'Quantico': Showrunner Josh Safran says 'you'll know everything' after season finale

Plus: What you can expect from season 2

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Photo: Jonathan Wenk/ABC

WARNING: The following contains spoilers from season 1 of Quantico. Read at your own risk!

After a season on the run and in the dark, FBI agent Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) will finally get answers — and some sooner than expected. “You’ll know everything,” executive producer Joshua Safran promises. “Before the finale, you’ll learn who [attacked New York], and in the finale, you’ll learn why and how.”

As Sunday’s episode revealed, Drew (Lenny Platt) is behind the Voice, manipulating Alex and Shelby (Johanna Braddy) into planting incriminating evidence into Ryan’s (Jake McLaughlin) laptop and driving away the nuclear bomb built by Will (Jay Armstrong Johnson). So with that, viewers now know who was behind the attacks — but that doesn’t mean the twists are over.

“One of the things you might not know until the finale is how many,” Safran teases. “Some people might be excited at just [answering] who, but we are excited about how and why. The show has been about, what makes someone a terrorist? What makes someone want to protect their country? What makes someone an American? That’s what we saved for the finale.”

To fill in those blanks, the drama’s season capper will bring back familiar faces, like academy burnout Elias (Rick Cosnett), and will include an epilogue with two time jumps that wrap up the story. “I’m not a fan of cliffhangers,” Safran explains. “We’re not leaving anyone’s life in the balance.”

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Jonathan Wenk/ABC

Case in point: With two episodes left, Safran explains that “the last true Quantico episode” — in which we see the NATs train in the Academy during the present timeline — will happen in episode 21, with episode 22, the season finale, showing their graduation. Stories will wrap up there, while in New York, “it’s a non-stop [ride], the end of the rollercoaster,” he says. “It’s the last drops.”

Those last drops will also look ahead to season 2 through the introduction of a critical new character in the final minute and work up to a second season that will maintain the two-timeline structure, but connect them using a central catastrophe. “There will be a crisis that is ongoing that needs to be solved, that characters will find themselves in the midst of, but unlike season 1 — when Alex didn’t know while she was at Quantico that someone might be a terrorist — season 2 will be more integrated,” Safran says. “The present-day timeline will be all about how we believe this crisis is going to happen, and you’ll see it happening in the future.”

The remaining episodes of Quantico season 1 air Sundays on ABC at 10 p.m. ET, with the season finale airing May 15.

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