Quantico, Season 3
After a long hiatus, Quantico returned to ABC in April as a summer replacement series. I thought it had been cancelled. (And whether it had or not, it has been cancelled now.)
After a year working with the FBI, and then a second year working with the CIA, what was there to do? Start a special task force working within the Bureau.
I'm glad I waited until the season was over to write this review. My initial reaction was that the first episode was a little weak, and I didn't particularly care about the villain. And then something weird happened: the plot wrapped up. It was solved. Done.
Huh? Instead of a seasonal arc, the show had weekly episodes, better suited to fit the task force, and this worked nicely. And then they ruined it. The later half of the season devolved into one continuous story arc, following a single nemesis, who outplayed them at every turn despite the fact that his tactics came straight out of The Art of War. The agents knew then, and they were still played, so easily manipulated. Suddenly, people the main characters cared about were dying, some off-screen, and some barely introduced, just so Conor Devlin can have revenge on the man who killed his son.
Until this point, my biggest complaint with the show was the opening sequence, which featured two awkward looking stick figures running up a spiral staircase, and then slowly embrace to kiss. (Side note: I complained about this on twitter, and someone connected to the show responded, but only to saw how good the animation was -- no, not really.)
This signaled that the off-again romance of Alex and Ryan might rekindle after Alex's disappearance of three years and Ryan's subsequent marriage to Shelby (all off-screen, in-between seasons 2 and 3). The forced love triangle was stupid to write into the early episodes, and it was undermined completely by the introduction of Agent Mike McQuigg, who immediately became an alternate love interest for Alex Parrish (not including the love interest she left in Italy, for his own protection).
If you had been a fan of the show and stuck it out through the first two seasons, then the final season is worth watching, at least halfway. After that, it falls apart.
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