'Quantico' Week 2: It Got Stronger And Weaker
Quantico, starring Priyanka Chopra and this week co-starring her hair — she fluffed it seductively, she used it to disguise her face, she pulled it back to be demure, she couldn’t contain its lustrousness in an FBI ball cap! — revealed more of where the series is going in its second week, and indicated more of its strengths and weaknesses.
Foremost among Quantico’s strengths is Chopra, an interestingly new choice as a network adventure hero. The Indian superstar is fast becoming an ideal central character for an American show that preys upon terrorist paranoia. Framed for a bombing she cannot have committed — one of the few sure things in a show that tries to make you think, to quote the Firesign Theatre, everything you know is wrong — Chopra’s super-smart FBI trainee Alex Parrish is a solid character, able to suggest fear at being caught, sturdiness at resisting capture (her fight scene with Annabelle Acosta’s Nathalie was tight and tough), and just the right degree of how-did-this-happen? confusion.
Backing her up even as he hunts her down, Josh Hopkins as Agent Liam O’Connor has found a good post-Cougar Town role as a possibly amoral authority figure and love interest.
Related: ‘Quantico’: 12 Things To Know About Priyanka Chopra
Weaknesses in Quantico include the idea that the twins played by Yasline Al Masri could possibly fool anyone for more than three days. Isn’t this a twist that doesn’t even fool the idiots in the Big Brother house every summer? I’m also suspicious of the structure that show creator-writer Joshua Safran has built into the show. Shifting back and forth between Alex’s first days of training and her status as chief suspect in a New York City bombing nine months later seemed, in this second week episode titled “America,” more of a tease, a delaying tactic, than an exciting dramatic-structure strategy that will pay off in the future.
As I said in my initial review, Quantico is trading heavily on the mystery-plus-romance with jump cuts style of producer Shonda Rhimes’s hits. Safran and producer Mark Gordon are going to have to break out of the Scandal/How To Get Away With Murder mold to do something original going forward. They also have to do something about stiff dialogue such as “You only ever see the best in people, and it blinds you to who they really are.”
Right now, Alex’s fellow recruits are a collection of red herrings, quirks, and tics — less human beings than updates from an old Agatha Christie/Hercule Poirot mystery novel. The show has a nice, fast pace, but is the star-turn performance by Chopra and the soap-opera glossiness of its young cast enough to keep the ratings high for this rookie series? After this week, I’m a little dubious, but still intrigued.
Quantico airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on ABC.
