'Quantico' Recap: 'We Broke Her'

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

That was certainly a long wait. The midseason finale of ABC’s freshman FBI drama aired nearly three full months ago, and left a lot of mysteries up in the air. But viewers were rewarded with a slew of answers to kick off the second half of the season, as well as a major, episode-ending cliffhanger that suggests a whole new level of angst and danger for agent Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra).

So, 10 things we learned in the “Alex” episode of Quantico:

1. The action has jumped three months forward in the timeline of “future”/New York City events, and we learn the most familiar casualty of the 32 people who died in the second bomb attack, the one that blew up the FBI command center: Clayton Haas, a.k.a. Caleb’s dad, Shelby’s ex-lover, and the husband of Senator (and aspiring Veep) Claire Haas.

2. Alex reveals at a Senate hearing that she doesn’t believe Elias Harper acted alone in the bombings at Grand Central Station and the FBI command center. Some of her colleagues strongly disagree with her, including Liam, Miranda, Ryan, Simon, and Shelby, who doesn’t even want to talk to Alex, given that Ms. Parrish blew up her life, humiliated her with the revelation of her affair with the late Clayton, and left her such a target of the paparazzi that she has to move back to Georgia to find a little bit of peace. Simon also tells the Senate hearing committee that he has left his job and the city, spending the last three months obsessing over everything Elias ever said to him to try to figure out what happened. “There is not a doubt in my mind that Elias Harper acted alone,” he says. “He hated the FBI. He made his career out of taking apart their cases in court. The attacks were Elias’s way of making a statement; 32 agents paid the price for it.”

3. Duncan Howell, the hacker who helped Alex figure out there was going to be a second bomb after the Grand Central attack, jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, telling the cop who tried to talk him down to make sure Alex knows “I thought I didn’t have a choice.”

4. Confirmation on that Liam/Alex hookup from the midseason finale; not only did they start a little somethin’ somethin’, but he’s making booty calls – or rather, booty texts – which she looks less than thrilled to receive, and which she blows off with a “not tonight” rejection. In the future timeline, things are even chillier between the lovers, as he tries to explain away why she’s the only one who disagrees with the FBI’s assessment that Elias acted alone. Liam testifies at the Senate hearing, telling the committee Alex “was one of the finest agents I have ever trained. If anyone’s to blame for her delusion, it’s the Bureau itself. After the Grand Central bombing, we fell for Harper’s plan to frame her. We turned her into a fugitive. We broke her.”

5. Alex does have another fling: a man she pulls her “I’ll tell you five things about why you’re not my type” trick on when he tries to pick her up in a bar. They end up making out in the bathroom — that girl does love sexy time in the bathroom — but only so Alex can snag his keyfob (he’s the CTO of a telecomm company) and investigate Duncan.

6. We find this out when Alex gets a visit at her Brooklyn apartment from Ryan, who tells her the FBI knows what she did, and that the Bureau is not treating Duncan’s death as suspicious. More bad news: Alex and Ryan definitely have not reunited, as she mentions she’s gotten no calls, emails or texts from him in months.

7. Alex’s FBI recruit class is introduced to the next class of NATS, and the two groups are pitted against each other in the Color Wars, a series of physical and mental challenges that will result in the losing class seeing five of its trainees – as chosen by the winning team — sent home. The competition finds the trainees squaring off angrily in the dorm hallways — think Quantico Side Story — when, shocker! Alex’s team loses, and twist! Two of the ejected trainees come from the winning team, after Miranda determines the winners used an unfair computer trick to claim victory.

8. The husband of Shelby’s half-sister, Samar, meets with Shelby and Caleb and tells them his wife has been abducted, and though Shelby is the last person who would want to help, she’s the only one who can. #Shaleb is still broken up, by the way, but Caleb, who caused the troubles that led to Samar’s kidnapping according to her spouse, does agree to help Shelby help Samar’s hubs.

9. Alex, who was put on “trauma leave” by Liam and Miranda after the command center bombing, caves to pressure and reverses her statement on Elias. During the Senate hearings, she reads from a new statement she wrote on a piece of notebook paper, saying she hasn’t been able to come up with any evidence to back up her theory about Elias being part of a conspiracy, and she no longer wants to drag out the aftermath of the attacks for the victims’ loved ones and the city. “It’s time for all of us to move on,” she says.

10. Alex thought her reversal would unite her with her friends, but all of them, even Ryan, are still angry, now because they think she turned her back on what she really believed. Hello Alex, meet the two people on either side of you: Rock and Hard Place. She does get reinstated at the FBI, but the public, who saw her as a heroine committed to uncovering the truth about the attacks, has turned on her, flooding her with rude voicemails and texts. But it’s a phone call from a man (probably?) disguising his (again, we think?) voice that draws Alex to a meeting that’s going to change her immediate future once again. When she arrives at the meeting — in a dark, unoccupied area of the city, of course — Alex receives a video of Duncan Howell’s death. Just as she’s trying to absorb that, a figure slowly starts moving towards her from the shadows. It’s fellow agent Natalie, who opens her coat and reveals her waist is strapped with bombs. The voice on the other end of Alex’s phone call tells her, “You weren’t a terrorist before… but now you’re going to be.”

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