By Guest Contributor: Lakshmi Gandhi (@LakshmiGandhi)
Lakshmi’s recaps for “Quantico” episodes 1-7 can be found here and for episode 8 onward here, including her recap of the show’s most recent episode. Her recaps appear on Reappropriate every Monday morning! As with reading any recaps, please be wary of spoilers.
“Wow, that’s a lot to process.”
Sunday’s episode began with Hannah’s reaction to Alex and Simon’s
explanation of the current Quantico conspiracy and what Alex is doing to
get to the bottom of it all.
“I can’t figure you out, Parrish,” Hannah says (and here she’s clearly
speaking for us all.) “You have no fear about confessing to a dozen federal
crimes.” She also notes that while ‘The Voice’ told her not to confide in
anyone she had no problem telling her story first to Simon and then to
Hannah herself.
Here she goes again… #hannahlogue #Quantico
— Jay A Johnson (@Jay_A_Johnson) April 4, 2016
“Do you believe me?” Alex asks.
“Well, yeah, I believe you, and now I’m going to brief the director,”
Hannah says.
That, however is one step too far for both Simon and Alex. Hannah is
(surprisingly) willing to compromise on this, but she does have one
condition: She’ll be in charge of this investigation going forward.
Here’s what else stood out for us this episode:
https://twitter.com/YahooTV/status/716812335592017920
NATs on a plane! (We brazenly stole that joke from the Yahoo TV tweet
linked to above.) It’s always fun to see the still-innocent NATs of the
past stumble through their training exercises. It’s especially great to see
Alex and Shelby both in full Tracy Flick-mode as they tried to negotiate
through a staged hostage crisis aboard a commercial aircraft. It’s clear,
as Alex and Caleb point out, that Shelby clearly needs a win. (Remember: we
learned last week that her parents weren’t really dead and that her parents
were also the ones who placed her fake half-sister into her life).
We get to see a glimpse of Shelby’s emotional turmoil: Throughout this
episode Shelby clearly alternated between the denial and anger phases of
the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. There were many awful parts of this
hostage exercise scene and one was that Liam deliberately created a
lose-lose situation that ensured that there was no way Shelby could be the
hero of the day. It was particularly terrible because until a week ago,
Shelby believed that she lost her own parents to an airline hijacking (on
9/11, no less.)
Liam’s explanation for all of this is pretty awful, merely telling Alex,
“As agents, you have to be able to confront the fears that live in all of
us.”
Will this truth set Shelby free? #Quantico pic.twitter.com/ywu6VVuCrk
— Quantico ABC (@QuanticoTV) April 4, 2016
This all lead into a nice scene between Shelby and Alex about the tragedies
they’ve had in their lives.
“This is a huge part of who I am, and my parents made me do that,” Shelby
confides in Alex before she burst into sobs.
“My mom lied to me for years about my father,” Alex confides in Shelby in
return. “And, she did it to protect me.”
The storyline about Caleb’s time in the cult is never going to go away:
Remember Caleb’s confusing alter ego Mark Redmond? We finally get some
clues about why he exists. Caleb is apparently doing his own undercover
investigation (how do all of these recruits have time for all these side
gigs?) Anyways, Caleb is still concerned about his old friend who remains
trapped inside of the Scientology-like cult Caleb managed to escape with
the help of his moneyed parents. In a nice touch, Caleb’s former cult is
called Systemics.
Turns out Hannah’s time in charge was very short-lived: Hannah, we hardly
knew ye. So it turns out that Hannah (who tried so hard to get Alex
suspended from the FBI) ends up being suspended herself for ‘accidentally’
discharging her gun when the lights went out during Claire Haas’ campaign
speech. Is this the last we see of Hannah? The scene had an air of finality
to it, so I think we won’t see her for a few episodes at least.
Also, raise your hands if you’d totally watch this?
https://twitter.com/YahooTV/status/716820779157966848
Simon and Raina are talking again! We don’t have much to say about this
analysis-wise, but we are looking forward to more Simon and Raina scenes in
the future. They certainly have lots of things to clear up.
A tip of the hat to the great Miranda: While Liam was completely
insensitive to Shelby (and just about everyone else) during his training
exercise, Miranda showed an enormous amount of compassion to Shelby, the
Amin twins and the rest of her students. In perhaps the episode’s biggest
shocker, she delivers this speech as she bids them all farewell. “I can’t
be your teacher anymore,” she tells them. (This was all so sad! We hope
that we’ll see Aunjanue Ellis again soon. That emotional classroom scene
was easily one of the best in this show’s short history.)
Lakshmi Gandhi is a journalist and pop culture writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Metro New York, NBC Asian America and NPR’s Code Switch blog, among other sites. She likes it when readers tweet her @LakshmiGandhi with their thoughts on Asian American issues and romance novels.
Learn more about Reappropriate’s guest contributor program and submit your own writing here.
