YMMV / Quantico

• Awesome Music: The finale opens with a montage revealing how the Big Bad managed to gather intel on and manipulate each of the main characters throughout their time at Quantico, set to the symphonic version of Peter Gabriel's "Digging in the Dirt". It works surprisingly well.
• Broken Base: Over season two. Some people hate it for the introduction of new characters as well as the absence of many from the first season, while others think it's a vast improvement, due to the lessened soap opera vibe, the increased diversity in the male cast to match that of the female cast, and the darker tone.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: According to the ads, the FBI traitor's identity was supposed to be a big surprise in the winter finale. Too bad apparently no one told the previous episode's director, with Elias' face clearly being visible during Simon's kidnapping.
  • The reveal of the main terrorist being Liam. Most of the fandom had called it since early in the season.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Due to the show's serialized nature and the way the two main story arcs trade off and interweave, if you don't see every episode in order then keeping track of what's going on becomes nearly impossible.
• Creator's Pet: Shelby. She gets more sideplots than just about any other character, seemingly at the expense of other characters, the protagonist, and the main storyline.
• Critical Dissonance: It's one of ABC's highest-rated new shows, despite being subject to much snark from critics over its attractive cast and heavy use of twists.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Grey's Homeland (or Grey's Academy) and How to Get Away With Terrorism are fan nicknames for the show.
  • Trust No Bitch: The Series
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The terrorist attack is eerily similar to the August 2, 1980 bombing of Bologna's Central Station.
  • Much like 24, the show had the bad luck to premiere within a couple months of a real major terrorist incident in the November 2015 Paris attacks. But while that show had the September 11th attacks happen a couple months earlier and had time to make adjustments, Quantico was already well into its first season. The network opted to still run the next scheduled episode just two days later, with a message beforehand warning of potentially upsetting material. It got worse when a few weeks later, terrorists struck San Bernardino, California, committing the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
  • Simon suggesting that Ryan's military background makes him unstable becomes much darker once the show reveals his past and it becomes clear that he was talking more about himself.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • Alex apologizes for reporting Shelby's plan to break the law and forge witness immunity agreements so she could lure her parents back to the United States to be prosecuted.
  • Alex is also portrayed as being in the wrong for Miranda putting her former classmates under surveillance and not trusting them, even though not doing so would have been irresponsible and potentially dangerous.
• Moral Event Horizon: In LCFLUTTER, Miranda sets up her boyfriend as the terrorist/AIC mole in the FBI.
• Narm:
  • Not only does every single person in Alex's class have some deep, dark secret, but they can't seem to go a day without breaking some record, until it just gets silly.
  • Also repeated until it gets silly: the present-day storyline largely consists of Alex finding a flimsy piece of evidence of one of her classmates being involved in the bombing that utterly convinces her they're the culprit, until they're inevitably proven innocent by the end. She never doubts herself on these no matter how many times she's been wrong.
  • The fake bomb exercise in episode 7, especially when the criteria for passing includes being suicidal enough to stay in a room with a bomb without offering any help, just waiting for it to go off.
  • The fact that everyone turns on Alex so many times you could make a drinking game out of it.
  • "Turn" attempting to make a commercial break cliffhanger of Miranda's possible death during the Quantico storyline, when she's been shown alive and well in the present day since the beginning.
  • The writing for Will Olsen's disorder is way over the top, until he comes off more like an alien doing a piss poor job at pretending to be human.
  • The new title card for season 2◊. Seriously, QUAN2CO????^note It seems to have been dropped for the remaining episodes.
• Romantic Plot Tumour: Alex and Booth, Booth and Natalie, and Shelby and Caleb all seem to serve little to no real purpose when it comes to either furthering the plot or developing the characters.
  • Clay's attraction to Shelby in the second season serves as a distraction from several important sideplots and comes out of nowhere, seeing as Clay is engaged to a woman that he actually knows and is well aware of Shelby's past with both his brother and father.
• The Scrappy:
  • Shelby garnered an extreme hatred from many fans following her tirade against Alex in her self-titled episode, where she blamed Alex for her extramarital relationship with Clayton Haas when many thought (and rightfully so) it was her own fault. This was furthered by her treatment of Alex, when she tried to stop her from forging immunity agreements (which is illegal), that went to the point where she said that she would regret meeting Alex for the rest of her life, as well as lying to Caleb's parents so they would not show up to his graduation.
  • Ryan as well, to the point where fans were delighted when he was accused of being the terrorist.
  • You could also make a case for Nimah as well, as her self-righteous rant towards a noticeably emotionally distressed Simon in the episode "Quantico" and overall mistreatment of him has garnered her much dislike.
  • As of this season, Owen and Lydia can become this, as fans are bored with their storyline and behaviors.
• Squick: Dayana scalds herself with boiling water apparently as a reminder of what either happened to her when she was younger, or what she or her parents did to other people.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Many found Eric Packer (the Mormon who got a Malawi girl pregnant and was Driven to Suicide by his guilt over her death from an illegal abortion she had at his instigation) to be one of the most interesting characters and wished that he had made it past the pilot.
  • Elias Harper, both for representation (he is as of episode 8 the only actual non-straight character on the show) and because of the character himself (being played by Rick Cosnett also helped.) Many show fans were upset when he failed the bomb test and thus had to leave Quantico. He returns just to be revealed as a traitor and killed off in episode 11.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Many fans were put off by Episode 9 showing that every single recruit except for Simon thinks that fabricating evidence is perfectly justified, also sardonically noting that this may in fact be the show's most realistic aspect.
    • Likely not entirely unintentional, seeing as the next scene with Simon is him on the phone, talking about corruption in the FBI. The recruits believing that doctoring evidence was acceptable pushed him to believe that the FBI might not be the best way to do good.
  • Another example would be Shelby blaming Alex for ruining both her life and career after her affair with Clayton Haas went public, even though it was a result of her not thinking about the consequences of such actions.
  • The show tries to make the audience view Clay as a tragic hero that puts doing the right thing ahead of himself... for not cheating on his fiancée with Shelby, a woman he's attracted to but barely knows.

---