‘Quantico’ season 2, episode 8 review: Who was the real traitor? The Alex – Ryan surprise
The second season of “Quantico” to date is a batch of episodes stuffed full of strengths and weaknesses. The biggest positive about it is simply that we have some top-notch action sequences — and that Priyanka Chopra is still the lead for the show. As for the negatives, most of it starts from the fact that the show is incredibly confusing and stuff fulled of twists and turns that are rather difficult to follow.
Let’s start with what we’d consider to be the biggest slice of breaking news from the present-day story, and that was the reveal that Alex Parrish, in her quest to try and infiltrate the AIC, apparently didn’t cut it in her infiltration. While she tried to make some moves with Owen, the reality according to Shelby is that Ryan simply was making more progress than her. They wanted to move her back to New York and with the FBI, where she could get back to her other assignments. What did she have to say to that? NO! She’s staying put, which is going to be rather interesting given that she doesn’t seem to have full approval on it.
As for the whole story about coming up with lies designed to trick families back home … ugh. This is one of our other major frustrations with the season so far, as this all should be stuff that we moved past back during the first season of the show. The fact that we continue to focus on go-figure stuff makes it all the more evident that the show really still struggling to evolve the story from the first season.
If you want some relationship drama, here you go! First, Lydia realized via Owen that he was always going to care about his vendetta and the agency more so than anything else. Second, Leon made it clear to Shelby that he’d killed someone in the past.
Now, how about some … good relationship news? We saw a sneak peek going into this episode featuring Ryan proposing to Alex, and we saw this happen near the tail end of the episode. She said yes! We were certainly afraid going into this that this was some sort of ruse in order to trick other people watching. (It’s too bad that things didn’t just stop there for Alex and Ryan this week…)
Oh, and before we move on the future, we should say that Owen learned the truth from Lydia that him losing his CIA post was his own doing, and not a part of a larger conspiracy.
Raina and her shadow – While this was a brief scene in the future, we do want to give acknowledgment to the power of the performance here as Raina stood strong against her sister Nimah and what she’d become. Given their history, which really stretches back over the course of their entire lives together, we have to imagine that this could not be a particularly easy thing for her to do. The fact that she did it is a further testament to her bravery.
As we said, this is probably not that important just yet, but it will likely be moving forward.
Into the future – While Shelby may have been forced to have some tough conversations with Alex in the present, she showed every bit of confidence in her in the future as she and Miranda did what they could in order to ensure Alex had more time to stop the hostage crisis from within. That way, they could potentially minimize the total number of deaths. All of this sounds incredibly smart in theory, and of course the right thing for them to do.
Not too long after this, Alex made a key revelation in regards to the plan: It was never to kill anyone on the outside. Instead, the dangerous substance was meant to spread inside, operating as a suicide fail-safe. It’s something that the team was not expecting, and as a result of that, we ended up seeing them have to change course.
In the closing seconds, this course-correction unfortunately led to a devastating reveal: Ryan, who we saw being initiated into the AIC, was one of the people working against Alex. Maybe he’s in REALLY deep cover, but for now, he’s certainly looking like a full-fledged traitor out to destroy countless lives. A cool reveal, but one that we probably needed more time with.
Overall – “Quantico” keeps its reputation as a crazy / twisted show, but the finer moments of it remain the ones where it takes a deep breath and actually lets us get to know some of its characters a little bit better. We had that with Raina and Nimah, and at times with Ryan and Alex. We just wanted a tad more near the end to make this winter finale a truly worthwhile one. Grade: B-.