'Quantico': Season 2's opener awkwardly executed

Actress Priyanka Chopra returns as Alex Parrish in the second season of the American show "Quantico". But its first episode was awkwardly executed and clumsily cut.

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 reason to feel gratified. 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. That apart everything in the first episode aired on September 25 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 in Episode 1 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 to a year ago when Parrish and her colleagues were taken to the 'Farm' for training where they are told that everything they are about to learn is illegal.

In "Quantico" she has Jake McLaughlin playing the love of her life. They break into serious relationship conversations at any time including, at one point, during an airborne parachute exercise. That McLaughlin is as expressive as actor Anil Dhawan once used to be, doesn't help the tension between the couple to be eased.

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.

--IANS

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