‘Quantico’ season 2, episode 7 review: Breaking Owen and Alex
We’ve spent several weeks now watching new episodes of “Quantico” and offering up a wide array of various complaints for some of the things that the show’s done wrong, whether it be having too many characters and following too closely to the season 1 formula for virtually no reason whatsoever.
Luckily, we are here to say that Sunday night’s “LCFLUTTER” may very well be the best episode of the season, largely because it focused on almost an entirely unified theme of torture, what it means, and precisely what it takes to cause someone to boil down to the very last never. It’s often not the pain that you personally suffer; instead, it is the trauma that lives in your mind.
For Owen, he challenged all of the recruits at The Farm tonight with a relatively simple mission: Find a way to convince him to give up an old alias he used in the field. All they had to do is figure out a way to make him talk. They locked him up in a room, he stayed there for hours upon hours, and they tried almost everything to get him to confess. They used ice water, intimidation, trickery, and manipulation to no change. What turned things around, however, was throwing Lydia in there and starting to practically drown her. It was his level of care for her that forced him to stop. You’d think that Lydia would appreciate the favor, but she did not — instead, she identified this as proof as to why he shouldn’t be out in the field. Heck, she took this a step further and said that this proves that he shouldn’t even be a teacher.
Lydia wasn’t the only person unhappy with this torture; Alex Parrish was furious at Ryan for taking things this far, and he argued that this has been a part of him since the beginning and she didn’t like it just because she saw it in the forefront tonight. What’s interesting about all of this to us is that Owen seems to be one of the more compassionate people on the team. Could he really be behind a mysterious / evil organization within the CIA?
In the future – The parallel between the present and future was obvious tonight, given that Alex found herself in Owen’s shoes as she was tormented extensively. The only way to get her to open up was when Dayana started to find herself the victim of torture. She gave them Lydia’s name concerning the drivers. Luckily, the two parties were eventually rescued, and there was some bad news breaking on the outside world: Could Claire Haas really become President? It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing any one of our heroes would want.
As if this wasn’t enough danger for them, Miranda’s getting into tracking mode, and we’re still eager to find out what she really wants out of all of this. The ambiguity of our adversaries at this point is season 2’s greatest weakness. Also, the episode ended with some sort of rallying cry by Alex when she was around Harry, Leon, and others. Didn’t she already have all the motivation she needed?
Overall – As we noted, this was the best episode of the season for the show, given that it brought a lot of interesting dimensions to these characters and made us care about them much more than we had so far this season. Sure, we don’t really care about any of the relationship stuff beyond Alex and Owen, and that’s only interesting because of motivation. When the show goes the route of sleek spy, it’s at its best. Grade: B+.