'Quantico' Recap: 'All You Have to Do Is Drive'

Warning: This recap for the “Drive" episode of Quantico contains spoilers.

In which we find out the identity of The Voice… for real, this time. We think.

Here, 18 things we learned in the “Drive” episode of Quantico:

1. Will’s not dead! He’s in the ICU, though, suffering from the effects of having cobbled together a nuke in the catacombs of the church where Alex and Shelby found him. Simon remains MIA.

2. Ryan and Nimah are hot on Alex’s trail, and they burst into her apartment only to find Caleb, on her couch, eating cereal and watching home renovation TV. He tells Ryan that Alex hasn’t been at her apartment in a day, and Miranda orders Ryan to bring Caleb into the office. She’ll make him talk, she warns…

3. Alex is on the run, meanwhile, but in touch with Shelby via phone. Shelby is using her laptop to search all the hospitals in the city for any patient description that might be Simon — damn, that McGregor-Wyatt software can do anything! She locates a patient at St. Luke’s that sounds almost exactly like Simon, and she and Alex agree to meet there to see if it might be their friend.


4. Dude at St. Luke’s is not Simon… he’s Drew! Whuuuut? Yes, after Drew left Quantico on his huffy bike, he got a gig at a private security firm in New York. Shortly after, he received a call from The Voice, ordering him to rent a van and park it on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Drew refused, until The Voice threatened his sister and her children. He rented the van, and then The Voice kept making more and more demands, he tells Alex and Shelby, like asking him to scope out train schedules and security cameras around NYC. After the first attack, he saw Alex on TV, he says, and started to make some connections, but didn’t know who he could talk to, because he suspected it was an inside job at the FBI.

Then he drops a big bombshell: he knows who’s behind the attacks. It’s Ryan! Of course, Shelby, and especially Alex, are skeptical, but Drew says they should get access to Ryan’s computer, phone, car… maybe they’ll even find evidence of some voice modification software, he suggests. He also tells them to look in his pocket for a flash drive he stole from his office, which has software that can help them decode Ryan’s computer passwords. What an incredibly informative and fruitful meeting Alex and Shelby are having with Deus Ex Machina Perales, er, Drew Perales.

5. In the Quantico timeline, with just two weeks until graduation, the NATS are getting close quarters combat training. They spar with each other inside “The Box,” a cage-like enclosure where Ryan kicks Alex’s butt using a cool backflip off The Box walls (which he later tells her saved his life in Afghanistan). Instead of being angry about her defeat, Alex tells Ryan he just got lucky, and that even Ronda Rousey loses sometimes. She’s also super flirty with Ryan, prompting a snarky comment from Iris about how Drew has only been gone for, like, 20 minutes. Exes Ryan and Alex are so flirty that they even make dinner plans — for two weeks ahead, post-graduation — during which she plans to find out everything there is to know about him (the truth this time).


6. Caleb is also back for Quantico training, which ticks off Iris and Shelby, who thought he would be gone. When Iris confronts Caleb — who got his own butt-kicking from Liam in the sparring session — he tells her he needs her help with Shelby. Shelby’s parents were just trying to use her for a final cash infusion, he says. Iris tells him Shelby has decided to change her field office assignment choice to Buffalo, so she can sneak over the border into Canada to meet up with her parents. Caleb tells Iris they have to stop that, to prevent Shelby from finding out the truth about her sneaky ma and pa.

7. The twins have decided to get aggressive and demand they not be assigned to any low-stakes terrorist cell infiltration projects, so they tell their new handler Susan Coombs they’re ready to go after the terrorists who attacked Quantico. Coombs says she’ll talk to her supervisors about it, but warns them, “I don’t need to tell you what happens if you’re not ready.” She does not, but if she could tell us some trick for keeping track of which twin is which, that’d be swell.

8. The NATS’ assignment for their penultimate week at Quantico is to visit FBI field offices, in groups, so they can be evaluated and so they can see how operations are run. Alex, Shelby, the twins, Caleb, Iris, and Fletcher go off with Ryan to Richmond, where they’re given minor tasks they find insultingly easy. The agent in charge of the office, Jordan Kent, assigns Alex, Iris, and Fletcher to work on the case of a local post office that was burgled, but with nothing missing at the end of the incident. That means they have to cold call people in the area — 2,700 of them, Kent says — to canvas for info. Alex finds a lead — duh — and she and Kent leave the office to investigate it. In the car, she asks Kent about Ryan, who he worked with in Chicago; Kent tells her to be careful around Mr. Booth. He says Ryan left his post an hour before the planned terrorist attack in Chicago — the one that led to the death of Drew’s girlfriend — and he doesn’t buy that it was a coincidence.

Related: Read All of Yahoo TV’s ‘Quantico’ Recaps

9. Nimah and Raina’s handler tells them her supervisors are going to give them a chance to prove they can handle serious undercover work, and here’s the test: when they go off to the Richmond office, one agent there will know they are twins. Using clues and cues they pick up on while there, they have to figure out who that agent is. If they can, they’re golden. If they blow the challenge somehow, “I won’t even be able to send you to Poughkeepsie,” Coombs tells them, from which we infer that the FBI does not consider Poughkeepsie to be a hotbed of suspicious activity. But maybe they don’t know that’s where Jersey Shore’s Snooki is from?

10. Present day NYC: Ryan, Nimah, and Miranda are interrogating Caleb at the FBI office, when Caleb points out that, behind them, a computer seems to be on fire. Right he is: Shelby, once again using that magic McGregor-Wyatt software installed on the FBI’s computer system, hacked her way in, turned off all the fans inside the computers, and launched all of the software on each one, making them overheat and spark a smoky mess. And while the office is being evacuated, Alex sneaks in and makes her way to Ryan’s computer. Yes, yes, Alex is wanted by the FBI, and yes, yes, that probably means Shelby should have been the one to sneak inside the FBI offices, but it’s not like Alex wasn’t careful about walking into the building full of people trying to hunt her down… she pulled her hoodie hat over her head.


11. In the Richmond office, Alex nearly blows an undercover case when she figures out a local man and former post office worker — the one she and Kent went to investigate — is under investigation for being involved with a child pornography ring. The FBI busts him in the end, but not before the baddie knocks Fletcher out and tries to kill Kent, who’s saved by his rival. Ryan confronts Kent about why he told Alex about Chicago, and Kent says it was because he doesn’t believe what Ryan did, leaving his post, was a mistake or coincidence. He thinks he left on purpose, because he wanted the militia to carry out the plan that would have killed hundreds of people if they hadn’t been raided first.

12. Ryan, as part of his promise to tell Alex the truth about himself, decides to tell her the truth about what happened in Chicago, something he hasn’t told anyone else. He says the night of the planned attack in Chicago, Liam called him and told him he should take off early, because Liam knew Ryan was upset about problems in his marriage to Hannah. Liam said he would cover for Ryan, but he got drunk in some bar and never showed up. When Ryan was investigated for the incident, he covered for Liam and never told anyone Liam was drunk and had committed to covering for Ryan. He tells Alex that Liam’s career was already hanging by a thread, and if the FBI found out what really happened, Liam would have been done. Alex asks him if he ever regretted hurting his own career advancement to save Liam. He did, he says… until he met her.


13. Back in the present NYC timeline, just as Alex finds Ryan’s computer in his office and inserts Drew’s flash drive into it, Ryan comes in, gun drawn and pointed at her. They begin to argue, and when he tries to take her gun, they begin a repeat of their Quantico close quarters training exercise, complete with Alex now using Ryan’s backflip trick off his office wall. Their fight gets vicious, as they punch each other and throw each other across the room. Finally, she gets Ryan on the floor, and as he asks her to stop, she kicks him in the face and knocks him out.

14. In Richmond, the twins think they have the agent contact figured out: it’s agent Paul Garnett, who’s been flirting with them all day. But they learn it was actually another agent in the office, and when they realize how wrong they were, and how they’ve potentially ended their career when Paul threatens to tell their handler how badly they messed up, Nimah offers to take Paul up on the dinner invitation he had extended earlier. Later that night, she returns to the Quantico dorms, just as an envelope arrives with the twins’ assignment: they’re being sent to Queens to deal with a major Islamic terrorist cell. Raina’s thrilled, but Nimah is acting very strange and withdrawn… did she actually sleep with Paul to prevent him from squealing to Coombs about how the twins initially thought he was their Richmond contact?

15. Also at the Quantico dorms, Iris enters her room to find Shelby packing. She says she’s dropping out of the program, which she has realized she’s not fully committed to, so she can move to Europe and be with her parents. Knowing the truth about Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt, Iris shares it with Shelby, telling her how Caleb paid the Wyatts off so they’d leave Shelby alone, and wrote their letters to her so she wouldn’t be sad. Shelby confronts Caleb, telling him she deserves a man who is strong enough to tell her the truth, and who trusts her enough to know she can deal with it. That ain’t him, she adds, and then goes back to her room to call Caleb’s dad, Clayton. She tells him the truth about her parents, and adds that she wants to help him find them and punish them for their crimes.

16. Ryan visits Liam in his office at Quantico and tells him he doesn’t want to get stuck there, so he thinks he’s going to be leaving. He also doesn’t want to have to continue lying about what happened in Chicago, and Liam tells him he won’t have to. Clayton just offered Liam a job in Washington, D.C., Liam says, and he told Clayton he wants Ryan to work with him there. Clayton agreed, saying Ryan has paid long enough for Chicago, and Ryan tells Liam he’ll consider the job offer.


17. Miranda and Nimah find Ryan knocked out in his office, and Miranda quickly puts the building on lockdown since she knows Alex is still inside. Alex, meanwhile, is trying to escape, when she gets a call from Drew…

18. … who tells her his flash drive, the one he told her to use to get Ryan’s passwords, actually planted a manifesto on Ryan’s computer that makes him look like a terrorist. Drew’s The Voice! Drew is the big baddie! And he tells Alex she’s not done yet. He tells her to go downstairs into the parking garage and then directs her to a truck… Ryan’s! He tells her to open the passenger door, where she finds the nuke. He instructs her to get into the truck and says if she doesn’t follow his directions to the letter, he will kill Simon and detonate the nuke. “All you have to do is drive,” he tells her. And as Ryan, Miranda, and Nimah come running into the garage and spot Alex driving quickly away in Ryan’s truck, she speeds up and drives right towards a wall.

Quantico airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on ABC.