RUTHFULLY YOURS

ABC’s Quantico is TV’s most multicultural and multiethnic soap opera, and its formula is a nod to ABC’s lucrative Thursday night Shonda Rhimes dramas.

Created by Joshua Safran, Quantico focuses on FBI recruits and their instructors. Most of the students have dark family or personal secrets. Trainees quickly pair off into love affairs among themselves and sometimes with instructors who have already engaged in illicit faculty love affairs. Has anyone here been vetted…ever?

By these “standards,” the most “qualified” trainee is Simon Asher (Tate Ellington), who happens to be the lone Jewish recruit, and who served with the Israeli Army in Gaza. Simon is introduced as a gay man, but soon (10-25-2015, written by Jake Coburn and Justin Brenneman), his gay classmate Elias (depicted as a coward and turncoat) asks him outright, “Are you a patriot? Are you Jewish? Are you even gay?… The only thing real about you is the way you look at Nimah Amin [a Lebanese-born classmate] when you think that no one is looking.”

Only when threatened with exposure by Elias, Simon responds:

“You’re right about me. I am dangerous…. I was in the Israeli Defense Forces. They sent me into Gaza. I didn’t just see things, I did things, things that haunt me every single day of my life. After I got back, living under cover was the only way I could cope with what I did. So I made myself a lie.”

Nimah (Yasmine Al Massri), too, will question Simon’s claims to be gay, and will grill him, “Simon Asher, you’re a Conservative Jew from a…Zionist family, but for years ago you traveled to Gaza to live with the Palestinians, and to this day you never told anyone.”

What is Simon Asher hiding? In the aforementioned dialogue Elias tells Simon, upon learning that he is not gay, “The only thing that bugs me is the lengths you’re willing to go to maintain your façade. You’re dangerous.”

Nimah is hiding something, as well. Simon is literally knocked over when he discovers that she has a twin sister. Has he unknowingly been involved with both? The twins are already being used to infiltrate an Islamic terrorist group. They conceal things because of patriotism, which is demonstrated, as well, by foreign-accented recruit Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) even when she is falsely accused of terrorism.

Simon is depicted as having the most to hide of any of the trainees. Early on in his relationship with Nimah, he tells her: “It became easier to let people believe I was gay, so I wouldn’t show them who I really was. It gave me boundaries, just like you have boundaries.” (11-1-15, by Shafran and Beth Schacter) The “boundaries” refer to the Muslim faith in which the twins were raised. The writers’ message appears to be that soap opera love affairs may save the world since they are the best therapy to connect with the “other” and thus to learn about oneself.

The writers do give Simon rare strength and courage. In an episode written by show creator Safran (12-13-15) he withstands efforts to frame him. Simon manages to retain his cool even while being literally hooked to a bomb. Once Simon is convinced that Alex Parrish is being framed in some terrorist conspiracy (by which Simon himself has been victimized), he does everything possible to help her, aiding her with his vast technical knowledge and skills, even hacking into a computer used by a classmate.

After Simon tries to save the class by defusing a bomb (11-8-15, by Logan Slakter), Elias tells him, “Whatever hangups you have about Gaza, you’re a man who saves everyone and I’m a man who runs from a fire cracker.” So if Simon does not act out of fear, what motivates his chameleon-like behavior? In the series Simon is described more than once as a “savior” of sorts.

Simon remains a very dark or at least murky character for more than half of the season. In the November 29 episode (by Cameron Litvack) he meets with a bearded, Hasidic-looking man (identified in a later episode as Oren Sheref) and they plot over blueprints of New York train stations to get the world’s (not so much America’s?) attention for “turning its back” on Israel, Gaza, and other Middle East suffering (whatever this prattle is supposed to mean).

Yet in the same episode Simon Asher turns in a renowned forensics instructor (Anne Heche) because of a case she presents to the class in which, Simon detects, she tampered with evidence in order to imprison a serial killer who has eluded authorities. Asher’s fellow students are outraged that because of what they perceive to be his self-righteousness, the killer may be released. They tell him that he could have arranged for a quiet reprimand. But he insists that he has done what is “right.” No one seems to care that the instructor tried to murder Simon when he questioned her methods.

Another time Asher is responsible for his class’s failing a character test because he selects three students for dismissal in order to save ten, an approach deemed unhealthy for morale by the faculty (10-11-15, by Jordon Nardino). He explains his behavior by declaring that he does not want to be a “drone” who merely obeys orders, as he did in the Gaza strip, where he saw “what people were really capable of.” Again, reference to Gaza as dictating Simon Asher’s conduct. In this episode he is branded as “creepy freak,” but we are shown that his “creepiness” will one day serve him in coming to the rescue of a classmate.

Why is someone so concerned about doing the right thing conspiring, in Hebrew, to commit bombings in New York City?

Most of what we’re told about the Simon Asher character is found in the December 6, 2015 episode, written by Jordon Nardino. Here, while the class awaits a ruling on the status of one student, Nimah (pre-romance) turns on Simon in front of everyone, calling him a “war criminal” for even serving in Gaza with the Israeli Defense Forces. “I was proud to serve,” he responds. “I believe in a Jewish homeland.” He adds that “they” made him a translator during interrogations, but that he didn’t hurt anybody.  Nimah interrogates, “If you didn’t hurt anybody, who did? Who killed those unarmed citizens, shot at ambulances, targeted hospitals and schools?”  Simon notes that “Hamas hides in schools. They use civilians as human shields.”

Nimah gets the last word: “I’m not defending Hamas. And even if they did this, what you have done is wrong.” Or is it Simon who gets the last word? “War is wrong,” he says.

The writers and producers seem to have postured themselves to claim “even-handedness.”  But the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) did yeoman service in documenting the show’s misrepresentations of the 2014 (and previous) Gaza wars, providing testimony to Israel’s unique restraint to minimize civilian injury. Understandably, these organizations were galled by the dialogue in which Simon discusses (in episode 4) “rehabbing greenhouses bombed by the Israelis,” when it is well-known that Israel took great pains to leave those facilities intact for the Gazans, who destroyed them before launching thousands of rockets at Israel since the 2005 withdrawal. The ZOA study lists references to Gaza in eight of the first eleven episodes.

Simon’s shrill and blubbering tones in that confrontation betray deep guilt, as does the ensuing dialogue. Nimah presses, entrapping Simon with what the show’s writers have emphasized about him, “There is no way you were just a translator. We have seen your skills with firearms. We’ve seen you invent a whole persona.” Simon confesses to the “sin” of volunteering for service in Gaza. But Nimah demands, “What did they make you do?”

Simon divulges: “I was a translator, that’s all, until one day my platoon leader told me they couldn’t find who they were looking for,” so Simon’s task became to get close to the women and to “lure them into interrogations regarding the whereabouts of their husbands.” (Soon afterwards, one of the twins will accept Simon’s romantic advances, anyway!)  He notes that the “platoon leader had gone rogue,” had “snapped from what he saw.” (The suggestion is that the leader did bad things to the husbands, but it is not clear whether he “snapped” before or after, and why.) Simon adds: “I was just following orders.” Does Simon feel guilty because he followed orders (in Nazi-like fashion?) from a “rogue leader” (writers covering themselves?) who violated Israeli rules of conduct?

The writers come across as uninformed and confused and confusing while trying to provide Simon with baggage that parallels everyone else’s. In the December 6 episode, colleague Ryan Booth (Jake McLaughlin) comes to Simon’s defense, “A soldier isn’t a criminal just because you don’t believe in their war.” Booth adds that trainees with secrets “deserve to be here because of their secrets, because of their rage. I saw that soldier in you, I saw that pain, and I get it.”

Does this suggest that Simon’s pain is simply that of any soldier, not only of one who happened to serve with the Israelis in Gaza? Are the writers shielding themselves against accusations of Israel-bashing? Why bring Gaza into Simon’s background at all?

Compared to Simon’s guilt over Gaza, his scheme (in a flash-forward) to stage a “political act,” also discussed in this episode, is depicted as rather minor. With Sheref, Asher conspired to plant “intentionally flawed” bombs on subway tracks under a landmark synagogue and a landmark mosque and to issue a warning in order to get “both sides to talk.” But the writing is so sloppy with reference to “remote devices” that one wonders whether the bombs might have gone off, anyway. Also, why would a Hasidic man (living in a community aloof to Israeli politics) get involved in such a plot, rather than, say, a counterpart to Simon from Gaza?

Here, the writers make a special point of making their Jews come across as “creepy.” Furthermore, we are told that during the “spare time” that Simon had at Quantico while shunned by his fellow students (for being “creepy”), he developed the explosives and started to gather subway blueprints, and that these plans were stolen by insider terrorists who used them to bomb Grand Central Station, killing more than a hundred people! Shades of the ominous Jewish bomb-maker in the prison scenes of the original Bad Boys (1983)?

The writers go to extreme lengths to invest Simon with an air of mystery. But they could have done that without damning him every step along the way.

The abiding impression purposely provided is that assisting the Israeli Army in the Gaza War is something to feel very guilty about, more so even than plotting a bomb scare that enabled mass murder; and that helping Israel warped Simon enough to hatch his crazy plan. Simon denounces and renounces war, but what are Israeli soldiers, what are Israeli citizens, supposed to do when hundreds of missiles are launched at them and many tunnels are built from Gaza to attack their families? Just as the TV season was ending, the New York Times reported that residents of Gaza are terrified that their Hamas leaders are building more tunnels right under their homes in order to attack Israel and to provoke war.

Maybe out of guilt for the way they treated Simon and Israel, the writers do make Simon the season’s “savior.” His sense of guilt, combined with his courage and bravado (“This is my fault. I got to fix this”) propel him to personally drive a van loaded with nuclear bomb (activated by FBI would-be “reformers”!) into a river in order to spare D.C. Nimah’s sister, Raina, tells him adoringly as his friends encourage him and declare their love by cell phone: “Simon, I always knew you would save us.”

The finale, written by Safran, ends with all of Simon’s FBI classmates gathered for his funeral in a lovely mid-century synagogue, leaving this reviewer wondering (1) whether the body of someone who died by nuclear blast should be put in a casket in a room full of people even if it could survive and (2) why real-life synagogue trustees would grant use of their building to this kind of TV fare.

Simon Asher is now finished as a character, unless there is a plan to resurrect him as a nuclear-powered superhero. This is possible, given what current TV and film producers obviously think they need to do with Jews. Quantico wanted an American Jewish antihero martyr with connections to the Israeli Army, similar to the Israeli-in-America Ziva David of the NCIS brand.

It would seem that today’s TV producers and writers — including, or especially, the Jews among them — prefer the most outrageous of Jews. True, they prefer outrageous characters in general over decent everyday folk with basic values. But for some reason their Jews have to be over the top, especially if they have a connection with Israel. Are such Jews regarded as the only interesting, ratings-garnering kind?

TV’s outrageous characters are required to have committed some kind of outrage (for Jews, outrage associated with Israel) in order to achieve greatness through guilt or defiance. Old-fashioned traditional values, whether religious or civic, are just not “dramatic” enough as moral inspiration or motivation for today’s soap opera characters, and certainly not for ABC’s FBI.