What I’m Watching: Quantico

Quantico: Season 1, Episode 18 “Soon” (D+)

There’s so much on this show that doesn’t make sense. I’ve written many times about how I can’t believe that every single assignment the trainees have involves probing into each other’s secrets, like arguing for who gets a security clearance based on the very public reasons that they have been flagged for review. It’s also crazy that Iris, who was flagged only for employing foreigners, didn’t get her clearance after Shelby and Drew both passed on the second try, and her subsequent decision was one driven by pure stupidity that doesn’t seem fitting for the prickly but intelligent recruit. This show has no understanding of how cults work, and the ease with which both Iris and Shelby were able to learn about and find the cult that operates in public places was simply absurd. I don’t know what Caleb thought he could achieve by beating Will up, and obviously it all doesn’t work out in the end given where he ends up. That said, this episode ended with another perplexing and surely indefensible twist: Caleb, pretending to be a drug addict being sheltered by his mother, is actually working for someone else. Could it be as innocuous as helping the FBI and Ryan? Unlikely. This show likes to drop so many shockers and then not address them that it’s going to lose track and contradict itself soon. At some point, there won’t be enough time left in the past to introduce new things that don’t correspond to what we’ve already seen happen.