Review: Quantico season 2 premiere disappoints, as does Priyanka Chopra

First the good news about Season 2 of Quantico. Priyanka was all over the first episode, emoting, fighting, loving and in one sequence stripping down to a shirtless state during an organisational test drill.

So we as an Indian nation, have much to feel gratified about. It's Priyanka all the way in Quantico. Or so it seems. But that's about it.

Quantico takes the quantity quotient of Priyanka's presence to the outer limit. Everything in the first episode, aired on 25 September, seemed as false as Priyanka's American accent.

The characters, now assembled at a CIA-driven place called The Farm, seem mired in a state of anxiety and self-importance distantly justified by the amateurish plot and the stilted dialogues.

The situations manufactured to create suspense in the premiere episode were purposely complicated. The narrative went back and forth between present times - when the brave though beleaguered Alex Parrish tries to single-handedly save a hostage situation involving the American President (a Black American Barack Obama doppelganger with a white American wife).

The masked terrorists who attack the Presidential summit speak in an indecipherable accent, so it's hard to tell what they really want.

While Parrish tries to save the President and his guests in New York, the narrative inopportunely moves back a year when Parrish and her colleagues were taken to The Farm for training. Here, they are told that everything they are about to learn is illegal.

Priyanka has Jake McLaughlin as the love of her life in the show and they break into serious relationship conversations at awkward moments, including at one point, during an airborne parachute exercise. That McLaughlin is as expressive as actor Anil Dhawan once used to be, it doesn't help ease the tension between the couple.

Cutting to the chase, when Priyanka finally gets down to kicking some a**, she is again half-heartedly into it. Come on Priyanka! You did the agile agent act much better in Don.

Actor-producer Anil Kapoor's 24 makes the tension of counter-terrorism seem far more credible and palatable.

-- Subhash K Jha, IANS