Quantico – KUMONK

By starrymag | April 23, 2017

By: Emily Cross

At the pool, Alex (Priyanka Chopra) trains Owen (Blair Underwood) the FBI way: a stronger body makes for a stronger mind. He complains, but she makes him tread water, retrieve heavy weights from the deep end and swim across the pool without coming up for air. She enjoys making Owen sweat, maybe a bit too much. Her goal is to get Owen out of his head, and trust his instincts. Meanwhile, Clay (Hunter Parrish) goes over the intel they have on the collaborators and is obviously frustrated when he can’t get anywhere.

At the dorms, Raina (Yasmine Al Massri) hasn’t told anyone that she switched with Nimah and spends most of the episode pretending to be Nimah. Shelby (Johanna Braddy) enters and gives her some info on Raina’s (actually Nimah’s) first 24 hours in custody. She’s being held at a detention facility in DC. Preliminary interrogation went for seven hours, but she’s showed no signs of breaking. Shelby knows that the interrogators won’t stop until they get answers, which just puts more pressure on the team to clear Raina’s name.

Ryan (Jake McLaughlin) wakes up at Sasha’s (Karolina Wydra) apartment to find her already awake, wearing his shirt. They flirt a bit (Ew.) and Sasha tries to sneakily get more information about what Ryan’s job is when he gets a text to come to the bunker. She fails and Ryan places a bug in her bedroom before he leaves. When he’s gone, Sasha takes out some files on some familiar faces: Henry Roarke (Dennis Boutsikaris), Clay and Ryan are just a few photos we see before the scene ends.

At the bunker, Clay and Owen tell the team that they’ve gotten multiple pings from the Cache. All of the information accessed was about procedures to be implemented by law enforcement in the case of civil unrest in five cities: Cleveland, Albany, Detroit, El Paso and Fargo. Each of these cities is on high alert and planning for the possibility of protests. Shelby knows this because she got an FBI “all agents” call. A riot in any of those cities would prove the country is more divided than ever under President Hass’ leadership. The team assumes that the collaborators will create and take advantage of such a riot.

Clay is convinced that there’s nothing to do, and no matter what the team does they will lose. Alex steps up and suggests that there is a way through. The first step is to figure out which city is most likely. Then she, Shelby and Raina (as Nimah) go in as FBI agents and make sure the collaborators can’t execute their plan.

Alex leads the team to dig deep into each of the five cities to see which one is most likely for the collaborators to hit. Ryan pulls “Raina” aside and shows her some audio from the bug he planted in Sasha’s apartment, in which Sasha is speaking Russian and telling someone about Ryan and to meet her at the Gold Leaf. Ryan heads there to meet her and “Raina” promises to cover for him. Shelby has sent a bunch of texts to Caleb and has no answer. Clay stays in his office, not helping the team.

All of a sudden, Alex tells everyone to shut their computers. They’re going about this all wrong because they are thinking logically. They need to think about what makes the best story and Owen finds it: Cleveland. A murder case has been sitting on a hung jury for three days and the judge is threatening an Allen Charge, which will force the jury to come to a verdict. In the case, a man shot a home intruder who sexually assaulted and killed his wife. The problem is that the gun was bought illegally, thanks to an executive order that Claire Haas pushed for when she was vice president. No other story touches on the president so this has to be the one. The team surmises that the collaborators are influencing the jury to present a guilty charge. Alex, Shelby and “Raina” head to Cleveland to prove that the jury has been influenced. The non-FBI agents will provide backup from the Farm.

Meanwhile, Clay is going on a trip of his own: to the White House. Shelby assumes that he is going to ask Claire to disband the team and he doesn’t exactly deny it. Shelby encourages him to stay and fight, but Clay is stubborn and leaves anyways.

Ryan meets Sasha at The Gold Leaf where she reveals that she knew he bugged her. The Russian was a trap. She gives him a one-time offer: any details, documents or photos he wants to know about her, she will give. Ryan doesn’t trust that anything she gives him will be true so he declines. She gives him a key to her place saying that he can get it for himself.

Clay arrives at the White House to see Claire (Marcia Cross) and finds an extra guest there as well: Caleb (Graham Rogers)! Clay tells Claire that he thinks that the team should stop trying to stop the collaborators and start preparing for what they’re going to do. Claire and Caleb disagree and think that their strategy needs to change. Caleb offers to help because these are his friends after all. Claire agrees to let him, despite Clay’s resistance. After he leaves his family, Clay calls Felix (Jon Kortajarena) and asks for a meeting with Henry Roarke.

Alex, Shelby and “Raina” arrive in Cleveland to find that the special agent in charge is none other than Miranda Shaw (Aunjanue Ellis). She stations the three troublemakers (as she sees it) in the basement manning phones, but not before she totally calls out Raina-as-Nimah for being Raina – not Nimah (She trained them, remember?). She ignores their insistence that they’re just there to work, knowing them too well.

They get set up at computers and use the FBI server to find the jurors’ names. Shelby sets up a secure site so that they can get the names back to the bunker for Owen and Ryan to investigate. In a montage, Owen and Ryan find info on the jurors possibly pointing to the collaborators influence and Alex, Shelby and “Raina” interview the jurors. Even though all of the info can be explained away and the team doesn’t get anywhere, it still shows how good at working as a team they’ve become.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Clay meets with Henry Roarke and offers to work together. Roarke rejects Claire and Clay’s belief that an ideal America is just out of reach. Roarke is convinced nothing has changed since the early days of America. He believes that the Founding Fathers wrote the first draft of democracy and it doesn’t help us to cling to that ideal. He wants to remove the illusion of the people’s power and leave the decisions to the people who really know what to do. He offers Clay a job working for him: no parties, no lines. Just the voice of the people. It’s an admirable ideal, but we all know that it won’t work.

Ryan answers a call from Owen while he’s in his car, fiddling with Sasha’s key. Realizing something is up, Ryan ends the call, but not before Sasha (listening through a bug she put in the keychain) hears the names of three collaborators and writes them down. Ryan quickly finds the bug and destroys it, not knowing he was too late.

Meanwhile, Alex tells Owen that she suspects the collaborators have gotten to the judge, but she doesn’t know why. He tells her that when a judge enacts an Allen Charge, the jury almost always favors the prosecution. Owen instructs them to get to the judge, ASAP. On their way up, Miranda stops them and tells them that given their harassment of the jurors, they are done.

At the bunker a masked man sneaks in and fights with Owen. They’re both good fighters, but Owen trusts his instincts and gets the better of the man, pulling his mask off and revealing Sebastian (David Lim)!

Before Miranda can take the agents into holding, Alex pleads with her to do what is right. She doesn’t tell her all of the details, but she says that the judge is compromised and it would be wrong to let him influence the verdict.

It works and Miranda lets them interrogate the judge, with her present. The judge admits that he was blackmailed into enacting the Allen Charge and told they had information to send him to jail if he didn’t. However, it doesn’t matter because the jury has returned with a verdict.

Owen and Ryan interrogate Sebastian, who reveals he’s been investigating the same group of collaborators our team has. In a flashback, we see that he let Harry (Russell Tovey) live and told him that he has to lay low until everything is over. He was at Bethesda Fountain because of his investigation and tells Owen and Ryan that he didn’t kill Rebecca Sherman and Thomas Roth. Sebastian broke into the bunker to make sure that they were all on the same side. Now that he is convinced, he gives Owen and Ryan all of the collaborators he knows, which happen to include the four names that the team was missing. They give him the collaborators they know and let him go with the intention of sharing any relevant information between them.

Sasha keeps digging into the collaborators, and finds a connection from Henry Roarke to tech mogul Peter Theo. She uses her journalistic connections to get him on the phone to verify some information, but she digs too deep and he stops talking.

Back in Cleveland, the jury has found the defendant guilty on all counts. Now, they have to gear up for a riot. But that’s not where our trio is going. Henry Roarke just landed in Cleveland to speak at the courthouse steps and Miranda needs them to be his security detail. Alex is frustrated: not only did the collaborators orchestrate the verdict, but Roarke is going to be the one to save the day. Not only will Roarke get the presidency by succession, he will also have the will of the people. Shelby calls Clay and fills him in, but he already knows. He tells her to hang tight because he’s got this.

Roarke arrives at the courthouse and is escorted by our team, only to see the president! Clay is there too and it’s clear he saw this coming a mile away. Claire addresses the crowd outside with a powerful speech, admitting that the law that made this man’s gun purchase illegal may have been a mistake. She takes responsibility and also warns people to be wary of any politician that promises that they and they alone can fix everything (sound familiar?).

Back at the bunker, the rest of the team, along with Claire, learns of Owen and Ryan’s discovery of the remaining collaborators as they are put up on the board. Claire expresses her support and faith in the team, and hopes that everything can be over soon.

Clay is cooking at Owen’s house and Shelby visits him, thanking him for not giving up on the team and letting him know that he is important. Of course, this is the perfect moment for a Shelby/Caleb reunion! Our resident snarker warns her to stay away from Clay because whatever is happening between them is what Clay is struggling with.

At The Gold Leaf, Owen tells Alex that during his fight with Sebastian, some of his instincts came back. Alex tells Owen that she trusts him, which is hard for her given everyone in her life has lied to her at one point or another. Owen is a notable exception. He tells her that someday he may have to lie to her, but Alex is taking what she can get.

In their dorms, Shelby and Raina (as Raina this time!) bond over cooking dinner together. Back in Washington, Roarke instructs Felix to find out what Clay and his team are up to or else he’s out of a job and a green card. If we were endeared to him before, this scene proves that Roarke certainly is an evil collaborator.

When Ryan arrives at Sasha’s apartment to confront her about the bug, she asks him to wait a half hour while she runs down a lead. They argue for a bit about trusting each other, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because as soon as Sasha gets in her car it explodes, presumably killing her.