‘Quantico’ season 2, episode 5 review: where does Lydia stand?

Tonight, “Quantico” brought to us a story that felt very much within the show’s wheelhouse at this point, given that you had revelations in both timelines, a little bit of romance, and a ton of people showing some skin for no real reason other than creating Twitter buzz. Hey look, Alex is in bed with Ryan and Harry!

Harry also in this episode outed himself as a member of MI-6, bringing another layer of intrigue into the show whose goal at this point seems to be throwing as many different government organizations into a single hour of television as possible. Harry admitted the he was the one who bugged Alex and Ryan’s rooms, and that ends that particular mystery for the time being. The mission assigned by Owen with the “journalist” was interesting not so much because of his threats, but instead because it actually taught us a thing or two more about his past and how he ended up not being on field duty anymore.

So what about Shelby and Leon? We’d feel more about that if we didn’t want to see Shelby go in a different direction this season.

As for the future, the big reveal we got out of that is that Alex has reasons to be suspicious of Lydia. She certainly didn’t act like your ordinary hostage. (On a separate note, why is nobody really looking at Miranda suspiciously at all? Somebody’s gotta tell that something is off here, right?) The biggest flaw with this whole future storyline in general is that we’re getting such bite-size pieces of it; right when we start to get invested, we get pulled right out again.

Grade: B. In terms of intensity, this episode brought it, and if you enjoy “Quantico” for the show that it is, there was a lot to like in here. The problem we’re running into so far this season is that it feels like we’re hitting almost all of the same notes from season 1, and putting Alex into the CIA was basically like pushing a big reset button so they could keep much of the season 1 structure in place.