Review: Quantico season 1, episode 1

(Warning: spoilers abound)

When it was announced that Priyanka Chopra was going to star in an American TV series called Quantico, the reaction at home wasn’t especially enthusiastic. Chopra has had an on-off relationship with the media and the public here, and no one was willing to stick their neck out for someone whose last international collaboration was a godawful duet with Pitbull. In time, the trailer appeared, and everyone admitted that at least Chopra’s American accent wasn’t grating. Then the first eight minutes were released, and more people admitted it didn’t look terrible.

The first episode premiered in the US yesterday. And it isn’t terrible. It’s messy, deeply unbelievable and, often, very silly—but it has pace and some synthetic style. That said, showrunner Joshua Safran (a former writer and executive producer on Gossip Girl) might have to tamp down on the inanity in coming episodes. A new show can afford to pack the pilot with logic-defying twists to reel in viewers. But a show which does that every week is opening itself up to ridicule.

The episode opens with Chopra lying on the ground with rubble everywhere and sirens blaring. As she looks around and registers a blast site, she’s suddenly surrounded by yelling FBI agents. It turns out she’s an agent as well, name of Alex Parrish. She’s taken in for questioning, ostensibly because she’s the closest survivor to the blast site. This ruse is dropped after a while. She’s actually a suspect.

Before it’s revealed that she’s the one they’re investigating, the interrogators tell Alex that they suspect someone from her FBI training batch is behind the attack. This would have been a reasonable enough excuse for launching the parallel timeline structure that Quantico seems set to follow, except this has already been set in motion: after the opening scene at the blast site, we’ve gone back in time to see Alex meet ex-military man Ryan Booth (Jake McLaughlin) on a plane, have sex with him in a car upon landing, explain in a glib sort of way why he’s not “her type”, and leave, only to lay eyes on him a couple of hours later at the FBI training base in Quantico, Washington DC. We also get snapshots of the other trainees: southerner Shelby Wyatt (Johanna Braddy); Nimah Anwar (Yasmine Al Masri), the obligatory Muslim character whom we’re supposed to suspect; former Olympian Eric Packer (Brian J. Smith); and Tate Ellington (Simon Asher), who turns out to be a gay Jewish man with a fascination for the Middle East, if you can believe it.

By the end of the episode, Packer is dead by his own hand, Shelby’s parents are revealed to have died on one of the hijacked planes on 9/11, and Ryan has been shot, possibly by Parrish. And these are just some of the twists—some clever, others there for the sheer WTF-ness of it all—that this episode sends your way in 42 minutes. (The one involving Nimah is so bonkers it easily surpassed my prediction of schizophrenia.) Alex, in whose home the FBI has now found evidence of a terrorist plot, has managed to escape—the manner in which she does is reliably ludicrous— and will now presumably spend the rest of the season thinking back on her training, trying to figure out who the actual terrorist (if any) was, in order to clear her name.

Would we be watching this if it wasn’t Chopra starring as Alex? It’s a bit difficult to answer that sitting in India, though most of the US reviews seem cautiously positive. There’s no doubt that Quantico will have to pull itself together in the coming weeks— the writing (by Safran) is occasionally funny but intermittently clunky (who says words like ‘grievances’?) while Marc Munden’s direction is just serviceable. For now, let’s just say that it is one of the more entertainingly ridiculous pilots we’ve seen this year. And admit that it was a bit of a thrill to see Chopra do a slow walk towards the screen at the end, looking very spiffy despite the hardships of the day.

Quantico premieres in India on 3 October on Star World.