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In the Academy

by DICK CHENEY

Quantico
creator Joshua Safran

"The majority of threats don't come from nations or extremist groups explains a Viola Davis-lookalike FBI agent (Aunjanue Ellis), "they come from our own backyard." Um, what?

When it begins, Quantico displays the wreckage of what used to be Grand Central Station. Alex Parrish (Miss World winner Priyanka Chopra) is arrested for the crime of bombing the place. Mere months earlier she is backwards in the lap of FBI agent Ryan Booth (Jake McLaughlin), riding his hard penis for all it is worth:

Maybe give us the slightest indication you used protection. Kids love Quantico.

Well, Quantico got me thinking about my idea for a young adult science fiction novel in which all knowledge is transmitted by sex. The better the sex, the better the knowledge. This kind of pressure to make wintercourse the best it can possibly be leads to a lot more banging than you would imagine, but most of it is bad.

Alex shows up at the FBI Academy six months before her arrest. Her instructors are all agents being punished for failures in the field. There is no running or physical training of any kind outside of pushups. No one even breaks a sweat in Quantico: they mostly just sit around the fabulous Virginia campus telling each other not to feel bad about various things.

Is this the Bret Easton Ellis version of the FBI academy?

Liam O'Connor (Josh Hopkins) directs the training of the recruits. He tells them all to select another trainee and find out their "secret." It subsequently emerges that a Mormon recruit had impregnated a 14 year old girl who died during her abortion, and the trainee kills himself before he is exposed. "I have no doubt Eric would have been a great agent," someone comments afterwards, and no one contradicts them.

"But D.C.," you ask, calling me by my initials because we have become rather close to one another during the review of this ABC drama, "I have two questions." I nod to indicate you should continue. "The first is, is Shonda Rimes, or as I call her, Ronda Shimes, involved in this show? The second is, don't you think the premise of this shit is bit ridiculous?"

I don't hate that jacket.

I can answer both your questions in the form of a question. No? And, sure, but no one spent all of their time at a Boston bar either, and yet Cheers became a huge hit?

It emerges in a grainy flashback that the bosomy Alex Parrish shot her FBI agent father after he became a bit angry with her mother and brandished a gun at her. Self-defense would seem be a stretch in this case, especially since her father carried a weapon regularly and the gun was never pointed at her. Did you know that the majority of kids in juvenile detention are now women?

Wondering what the Old South was? I guess white hoods and Jefferson Davis.

Parrish's roommate is a blonde from Texas known for her hunting skills. Also on the hall is a gay Jew, a legacy case, and a pair of Muslim twins pretending to be one person. The FBI recruitment team was beset by a plague of chicken pox this year.

Parrish is quite voluptuous, nearly always on the verge of popping right out of her top. She is always in full makeup, even when she wakes up. Every part of her seems to bounce or twitch on contact. She is the human equivalent of a beanie baby. When she gets arrested after they show her the various detailed plans she has in her apartment for bombing Grand Central Station, she cries like a little girl and screams that she has rights. This is clearly the cool calculus of a trained federal agent.

I feel that this show could have been saved by a S & M arrangement Alex had with her superior.

Quantico's sexism aside, I shouldn't really be upset at the show, since it is basically The Hunger Games with an attractive protagonist. It is no more meant to be taken seriously than Michael Moore or Dr. Ben Carson. But I have sketched out in my dream book a real television series about what it was like to train to fight our nation's terrorists. I just didn't think anyone would believe they were incubated in the FBI.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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