions, however, provide more opportunities for flirtation than actual analytic exercises, and the show soon becomes more interested in who is doing whom with an uninteresting central triangle between Alex, McDreamy (Hopkins, although six years of Cougar Town have drawn attention to his beady "Dime Eyes") and McLaughlin's McSteamy (whose abs are his only distinguishing feature). The second half of the season does become more interesting when Alex finds herself back on investigatory end of the case after a daring gambit that almost costs her freedom (but more in the "how could anyone be so mean and petty as to frame our pretty and plucky heroine?"). At this point, however, the present investigation scenes become more compelling while the flashbacks start to become more filler (oddly, once one character is killed in the present day scenes, they also seem to disappear from the flashbacks as well), and certain characters become increasingly superfluous (presumably new revelations about the past of one of them will lead to more complications in the next season). Chopra does a fair job in a wish-fulfillment role of a trainee who is smarter than her teachers from the start and never gets slapped down for pointing that out while Hopkins wildly overacts and says things like "We've given you the haystack, now you have to find the needle," while Ellis does what she can in a role in a role that requires her to be willfully ignorant and believe that the threat against her is the glass ceiling. Amidst hookups among the supporting characters are enough outlandish plot twists that it is easy to stop caring who is behind it all (some will have guessed correctly it early on) and enough characters making going against training and making enough stupid mistakes to get killed off for the sake of ratings as has become fashionable in shows of late. The cast also includes Mark Pellegrino (The Number 23) and Marcia Cross (Desperate Housewives) as Caleb's parents, J. Mallory McCree (Code Black) as Miranda's troubled son, Lenny Platt (How to Get Away with Murder) as a former recruit who becomes a suspect, Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings) as Ryan's ex-wife, and Johnathan Schaech (That Thing You Do) in flashbacks as Alex's father. 
Video
No complaints about ABC Studios' treatment of the series on disc since ABC Studios likely felt the series would not sell enough copies on Blu-ray. Twenty-two episodes are spread across five dual-layer DVDs with supportive mid-range bitrates since extras are sparse on the first four discs. 
Audio
The Dolby Digital 5.1 track of this dialogue-driven show are clean and front-oriented with some atmosphere in the surround during the Quantico scenes and much more active in the flash-forwards by design. Subtitles are available in English (SDH), French, and Spanish. 
Extras
Extras are spread across the four discs. The sole audio commentary for the season was recorded for the pilot Run with executive producer/creator Safran & actors Chopra, McLaughlin, Al Massri, Bradley, Ellington, and Rogers which is separately encoded as a splitscreen presentation with the commentators in studio on the left and the pilot on the right (occasionally turning to fullscreen on the episode for scenes featuring none of the participants). They discuss their various auditions, the shooting of the effects scenes (the Grand Central Station scenes shot against the largest blue screen in the United States) and the shooting of the scenes involving Al Massri as twins, and Safran points out that one seemingly principal character whose death in the pilot was truly surprising was scripted for the Gossip Girl alum as a one-off since he is already a regular on the Netflix series Sense8. Safran also points out a number of scenes reshot not because of producer or network notes but because they had the opportunity to lens some bits originally shot in Canada on the actual Quantico campus (a couple others were just reshot for the sake of more interesting and busy backgrounds).  Each disc has a selection of deleted scenes, most of which are under a minute but there are a couple extended and alternate bits (as well as one with an alternate line of dialogue), but the bulk of the extras are on disc five starting with "Welcome to Quantico" (18:54) - which like the rest of the featurette is full of spoilers and warns viewers of such - which starts off like an ode to Chopra with cast and crew members alike commenting on her beauty and talent before introducing some of the other characters, discussing chemistry, the family atmosphere behind the scenes, and Safran's interst in strong female characters (before calling the central trio of Chopra, Al Massri, and Bradley the "Powerpuff Girls"). Also covered is the show's costume designs, including the regulation-wear Henleys and the clothing choices for the characters' off-time, along with the difficulty of shooting the separate takes of scenes with the twins for digital compositing. The bloopers (4:15) section has a couple amusing flubs and a lot of joking around but also reveals a number of gaffes as characters forget which twin they are addressing and even Al Massri occasionally forgets which one she is playing for which take. In "Who Did It?" (8:11), Safran reveals that he knew who the terrorist was from the first episode but did not tell the cast who variously recall frantically checking each week's script to see if they were getting killed off or if one of them was revealed as the terrorist (which lead to a degree of ambiguity in the performances with the actors not knowing if they were the guilty party). The first and last discs of the set annoying have a number of start-up trailers for various ABC series while the last disc also includes additional Sneak Peaks.
Overall
Not a complete write-off, but Quantico may actually be one of the few shows of its kind that is best enjoyed in staggered viewing as binge-watching is more likely to call attention to its more tiresome aspects. 
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