How do I usually begin these again? I forgot. Well, we're into it now so I guess it doesn't really matter, now does it? We've both made it through another year, and as is customary I am going to talk about some computer video games I played in that year. I will say that it wasn't as many as previous years. Doing two big projects like the zombie one and the Quantum Leap one, along with real life stuff that distracted me in the fall, kept me off of the gaming a bit. It may be something I put more time into during 2023, but I have some ideas for things to watch that might be worth writing about. We'll see. That's a concern for the future, though. For now, let's talk about the year that went past... in games.
Thursday 29 December 2022
Monday 31 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween Kills/Halloween Ends)
Here we are! The spooky night itself, when the kids run around in the dark in masks and want candy from us folks who are staying in and throwing on spooky media. Like this double bill. Actually, to be truthful, I am writing this part the day before because I watched the first movie the night before. I'm a SPOOKY SPECTRE OF THE RECENT PAST OOOOOOO. Basically I knew I was going to cover this film, but I did not realize the finale of this modern Halloween trilogy was also like, available on streaming stuff? So I can just watch both of them and put a cap in the trilogy. You get a double treat tonight, a metaphorical full size Snickers bar from my house. Let's hop on back to Haddonfield, Illinois, and encounter that Michael Myers again starting with...
Saturday 29 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Mandy)
Thursday 27 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Cure)
Tuesday 25 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (God Told Me To)
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| THEY'RE BRINGING LOVE, DON'T LET THEM GET AWAY!!! |
Monday 24 October 2022
Doctor Who First Impressions: October 2022 Special (Power Of The Doctor)
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| Remember when Doctor Who was locked in a booth and regenerating, like in 2010? |
Sunday 23 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (Scream [2022])
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| THESE BETTER BE YOUR FAVORITE SCARY MOVIES!!! |
Saturday 22 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Coraline)
Thursday 20 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Cube)
Tuesday 18 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (Gamera 2: Attack Of Legion)
Monday 17 October 2022
A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History (Epilogue)
Basically Al would have become the quantum leaper, and the major goal would be the search for Sam. There's something really sweet and moving to me about that. Not only does it show a deep level of camaraderie and loyalty in Al's heart for Sam, but it shows the fundamental truth of Sam's making the world a slightly better place: he made Al a better person. Not just that being with Beth for years would make him less of a womanizer, but even just being his guide on this journey has enlightened Al enough that now he can take the leap to do good too. All those times Sam changed Al's mind on something, all the times Al learned better from watching Sam's altruism (We'll even count "Running For Honor" here, mad as I am that they took Al that far to make him better), all those times and more. I wonder how the late great Dean Stockwell would have played this new Al, and what sort of things he'd have faced. Would he have gone back to the everyday microcosm, or would he be set loose in the new wild macrocosmic foundations Season 5 built? We'll never know, but I do know this: Al changed for the better on this journey, and so did I.
Al the bartender, or God or Time or Fate or whatever Bruce McGill was, asked Sam why he started time travelling in the first place in order to get a simple and decisive answer for the ethos of the show. In the same way, let's get a simple question to cut to the heart of the matter. Frezno Inferno, blogger friend of yours and mine, why did you decide to watch this old time travel show from the 90's in the first place? I wrote it all down at the start of this, but let's get back to it in short. I had grown tired of the long-running sci-fi stuff I was into becoming utterly macrocosmic and going up their own asses, forgetting the human for the sake of their own references. I let all that venom out all at once, showing the psychic wounds of my internal self before retreating into a quantum leap accelerator of my own for this. This show, a show I hoped would have no big continuity, no needless references, just a series of period pieces about helping ordinary people with real-world concerns.
Oh, I got that alright. I got that in spades. In a way, I wasn't ready for just how real Quantum Leap could get. That mission statement of real-world concerns mixed with the less politically correct era of the 1990s to make a show that you could not get away with today. I know there's a new Quantum Leap out now, but I cannot imagine it doing some of the shit this old show did. Racists, rapists, reprehensible people... it showed them all and did not flinch from putting their evil on display. Sam and his mission were to shine a spotlight on the best of humanity, and to do that he had to battle the worst of humanity. The people who say slurs maliciously, who commit injustice against minorities, who flaunt getting away with sexual assault... we battled them all, and got to show them a thing or two. Quantum Leap was unflinching in what it could do, and the new show can only be defanged in comparison because that's just how time works. There's no way in hell it would have people openly say the slur words, like N's or F's or R's. That's just how material social progress works, but at the end of it all I have to admire that unflinching realism just a bit, even if I don't like hearing those words.
Point is, Quantum Leap in its realism was miles away from what the other sci-fi shows had to do with just allegory, given changing times. When I talked about "The Color Of Truth" I compared it to Doctor Who's "Rosa", and how the former did shit the latter could never dream of doing because it was Doctor Who and not that kind of show. If ever you need a case for throwing the sci-fi/fantasy blinders off your eyes and looking at the real world, this is it. Quantum Leap was my gateway drug, and though I still enjoy those sci-fi shows I did get what I wanted out of this. I got those real stories about the real world in a way that mattered, uncomfortable as they might have been. For that I can't thank Quantum Leap enough. Some of those stories were rocky and shook my faith, but we ended out well when all was said and done. Better than that, in fact. I mentioned above how Al would have grown and changed from all of this. Now let me tell you how I have changed, even just a bit, from this journey.
To put it simply, breaking out of that sci-fi framework and expanding my horizons has helped me mellow out. Look back at the intro to this project and you can see the malfeasance lurking within myself that I was trying to exorcise. A screaming shouty demon with opinions on sci-fi and a deep hurting sense of betrayal. Going through Quantum Leap has helped me quell that demon, just a little. You can see the difference if you go even further back. Let's compare the final seasons of two shows I've covered here, both with Scott Bakula: Enterprise, and Quantum Leap. Both of these last go-arounds alter things substantially, building their own frameworks and foundations and feeling like new iterations of their shows altogether. When it came to the former, I was enraged by what I was seeing. Betrayed, even. The show I loved went away and in its place a bunch of Star Trek nerds were gleefully setting up their status quo. As TOS nerds often are, they fumbled about under the misguided belief that the continuity was the most important thing, and the even more misguided belief that the way to "solve" it was to throw more random Captain Kirk-era references at it. I hated it, and in 2019 I let that venom be known. Enterprise BETRAAAAYED US.
By any measure, the me of 2019 would have went off at Quantum Leap's latter half. I'm sorry to single out "Running For Honor" again, but it's only to show what my past self would have done to it. They'd have eviscerated it, and it would fuel that malfeasance within me further. It would be a betrayal, a black mark on the show that mortally wounded it. If that wasn't bad enough, what would Season 5 have done to me? The celebrity leaps, the gimmick stuff... hell, the goddamn evil leaper story arc! By the end of that shit it's so not about what's going on in the microcosmic world that the story has to deus ex machina a resolution for that in a minute because it spent all its time pissing about with its own lore! The me of 2019 would have lost their goddamn mind, bamboozled again just like with Doctor Who under Chris Chibnall. Faith was had in Quantum Leap, and Quantum Leap blew it for the sake of cheap drama and lore, betraying me yet again and giving me no solace or respite from the hate in my heart.
Good thing I'm not the me of 2019 anymore, huh? I've regenerated. As recent as a year ago, when Doctor Who was airing Flux, I was on this mean streak. Somehow or another, Quantum Leap gave me perspective and got me to relax. I hadn't even realized I'd changed like that until a friend of mine pointed out that I had a tendency of throwing babies out with bathwater when these shows did bullshit I didn't like, and urging that I not do that with Quantum Leap over "Running For Honor". I had no intention of binning all of Quantum Leap because of that episode, and it was realizing that which made me realize "oh shit, I've changed for the better!". You can see it in my approach with Season 5, too; rather than treat its macrocosmic creepings as something going against the spirit of the show, I rolled with it as a bit of experimentation, a new iteration of the show building its own foundation. I knew it was the last season anyway so I rode it out. I won't lie, by about Marilyn Monroe I was getting fatigued with this iteration of the show. I might have gotten madder if there was a Season 6 in this style, but there wasn't.
That's what this show gave me, and what I gave myself. Its metaphorical Sam Beckett leaped into my internal landscape, as its Al calculated the odds that he was here to quell the venom and betrayal in there and teach me how to mellow out and enjoy things again. It's fine to be critical, and it's fine to call shit out. I have done that here, I feel, and I made no concessions over calling out stuff I did not like when I saw it. Crucially, it's what you do after that matters. What do I do after Quantum Leap? I use what I learned, and move on to other things. I leap on, like Sam did. Before I do, a final fond farewell to this time travel show which kept my summer interesting. I'll say it like this, so you know the impact you've made to me. Quantum Leap... you did not betray me. We did not always see eye to eye, but you did not betray me and I hold no grudge to you in my internal landscape. You showed me there's a better way, and for that I thank you.
And now I move onward. I know what the next show I'd like to cover will be, but we're in the midst of fall and fall is a busy time for me. Don't expect a big big thing on the blog until 2023. In the meantime... Well, it's odd. You are reading this in the midst of my Halloween marathon, due to how the timing worked. As I write this, though, it's not even October. It is Sept. 30th, 2022. Today I have to watch the first piece of media for the Halloween marathon, and it is Ghostbusters Afterlife. You already know what I thought, as those words will have come out first. If I may send a hope to my future self, it will be that you took what you learned from Quantum Leap and used it in analyzing that movie. It is a movie which acts against everything you believe in, taking a concept with infinite possibility and constraining it to be about itself with the same four signifiers to remind people of the original movie. Tackle that darkness with the same dignity, grace, and unflinching mellow that Sam and Al bestowed upon you. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: The real test is going to be a week from now, when I have to write about the final Chibnall/Whittaker era Doctor Who story. I am going into it with complete apathy rather than dread, so we'll see how that factors in.)
Good luck, my friend. Best of love to all of you at home. And to Sam and Al, the time travellers making the world a better place... Whenever I think of you, in this wild internal landscape they call Frezno Inferno, a smile will cross my face. With warm serenity, I will be excited to recall your travels, and a simple little phrase of jubilance will pass through my thoughts, in honor of you... and it's the only way I know how to end this journey fittingly. It is, simply...
Oh boy.
May 24th - October 17th, 2022
Sunday 16 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Old)
I say try because I bounced off of this movie hella hard. It is not as if this movie's premise is too rock fucking stupid to work. A bunch of people trapped on a secluded resort beach which rapidly ages them, from which there is no escape due to the metaphysical fuckery of the advanced aging giving them the sci-fi bends if they try to leave the way they came? It could work. Some parts do work, like the slow descent into madness of the doctor character or the fucked-up payoff to his wife having a calcium deficiency that eventually leads to body horror. Or the bit where someone's tumor rapidly expands and has to be surgically removed. It is not as if this film is total garbage all around. Other parts, like the kids who rapidly grow up and "play" and then one of them's pregnant? What in the fuck? More to the point, the acting and dialogue all around just put me at a distance from the film. I don't usually complain about that shit, but here we are. And yet, there's still some poignancy, like the scene where the main couple of the film age to death and share one last bittersweet moment together.
Of course, being Shymalan, there has to be a twist ending to it all. The twist ending is that this is all grotesque experiments by Big Pharma, to test out drugs against various conditions by slipping people with said diseases the test drugs and then tricking them onto the beach which makes them old, to monitor how they react to the drugs over a lifetime in one day. It's cruel capitalism at its worst, parading around in a "needs of the many" mask. OH, YOU WANT TO TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THE BEACH? YES! YES, I WILL TRICK YOU AND YOUR KIDS ONTO THE BEACH! I CONDEMN YOU TO DEATH IN THE NAME OF MY RESEARCH! The end of the movie papers a line about how this whole scheme gets uncovered and the people behind it punished in the end, but like... Man, why didn't you make a movie about that? Shymalan kind of did, I guess, in that this was what was happening all along. On another level, it's just a microcosm of people getting old rapidly and surprise, it was capitalism. M. Night Shymalan has done what I thought impossible: he made a movie critical of capitalistic death drive at the expense of ordinary people and made me bored of it. I honestly just should have rewatched A Cure For Wellness again, if that's the kind of spooky movie I wanted tonight, and you should too. Let's just leave this movie to age to death on the beach and something something I'm done.
Saturday 15 October 2022
A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 5 (Quantum Leap Season 5) [5.4]
Goodbye Norma Jean: I'm divided on this one. It does have some good little moments of humility and a nice comparison to make with Sam's leaping, but on the other hand... it's about the death of Marilyn Monroe. A real famous person who died far too young, a tragedy... and one that's too big for Quantum Leap to change. Let's just defuse that tension now. Sam does not alter history massively such that Marilyn lives to old age. Like the ending to "Lee Harvey Oswald", the show is forced to play that trick of putting Quantum Leap's status quo in a slightly worse position, such that Sam changing the future for the better results in our historical status quo. I could almost stop there, but that wouldn't be proper, now would it? Let's see what's in here.
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| Happy birthday, Mr. Beckett... |
Well, here's where we get our first "slightly worse history made better" approach, as Sam and Barbara accompany Marilyn to a glamorous beach party. She's alone for five minutes with a guy when she has a bad reaction to a drug and starts ODing then and there. The episode's implication is that in Quantum Leap's original timeline, this is where Marilyn Monroe died. Sam does CPR and manages to save her life, though, so that's a slightly better future made. It's also around here where we reveal that Barbara is lying about who she is, and is actually an aspiring actress herself who is trying to sabotage Marilyn's career and jumpstart her own. In one of those trite second act misunderstanding moments, Marilyn doesn't believe Sam's accusations and fires him.
Well, she should have, because Barbara gets her nice and drunk the next morning and then goes off to stand in for Marilyn at her next big movie audition, reading along with Clark Gable of all people while Sam, despite being fired, still tries to get Marilyn up and running again for her big audition. There was a nice tender moment between them earlier, before the mistrust, where Marilyn lamented that she wasn't really Marilyn, and that Marilyn is an artifice, a show business alter ego that isn't the real her. There's a lot about acting and performativity that can parallel with the idea of Sam and his quantum leaping there, and it's genuinely nice. (INTRUSTION FROM THE FUTURE: This will come up in the finale again, so let me just remind you of all that Don Quixote stuff from back in Season 2's "Catch A Falling Star" about artifice and acting and performativity. Just something to keep in your back pocket before we end things here.)
Well, Sam does get Marilyn to her audition, and this is the other thing that he gets to "change". The audition is for a film which will be retitled thanks to a remark Sam made to try and cheer up Marilyn: The Misfits, Marilyn's last before she ODs in 1962, as she sadly did in real life. In the end, it's a nice little episode, though interacting with major famous history that can't be changed for the better without imagining the worse and saying that our status quo is better? I don't know how I feel about that approach for the show. Thankfully I don't have to think about the limits of it for too much longer, because we've got another gonzo supernatural one on the docket.
The Beast Within: Ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, vampires. All of these got the same basic framework of a Quantum Leap episode about them, which I have detailed more than a few times as they've come up. This episode takes the same approach and applies it to Bigfoot. You would think that would make me upset again, as I spent half of "Blood Moon" groaning at how repetitive this framework is getting. This episode doesn't exactly fix it, so much as it grafts an engaging episode of the show that could stand on its own onto the supernatural one.
It's 1972 and Sam is Henry Adams, a Vietnam vet voluntarily living up in the mountains of Washington State with another war buddy named Roy. Roy suffered a head wound in the war and now has violent seizures, which Sam needs to get Roy medication for to save his life. Henry also has a big fur coat, and as Sam leaps in Henry is trying to steal pills for Roy from the house of a young boy named Daniel Burke, who's obsessed with Bigfoot and is convinced the big thing hanging out of his bedroom window is said cryptid. Daniel's mother Karen and his stepfather, town sheriff Lucas, do not believe him. Lucas, however, knows Henry well.
Things get more complex as Daniel sneaks out of his house at night to go Bigfoot hunting, finding Henry and Roy in the morning and hanging out with them. Sam decides he has to risk a confrontation with Lucas to get Roy his pills, and this ends up getting him arrested by the blinkered sheriff. Daniel and Roy, meanwhile, go Bigfoot hunting and this now will end with Daniel falling into a crevice and dying while Roy dies from a seizure. Sam manages to appeal to Karen to let him out of jail, and the pair make it up the mountain (despite Karen running her truck off the dirt road offscreen) to try and save Daniel. Lucas is there to hold up his shotgun, but he relents. He gets to try and confess to Karen the truth about John's death, but she knew all along and still wanted to marry him. That's enough to make John be decent, and they save Daniel and get Roy his pills and all seems to be well.
Except hey... when they get back to Karen's truck, it's been moved back onto the road. That's weird, but helpful! Everyone but Sam heads off in it, and before Sam leaps you know what's coming. YES THAT'S RIGHT, BIGFOOT WAS REAL! BIGFOOT WAS REAL AND SAM AND AL SEE HIM OH MY GOD LET'S LEAP! Now see, this is how you do a supernatural episode. Graft a normal episode of the show onto it and use Quantum Leap's supernatural framework as an accent, not the whole show. I really like the story they choose to tell here, about disenfranchised Vietnam veterans and their guilt and grief. It's a good episode, which also happens to have the gonzo ending of Bigfoot. Speaking of gonzo... Well, the next one isn't exactly gonzo, but it is significant. Quantum Leap is breaking its "within Sam's own lifetime" rules, as... a little treat?
How it came to be, and sort of predestining it together. Sam leapt into the middle of a battle, and it is chaotic and hellish. Not quite so much as Vietnam, but there's cannons and muskets and Sam actually gets shot in the arm and has to hide from Confederates. He eventually is given refuge in a barn but the owner of the place, Olivia Covington, is loyal to the Confederacy and thus takes the northern Sam prisoner. Olivia Covington will also Sam's great-grandmother, so now Sam has to play matchmaker and get them together. In addition to the usual hot and cold budding romance, we're also playing it against the period backdrop of the USA ripped in two. It's a neat enough gimmick for Season 5, I guess. What else was going on with that war at the time?
Oh right, they were fighting over whether or not black people had rights. It's left somewhat ambiguous in the show, but Olivia's farm here is one of the stops for runaway slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad, and her one remaining bit of... let's call him "hired help", Isaac, is a part of it. Sam wants to help Isaac and the runaways any way he can, and he also tells them how great it will be in the future when the fight for stuff like freeing the slaves and equal rights for black people will be won. Please put a pin in the fact that he tells Isaac civil rights will be won in the future, it will come up at the end.
Oh yeah, and we need an antagonist for this shit, so how about some Confederate racists? Yeah, old Southern racists in their grey uniforms suck. Sam bluffs them earlier by pretending to be Olivia's cousin and putting on a fake-ass Southern drawl, but later they come back and are about to raid the barn, so Sam has to pretend to have captured Isaac and the other runaways in order to defuse the situation, banking on them letting their guard down later so he can stage an escape. Having to play buddy-buddy with the racists of history is never fun, c.f. "Justice", but at least in the climax of the show Sam gets to punch these racists and escape along with Olivia and the runaway slaves. So that's good! John Beckett and Olivia will get together, and they'll continue the Beckett family line such that Sam will be born. Even better!
Then one last little surprise, a good old-fashioned "Sam Beckett Done A History", where Isaac, free at last, decides to give himself a surname and chooses... King. To which Al helpfully tells Sam the family line of, particularly noting a very famous King a few generations down the line. Yeah, Sam helped to free Martin Luther King's ancestor. And told this guy all about civil rights and stuff. Look, I have been nicer than usual to the creeping macrocosm of Season 5. I've been genuinely intrigued by how unique things feel compared to before. This? I don't know. I can remember way way back in Season 1, with "The Color Of Truth" where I liked the restraint of not making Sam the secret inspiration of civil rights, and just one guy doing good. On some level it feels like the show forgot that lesson. On the other hand, you could say he's repeating the lessons and morals of MLK back to the latter's ancestor, creating a predestination paradox where that inspires itself. I don't know. It's a unique leap, but it didn't hook me that much... and the macrocosm isn't about to abate any time soon.
Memphis Melody: Well, the penultimate episode definitely is marinating in macrocosm. In 1954 Sam has leapt into an aspiring singer, a dude you may have heard of called Elvis Presley. This is one of those good old "balance" leaps, where Sam has to make one thing right while making sure another thing doesn't collapse on the other side. In this case, he wants to help a girl named Sue Anne also follow her dream of a singing career... but the balance is uneven. On the one hand, the microcosm that is Sue Anne and her anxieties and insecurities which Sam needs to help her with. On the other, the massive macrocosm that is making sure Elvis's career jumpstarts exactly as it "should" in original history.
I really don't know. Like, at some points, it seems that the biggest disaster isn't that one girl will end up in a bad marriage, but this famous guy won't get to release all his songs like we know in the real world. In a way, I'm not talking about the episode anymore, but what it represents. This is the second to last one. After this, Quantum Leap goes away in 45 minutes. So, in some mad sense, this is Quantum Leap going back to its roots in a macrocosmic sense. As a child of the 80's I have enjoyed my time with Quantum Leap, more or less. It also cannot be denied that much of Quantum Leap is basically boomer aesthetic nostalgia. Burgers, rock and roll, 50's cars, letterjackets, that whole aesthetic. What's more emblematic of that than hopping into the king of rock and roll?
It's a little short, but that's all I want to say about this one. Another bit of stunt leaping for the radical Season 5, and one focused on a big celebrity. Between Marilyn and Elvis, the show seems to be toeing the line of macrocosm a lot... but toe no more. It's time to confront it, once and for all. The radical Season 5 has to end now, and Quantum Leap itself is going to go with it. The end is just on the horizon. Won't you join me one more time, for the finale of it all?
Mirror Image: And so we've reached the end of things. In 45 minutes, Quantum Leap goes away (for 30 years) and thus has to wrap itself up. For me, it does it in perfect bittersweet fashion. This finale is everything I wanted from a Quantum Leap ending, that I didn't know I wanted until I laid eyes on it. I have to approach things a little different. As Sam does in this episode, I must admit my one regret during this journey. We'll talk about his, but mine is that I somewhat failed again. I tried to promise myself not to turn these writeups into mini plot summaries. I failed in that regard, and I can see it on the page as you can. I can't go back and change it like Sam does, but I can do it right one last time here. I can just share the feel of this final story, and what I took from it.
Last week (as of writing this up finally on Sept. 29th) I was on vacation in a place very special to me. I go there every year, and I always bring a piece of my current media obsession with me to share with the place. A piece of media which means a lot to me, broadcast within the four walls of those place. A place so steeped in personal meaning and resonance for me, only added to by sharing this beautiful thing. For 2022, Quantum Leap was the only pick, and I uncovered a gem on my Internet journeys: the original 1989 TV broadcast of "Genesis", with all of its vintage commercials intact. All of that is to say that, before I reached Quantum Leap's end, I looked back at its beginning. A phrase coined itself in my mind as I rediscovered where I'd started this journey, back in late May. The first episode has an ethereal ethos, a hazy dream only further amplified by the VHS fuzz and lower quality of its airdate, a little bit of 1989 trapped in my tablet screen.
"Mirror Image" full circles the whole thing, reflects back on itself and gets right back to March 1989 in a lot of ways. Throughout the Season 5 writeup I have been marveling at the new foundation this show has been building. This was a bold regeneration of Quantum Leap, going places the old show would never dream. There were wild experiments, multi-episode story arcs, expansions upon the lore, celebrity cameos and famous leaps... I want to preface this all by saying that I do not hate what Season 5 tried to do. It would be easy for me to connect its shakeups to another Scott Bakula show, Season 4 of Enterprise, and be really unfair and talk about Quantum Leap going up its own ass and betraying me. I won't do that, and it would be a flimsy foundation. Still, we must admire that foundation Season 5 of Quantum Leap built one last time.
"Mirror Image" makes us fall right through it and back into the ethereal ethos. This is not a Season 5 episode, despite airing in it. It even opens with the old theme again, and not the bombastic Season 5 one. Talking about the actual episode is odd, because while it does follow the path of a narrative, it's more a philosophical introspection on what Quantum Leap is and was. For setting's sake, it is August 8th, 1953 in Pennsylvania. In Elk Ridge, Indiana, a little baby Sam Beckett has just been born. In more than one way, then, we've gone back to the beginning. The beginning of Quantum Leap, and the beginning of Sam's life. Most of the episode takes place inside one bar, and with Sam's chats with its bartender and various patrons.
We must discuss the bartender later, but amongst the various patrons are people and names Sam remembers. An old bearded guy named Gooshie. Frank and Jimmy LaMotta. Mo "Captain Galaxy" Stein. They are the people Sam and the viewer remember, but they're not quite them. (Annoyingly with invoking Jimmy, we get one last use of that word...) The editing in the episode feels disjointed and off as well, cutting away from what should be big things to get us back into the bar, known as... Al's Place. The bartender is not Dean Stockwell, but he is another instance of the show going back to its roots. He's played by Bruce McGill, an actor who actually was in "Genesis" as a guy named Weird Ernie. I forget if I talked about Weird Ernie or not all that time ago, let me check. I did not, because I was trying to be concise. You don't need to know who Weird Ernie was, just that he was there.
It would have been really bold to go full Evangelion series ending and just have the show be reflection and introspection, but there's some other stuff to break up the plot. Like the not-quite-Jimmy and Frank duo getting caught in a collapse at the local mine, and Sam trying to help while an old disabled miner who's been grumpy the whole show also manipulates things to make sure the miners are saved. This guy's around for a good half the episode, another strange and ethereal character which makes you wonder his motivation. Any attempt to figure him out vanishes when, as the day is saved for these two, he leaps and vanishes.
At this point explanation also vanishes away in a sea of ambiguity. It's never clear exactly what's going on here in this place, and one could come up with half a dozen explanations. Is this Earth? Purgatory? A quantum zero dimension? I don't know, and I like the not knowing. What I do know, though, is Sam's introspection. Here in Al's Place, wherever or whenever that may be, Sam Beckett shares one of his biggest regrets to the bartender. It was Beth. Beth, the one true love of Al who thought him dead in Vietnam and moved on. The heartbreaking leap back to her time, where Al tried so hard to fix history only to let go and share one last dance. Sam could have done it. He could have changed things, but he didn't... and that he regrets.
We'll come back to that, but there's deeper introspection and a whopper of a reveal from that bartender. It may have been God or Time or Fate which started Sam on this quantum leap... but then he asks the simple question to Sam, one so simple it's a wonder it has never been asked before. Sam, why did you want to time travel in the first place? The answer is simple and to the point. To make the world a better place. Of course it was... and well, hasn't that been what Sam has been doing all this time? Improving not just the lives of the people he directly influences, but the lives they touch, and the lives those people touch, and so forth. That had nothing to do with God. That was all Dr. Sam Beckett, time traveller and altruist. The one controlling these leaps and Sam's destiny all along... was Sam.
And so, Sam eventually accepts that. We get one last scene with him and Al Calavicci, which ends a bit abruptly for a final episode (but I'll talk more on that in the coda) and isn't quite the final goodbye I wanted for these two. Still, Sam will more than make up for it. He's a force of good, putting right what once went wrong in the universe, and so he decides to put the biggest right wrong and fix his deepest regret. It's April 1970 in San Diego, California, and Beth Calavicci is dancing with herself. A strange man appears in her home, promising he means her no harm and is a friend of her husband's, before telling her that Al is alive in Vietnam. As Beth tears up, we zoom in on that old photo of Al, get a leap effect and then...
Cut to black, and three little title cards meant to end the series. Beth and Al remained married for 39 years, a loving family made, a right put wrong. They had four daughters, those daughters touched other lives... ripples of positivity in this crazy mess of a world. Al, for all his fumbles and faults I've lambasted him for over this journey, deserved this happy ending. Well, I say happy, but it gets bittersweet with its final title card. I knew it going into this show, and I expected I would be okay with it in the end and I am. If you don't know, well, you followed along 97 episodes of a Quantum Leap blog-along. You don't give a shit about spoilers now.
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.
There are ways to take that statement which I'll save for the coda. For now... that is the end of Season 5. That is the end of Quantum Leap. I absolutely loved this finale, even if it was not really a finale to Season 5 if that makes any sense. At the last second, we flinched away from the macrocosm for introspective microcosm. This is a thoughtful and ethereal story where Sam learns things and truths about himself, reflects on his journey so far, and moves on to the next stage by doing one last good thing for his best friend. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, and an absolutely fitting finale in my eyes. Thank you, Quantum Leap.
Before we get to that coda, let's sum up Season 5 then. It was... strange. I use the metaphor of Doctor Who here, because that's a big long-running show that often reinvents itself, not just in lead actor but in aesthetic and style and ethos. Season 5 feels like a regeneration for Quantum Leap, albeit one that only lasts for one season. It's a bombastic and grandiose show, for better or worse. The better comes when its experimental nature and willingness to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks actually works out. Stuff like the Oswald two-parter, or "Killin' Time", or the multi-part stories. On the other hand, macrocosm and lore are dangerously close to a show going up its own ass; to becoming a show about itself rather than the concerns of the material world. The evil leaper trilogy best shows the danger of this approach, three stories which just use the real world as a battleground for pretend time travellers. It must also be said that late into the season, the invigoration I felt was starting to fatigue me. I don't know if I would have been fond of a Quantum Leap Season 6 that kept going in this style. Still, since it was the last season and all, I was good and rolled with the punches and wasn't too offended. It took some risks and shakeups, and not all of them worked but I kind of admire the attempt.
Now, one last dance. One last dance like Beth Calavicci shared in April 1970, before things were made right. One last summation of what Quantum Leap meant to me, before I leap away from it...
Friday 14 October 2022
Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare)
I keep mentioning Freddy Vs. Jason, so let's signpost that with a fun fact: As big dumb 80's slashers, I value the Freddy films way higher than the Jason ones. I find Friday the 13th to be very one note "the teens have sex and then I cut their throats" nonsense. Freddy, on the other hand, has had two things going for him to catch my interest time and time again. The first is the novel approach of killing people in their dreams, which opens up all sorts of creative liberty and gonzo approach to how to kill the teens. So, for instance, you have the madcap Looney Tunes-like malarkey going on in this fucking movie. Parasitic hearing aids that amplify sound and make a deaf kid's head explode, or the bit where Breckin Meyer gets high and passes out and goes into a TV world where Freddy is playing Nintendo to try and kill him before whipping out a knifed Mattel Power Glove and winning at the game/plunging Breckin Meyer into the depths of hell. Yes, this is rock fucking stupid and a total decay from the original horrific concept of Freddy, and it's like a shock of cold water in three years when Wes Craven comes back and makes him scary. On the other hand, I kind of don't care. This slasher film slapstick approach, this... slashstick, let's call it, is gloriously entertaining. It reminds me of Busta Rhymes roundhouse kicking and electrocuting the balls of Michael Myers in Halloween Resurrection. People hate that movie for that, but I am here for that dumb shit.
I said there were two things these Nightmare movies had going for them over other slashers, and the second was interesting themes and subtext. From the gay undertones of 2 to the state of mental health in 3 to grief and loss and memory in 4, there has usually always been something really intriguing going on under the hood of these movies beyond just kids getting killed in their dreams. Nightmare 5 kind of skipped out on this, to the film's detriment, but you better believe there's something happening in this movie. It's about the cycle of abuse. All of the troubled teens in the movie are victims of abuse in one form or another, from one extreme to the other, and in their deep dark nightmares they are confronted by it; some killed by it. For all the slapstick Nintendo dork shit happening with Breckin Meyer, it's notable that the first enemy in his game is his jock dad yelling digitized cries of BE LIKE ME! before Meyer beats him over the head with a tennis racket. You get other more serious cases of abuse with the other characters, and it creates an interesting tonal whiplash.
We haven't even gotten to the main lead, Maggie, yet. Who, spoilers for a 30 year-old movie where a slasher monster dies, is Freddy's daughter who was given up for adoption after his heinous crimes. It's implied that Freddy losing his daughter is what drove him to come back from the dead as a vengeful dream killer ghost, taking everyone else's children from them. Indeed, much like Halloween Resurrection earlier, the film opens with his victory. He's killed every kid in Springwood, Ohio, and now after a quick recharge from killing off part of this movie's cast he wants to go out into the world and kill more. Every town has an Elm Street, and Freddy's an immortal unkillable thing thanks to some bullshit dream demons... but forget them for a second. Let's focus on that cycle of abuse, as we learn in the climax when Maggie dream dives into Freddy's twisted mind, IN THREE DEE, and finds his own lurid history of abuse at the hands of his own father. Freddy harnessed the pain, laughing it off and deciding to inflict it instead. He's convinced of this cycle. His father abused him. He became a child killer, in life and in death. Now he's convinced it's in Maggie's blood, and that she'll put on the glove and be unable to resist becoming a monster.
Maggie, who saw her own mother killed at the hands of Freddy, responds to this by ramming Freddy's own fucking glove into his chest, and also a pipe bomb, and blowing him up. The cycle of abuse isn't a sure thing, much like the guaranteed continuation of an 80's slasher movie series. Sometimes you can break out of it, shove a pipe bomb into its chest, and break free. The cycle's broken, the dream demons are dispersed, and Freddy's fucking dead, baby. That's the movie, and I'm honestly a little impressed by it. I would be remiss if I didn't close by mentioning that it was directed by Rachel Talalay, who would go on to direct all the Peter Capaldi finales of Doctor Who. Those are spectacular fucking episodes, and her direction in this is sound. I really don't know much about that side of things, but the way this movie looks is just stunning. You can tell the same person directed Heaven Sent, is what I'm saying. Amusingly, I saw her name pop up again in a franchise I've grown invested in: I was sitting here watching the fourth episode of the new Quantum Leap, only to see that "Directed by Rachel Talalay" credit and perk right up. Still, that's neither here nor there. I should close out fittingly, since the movie opens with a quote by Nietzsche about dreams (and also "Welcome to primetime, bitch", for some reason).
Freddy is dead. Freddy remains dead, and we have killed him.
Thursday 13 October 2022
A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 5 (Quantum Leap Season 5) [5.3]
(TW: sexual assault attempts, animal death)
A Tale Of Two Sweeties: Oh, god. To use some modern parlance, this episode was cringe. I don't mean that as an insult, as it's designed that way. You are supposed to wince and cringe and be somewhat uncomfortable watching this one, but not in an overtly triggering way like any of the unflinching looks at serious subject matter like... take your pick out of Season 4, you're bound to hit one. Even with its wince factor, there's still enough actual tension here to keep you invested in places. It's 1958 and Sam has leapt into Marty Elroy, a real piece of work. Marty is an absolute scumbag of a human being, a bad gambler who owes a lot of money to a lot of bad people, and who has many other flaws. The biggest, and the tension inherent in the episode, is that he is a bigamist. He has two wives and two families, one in New York and one in Florida, and neither knows about the other. Marty Elroy seems to have shit all figured out, until his New York family come down to Florida to surprise him. Oh boy. SHENANIGANS ENSUE!!!
On the advice of Al, Sam has to try and juggle having two families without either of them learning about the other. Watching Scott Bakula playing the earnest and kind-hearted Sam Beckett trying and failing and flailing to play this real piece of work of a man is some sort of comedy. A special highlight has to go to Sam taking both families to the movies at once, shuffling back and forth between seats. Dear God in heaven, did he leap into Marty Elroy or Jack Tripper? The episode's smart and plays at both wives going to find Marty at the same time, which leads you to think this is where Sam will be caught. Nope! Phew, glad we avoided that! Oh hey, it's some guys threatening to break Marty's thumbs if they don't pay them 2000 dollars in 24 hours. There's the tension!
Which Sam defuses, once they pick him up a day later after more flailing around trying to keep each wife from catching on, with a last-minute bet against a terrible horse named Lead Balloon with 40 to 1 odds. In a shocking coincidental twist, the horse wins the race and Marty's debts are paid off with no thumbs broken. Al is helping in his own way while this is happening, as the youngest daughter of Marty's New York family is going to run away. She's young enough that she can see Al, and so Al has a heart to heart with her and tells her how lucky she is to have a mother to take care of her, as Al grew up an orphan. Out of nowhere in this farce is this genuinely really sweet moment between Al and this kid. It's nice and welcome.
I mean, it's a big dumb comedy episode meant to make you wince and cringe at how awkward it is and how much more awkward it would be if Sam gets caught having two wives. On that level, I can't exactly be mad at it. It's not going to be my favorite or anything, but it has its moments. Mostly the Al stuff with the kid, or how genuinely subversive it is for Sam to finally go "You know what, fuck this pretense, I'm shattering it, make a better future out of that". Marty Elroy sucks, that's kind of the point, and now we're done with it and we can move on to hopefully better things.
Liberation: I moved on to better things, alright, like another vacation in between episodes. While I was there, other big shifts happened! I am writing about Liberation on the morning of September 23rd, and thus this is the first Quantum Leap writeup to be done in a world where the new show exists. I haven't seen a frame of it and am saving it for when I finish... do we call it Classic Leap now? Like Doctor Who? Well, whatever it is, we get to talk about this episode of it... and I'm walking into a bit of a minefield. Ah well. If I bravely faced talking about all the other heavy shit, surely I can handle taking this on. Welcome to the Quantum Leap episode about second-wave feminism.
From here the leap splits into a dual balancing act of sorts. On the one hand, you have George Sanders, who will leave his wife due to this sudden change where she's suddenly a big scary feminist and not his happy little housewife any more. As such, Sam has to be careful not to poke that sleeping old bear any more than he already has. On the other hand, one of Diana's feminist rallies is going to get violent, involve a struggle with Chief Tipton for his gun, and end up getting people shot. So, Sam has to prevent tragedy from occurring at the feminist rally... but if he goes to the feminist rally he's disobeying the orders of the head of the Sanders household and George will leave Margaret. Tricky.
Now, one of these plotlines gives me some pause, and the other has at least an okay resolution. In the end, it all comes back to the idea of the system and the status quo. George, Tipton, Tipton's son, and even those letterjacket assholes are all nice and comfy with the way things are in 1968. The men are the breadwinners and go-getters, and the women are happy homemakers who cook pot roasts and do what the men say. It's just The Way Things Are, and it's a happy little coincidence that The Way Things Are has them on the high ground of privilege. All this outlandish talk about feminism and equality? That's not The Way Things Are! That's something different entirely! That's terrifying!
You can really see it in an early scene where Sam suggests that George promote one of his outstanding lady employees instead of Tipton's son, and George thinks it's a great idea... because he'll save money on wages. Sam is appalled that George would pay a woman less for the same job, but George is just confused. Paying a woman less than a man? That's just The Way Things Are, Margaret! Wh-- WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CHANGE THE WAY THINGS ARE? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? WHAT'S GOTTEN INTO YOU? To George, changing the policy to pay a woman the same as a man is so utterly out there as to offend him at the suggestion. Build on that mentality all the way up, and you have how the men in this one react to the idea of feminism. Even Al is a little weird about things, but the episode does take care not to shove him over the line a la "Running For Honor": yes, he's devil's advocate in this one so Sam has someone to argue about the virtues of feminism with, but he also mentions that Tina ended up siding against him on the issue. So there's that.
Then we come to Diana. Lord, okay. Why don't we just talk about that climax? It's where I bristle a bit. Over the episode, Sam has tried to get her on the path of nonviolent protest, like Ghandi or MLK Jr., so that she doesn't go guns blazing on her rallies and ending up killing people. For the sake of drama, this approach does not work, and we're still going to get a climax with a gun. We also learn from Diana that she was an abuse victim, and so lashing out against a police officer like Tipton using unnecessary force against her is kind of a trauma response. Anyway, here she is in a boy's club, struggling with Tipton as Suzanne pulls his gun from his holster and Diana grabs it, just in time for Sam to come in and talk her down...
And, hmm. The way Sam talks Diana down is... something. It makes sense from his perspective, of course, but that doesn't mean I have to love it. The basic argument is urging Diana to fight the system of oppression from within the system itself. They're occupying a gentleman's club, so Sam asks if she tried to join it officially. No, they'd never accept a woman's application. Why? It's in the bylaws. Then change the bylaws. You can't, it's in the Constitution. Then change the Constitution! Sam's talkdown is that Diana shouldn't rebel against the system, but to use the system to change the system. That gets her to calm down enough to drop the gun, and Al informs Sam that after a bit of jail time, Diana will do just that and work on constitutional law.
I get that this is the path Sam would take. I really do. On the other hand, there's a bit of a smell here that I have to waft out. The idea of the system being this innocuous tool used by good and bad players alike, one that can be used for good as well as evil? It's a lovely idea, and maybe at one time it was true. I can't speak for 1968 or 1993, but all I can do is look at it from a modern lens. I am uncomfortably reminded of the political benchmarks of Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who, namely "Kerblam!" and "Orphan 55". The idea that the system can't be at fault, just the actors within it. The idea that you can do good work within that system and make better things happen by working within the framework of that system. At one time that might have been true. Women in America did change the laws and the systems for the better to get more equality, and it was an admirable fight and they should be applauded for it.
Hey, what's that in sight of our modern lens? Oh, just the system with a bunch of deep-rooted bad actors ripping away a bunch of reproductive rights. Just a bunch of old Republican fucks entrenched in the system for life turning what they believe into their policy, material social progress be damned. Just a bunch of people that you can't oust from the system, even if you are good and play within its framework. So, from a modern lens, this resolution doesn't quite work for me. I can't blame the show for not looking 30 years into the future and seeing Roe v. Wade being overturned. What I can wince at it for is that same mentality which was present in "Animal Frat": the idea that we future people know how this fight for social justice ended, so all you people in the middle of it should just relax and stop being so radical because everything is going to work out. Yeesh.
At least the resolution of George and Margaret is something nice. Yeah, you can't fuck with the system, but you know what you can do? Make one old guy realize that change and progress isn't the scary boogieman he makes it out to be. Instead of mourning the loss of his happy homemaker, he can get to know the woman she's changed into and love her for who she is. You know, keep up those vows he made at a church altar. That's very Quantum Leap, and I at least appreciate that... and, see? It was a side character who held outdated views who learned to be better, who we also never have to see again! That's how you do shit like that, I'm looking at you again, "Running For Honor"! Liberation is... a bit of a mess, albeit one that has its heart in the right place. Though I compared its climax to Chibnall-era Doctor Who, the fact remains that I'd throw this one on over any of his era in a heartbeat. Speaking of, instead of throwing on one of his episodes, let's throw on another Quantum Leap episode.
Dr. Ruth: Season 5 continues to be this radical thing that throws anything and everything at the Quantum Leap formula to see what sticks. In this case, we have an honest to God celebrity leap. Granted we did leap into Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was more infamous than famous, and also was portrayed... shall we say unflattering. This, on the other hand, is Quantum Leap getting an actual contemporary celebrity onto the show and having Sam leap into them to do his usual Quantum Leap thing. The celebrity in question, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a famous sex therapist who opens the floor for all sorts of frank discussions on the topic. On paper this sounds like a dreadful gimmick, a bit of stunt casting to bolster ratings that flies right into the jaws of macrocosm and gets away from what this show's heart and soul is. That's not the case at all. In fact, this is one of the highlights of Season 5 so far.
Really, you could rewrite this episode to be about any anonymous sex therapist with a platform, and it would still work. The fact that it's Dr. Ruth, one the audience and characters recognize, is just a little bonus treat. This episode's got a little bit of everything for everyone. It's wickedly funny, it's charmingly sweet, and terrifyingly real about a serious subject. It does this while managing to keep these tones from bleeding into each other. The comedy bits don't leak into the mature subject matter to spoil the affair and make a dissonant atonal mess. The show does a little of everything Quantum Leap does well, and does it extremely well. I'm amazed. The fucking Dr. Ruth episode of Quantum Leap is a high-water mark. Let's talk about those tones a bit, then.
The comedy beats come from Sam, and it's the familiar setup of "Oh boy I have to act like I know what I'm talking about with this leapee's field of interest!". Except Dr. Ruth's field of interest is answering unfiltered questions about sex and sexuality in a mature and healthy manner. Meanwhile, Sam in this episode is written as a shy flustered mess when it comes to the topic. It's not quite prudish, more that Sam is a wholesome farm boy who stammers and sputters when he hears people ask about multiple orgasms or premature ejaculation. What is a little weird, though, are the brief moments where Sam psychosynergizes with Dr. Ruth. Yes, this leads him to be more confident and give out better advice, but... Well, if you've never heard Dr. Ruth speak before, she has a German accent. Scott Bakula replicates this whenever Sam psychosynergizes, SO AT SOME POINTS IN ZE EPISODE HE VILL START TO TALK LIKE ZIS UND IT IS QUITE A SILLY COMEDY ACCENT! It's a little silly, but again, it only happens in the parts of the show that are meant to be silly. Not in the serious parts. Let's ramp up and talk about some more serious stuff.
This is another leap where two problems have to be fixed at once, and immediately one can be seen. Two of the workers on Dr. Ruth's radio show, Doug and Debbie, are having relationship trouble. It's once again another hot and cold romance portrayed on the show, but it's less frustrating when Sam is on the outside of it playing matchmaker. You get good advice from Sam's perspective, and then also good advice from Dr. Ruth's perspective whenever Sam psychosynergizes, which keeps on almost working before one of them puts their foot in their mouth and offends the other one, leading to them arguing again. Sam's eventual solution is to make them hash out their relationship on the air, which he sort of does on the fly? Just "OKAY LISTENERS NOW WE'RE GOING TO HEAR DOUG AND DEBBIE'S ARGUMENT ON THE SHOW, GO GUYS!". Weird, but it works and the two end up together.
Ah, but now we get to the serious stuff. One of Sam's first calls he has to take on Dr. Ruth's show is from Annie, a woman asking for advice on how to stop her boss from flirting with her and not taking no for an answer. Though Sam can't give her much help before she has to hang up the phone, he does meet Annie at a book signing and talks to her a bit... before she flees. As the camera is lingering on a man in a long coat staring at the book signing, we can only conclude that she's fleeing her boss who is stalking her. Sam can't get back to her in time again, but things seem serious. They only get worse as Annie calls Dr. Ruth again, worried about hearing noises outside her apartment before suddenly dropping the phone. Sam rushes to her apartment and finds Annie passed out after a gas leak... which he suggests that maybe Annie lit the stove before she heard those noises and forgot, flooding the place with gas. Except, Annie can't find the match in her trash can...
Great, so now we're literally gaslighting Annie. Sam eventually convinces Annie to quit her job, helping her clear out her desk only to come face to face with her ex-boss, Jonathan. Sam and Jonathan have a chat after Jonathan recognizes Dr. Ruth, claiming that actually Annie is the sexual harasser and not him. It couldn't be me, I'm just a normal man! I'm just an innocent man, I have a wife, it's that woman, she's crazy! Yeah. Uh huh. Sure. You can't trick me with the uncertainty game, Quantum Leap, 'round these parts we believe women. And we're right to, because Jonathan is indeed an entitled monster who thinks Annie is just playing hard to get, and he wants her, and so he is going to have her. We get to see, in shockingly real detail, the kind of shit that Katie McBain struggled with at the hands of Kevin Wentworth. Let us not beat around the bush. Jonathan breaks into Annie's apartment with full intent to rape her, and the two struggle for an uncomfortably long time while Sam tries to get there.
The second Sam bursts through that door, Jonathan shifts into victim mode and starts crying OH THANK GOD, DR. RUTH, THIS CRAZED WOMAN WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER, LOOK AT THESE WOUNDS SHE GAVE ME WHILE I TRIED TO DEFEND MYSELF, I AM THE VICTIM HERE! This fucker. This fucker. I will repeat to Jonathan what I told Kevin Wentworth in "Raped". You're not here with the eldery Dr. Ruth Westheimer, an old lady you can beat the shit out of to make your escape consequence-free. You're stuck here with Scott Bakula. So another rapist gets roundhouse kicked into next week, with the added indignity of the fact that Jonathan will now live with, among other heinous crimes, the fact that Dr. Ruth kicked his fucking ass.
And that's the Dr. Ruth show. A little bit of everything, and all of it done well. Like I said, on paper this had the potential to be disastrous. As it played out, it kind of worked. It worked because it was well-made first and a celebrity episode second. It's not exactly the kind of thing you can get away with every week on this show, but it's very likely a one-off given we only have a handful left. As a little treat, it manages not to be too macrocosmic. It even gives us the leap out from Dr. Ruth's perspective in the waiting room, just to be cute and do another thing the show's never done before. I really liked this one, what's next-- A VAMPIRE WHAT THE FUCK??
Blood Moon: It is once again time for spooky supernatural shit to intersect with Quantum Leap. This time it's vampires. As haunting and gothic as the aesthetic of the episode is, and as wild as the human story of the show is, I have to be honest. This one let me down a little, and it's because it's in Season 5. Season 5, which has already been daring and strange and willing to experiment and test the limits of what Quantum Leap can be, is playing this supernatural story about vampires exactly the same as any other supernatural episode of the show. The formula hasn't changed, and in fact I'll just tell you it now: Al is spooked out of his wits and convinced that Sam has leapt into some situation that proves the supernatural force in question is real. Sam, the skeptical scientist, tells Al that he's being a big superstitious baby and that there's a logical explanation for everything that's happening. The mysterious events of the episode play with that ambiguous tension, never committing one way or the other until the climax which reveals that things did have a logical explanation all along. Sam solves the crisis and saves the day, and just before he leaps out there's a last-minute bombshell that reveals oh shit, the supernatural thing was real all along!
Again, that tension comes from wondering whether or not Carrington and Drake are vampires, as the blood moon ritual goes back to the early days of vampiric legend. Certainly Drake and Claudia are ominous enough to make it a possibility as one watches. They're not, though. They're play actors who put on fangs, but are deluded enough to want to kill Alexandra (and Sam, too, when he tries calling shit off) and drink their blood in order to absorb their souls and power and grow stronger themselves. Indeed, in one of the crueler moments this show's offered, they kill Alexandra's dog offscreen. Uncalled for, absolutely. You vampire LARPers are already going to kill Alexandra for her blood, and you're not really vampires so you're not hungry... so why do away with the dog? Nasty.
In the end, that gets at something interesting, a truth obscured behind all the spooky vampire myth. Eccentric aristocracy which drains the lifeblood out of other people to secure its own power? Vampire, or deluded nobleman? Drake is the former, utterly crazed and power-mad enough to kill and play this sick little Dracula game. Quantum Leap is getting at the truth behind the vampire myth, and taking it down a peg. Indeed, it's ultimately a lightning bolt which takes out Drake as he holds his ceremonial dagger high on the castle ramparts. An act of God, I guess. So vampires aren't real, and they're just sadistic rich people playing at blood rituals because they can. Oh, except Sam doesn't have a reflection at the end. OOOH CARRINGTON WAS A REAL VAMPIRE OOOOOOH! It's a fine spooky episode and even has a neat bit of subtext to say about the rich. I just wish it had done more to break out of the usual supernatural story framework of the show. It's become a bit old hat, especially with the brave steps Season 5 has taken. Speaking of brave steps...
Return Of The Evil Leaper: They're baaaack. I knew this was coming from the episode titles, of course. Something so monumental as evil counterparts of Sam and Al had to come back at least once. Indeed, the show makes no bones about it. It opens with "Evil Leaper I: Reprise", a quick primer from "Deliver Us From Evil" on who Alia and Zoey are and what they tried to do in that episode. This retroactively makes that episode the first of a trilogy about the evil leapers, as the next one's also tied up with them. I haven't seen it yet, but that's a job for right after I finish watching this.
Oh yeah, and his girlfriend Dawn isn't Dawn, but ALIA THE EVIL LEAPER OH MY GODDDDDD!!! The show sort of has its cake and eats it here, as Sam shakes hands with Dawn and the leap disguise falters... but only for us. Now we know that Dawn is Alia, and she'll be played by Alia for the rest of the episode, but Sam and Al don't know that. Alia seems to be plotting a scheme where she pretends to like Arnold only to humiliate him at the homecoming dance, creating a worse future. Pretty small-scale for an evil leaper, but they can't all be big ones on the dark side too I guess. Alia's holographic advisor Zoey sees Arnold talking to himself, mentioning an Al, and already knows what's going on... and so Alia escalates things, pretending to break up with her boyfriend and implying she's leaving him for Arnold, so that both Sam and Arnold will get in trouble. This is when Sam finds out that Dawn is Alia, and things get... interesting. Alia claims that after her failed leap to ruin the LaMotta family, Project Evil Leap or whatever we want to call it tortured her for her failure? She also seems to agree to a plan from Sam to save her and get her out of there, Sam figuring that if they leap together then maybe that will free Alia from the clutches of Project Evil Leap. Alia agrees, but I am still quite suspicious of her and not sure if she can be trusted.
Lest you think there's nothing ordinary and microcosmic happening in this show, it is. In 1999 Al is talking with Arnold, and eventually thanks to analysis he figures out why Arnold is running around saving people in a cape. As it turns out, Arnold lost his parents to a wild gunman when he was 7 years old, unable to save them and thus harboring the guilt as he tries to do selfless and risky acts of heroism in atonement. This kid is basically Batman, and Al is psychoanalyzing him and telling him that it wasn't his fault and that it's okay to just live his life without risking it as some sort of penance for surviving. It's heartfelt, it's moving, it's human, and I really like it.
As for Sam and Alia, they play chicken with Neil Patrick Harris except one of his goons cut Arnold's brakes, so the pair have to bail. As Sam hops onto her, the pair begin to leap, red evil leap energy being overtaken and merging with Sam's blue good leap energy... and the pair now find themselves prisoners in a women's prison, the guards sadistic and eager to wring a confession out of them for a murder. I have no idea where things will go from here for Sam and Alia. I'd like to hope for some redemption for Alia, but if it doesn't come and she was playing Sam all along, then I won't write off the whole show or anything. It'll be disappointing, but I'll roll with it. This part had some good stuff, namely Al and Arnold in 1999, but I admit I am intrigued by what else this encounter with Project Evil Leap has in store for us. Let's find out!
Revenge Of The Evil Leaper: Well, it certainly concluded things with Alia and Project Evil Leap. It was messy in a few places, but it did manage to do that. The main danger with this sort of macrocosmic lore is that it subsumes the ordinary stories that Quantum Leap is known for; the kind of stuff I came to the show to see. The everyday goings-on of the women's prison in 1987 (hey, the furthest into the future we've ever leaped, practically on the doorstep of the series premiere!) melt to be little more than a battleground for the time travellers in this story. That being said, there is a good alchemical connection that ties the microcosmic story of this prison with the macrocosm of fighting against Project Evil Leap.
Sam and Alia have leapt into two prisoners; Sam is a convicted murderer named Liz Tate, and Alia a drug possessor named Angel Jensen. The pair are in trouble for the murder of another inmate, Carol Benning, and the mean prison guards take delight in roughing the pair around for any hint of insolence. Left alone in a janitor's closet, Sam manages to sever any link that Zoey could use to trace Alia by putting Alia under hypnosis and using the psychosynergic imprint of Angel Jensen in her head to make Alia believe she is Angel, thus making her impossible to pin down by Project Evil Leap's future computers.
For now, though, Zoey doesn't know that Angel and Liz are the leapers she's looking for, and so she plays along as the warden in asking about the death of Carol Benning. Sam manages to convince her to let him go back to the prison block to ask questions and investigate. Now here's where the show could have tied itself in more to the microcosm of Sam doing a good deed and discovering the truth. We don't get that, and the resolution to this murder mystery will be... a thing. There's all of one scene of Sam talking to an inmate about what she saw before we get right back into the machinations of Zoey and Project Evil Leap, as well as Sam and Alia's escape attempt.
There is very little revealed about Project Evil Leap here. Lothos apparently has some sort of grand plan which Zoey has been working for years to make a reality, by ruining ordinary lives? I kind of like that it doesn't go crazy with lore. Maybe it would have in Season 6 of the show, but there is no Season 6 so this is almost certainly all we're going to get. More to the point, we have Alia as Angel locked in solitary confinement and traumatized out of her goddamn mind because Angel is claustrophobic. The one prison guard in this place who isn't a bully, Vivian, takes Sam down to see her and then things escalate enough for Vivian to take Alia out of there while Sam replaces her in the cell with another unconscious guard who tried to stop them.
Zoey confronts Sam, and the pair end up touching and the jig gets revealed. Cue the climactic prison escape, with Vivian helping Sam and Alia to get out as Zoey and her guards scour the place for them, Zoey determined to make Alia suffer. It's here we get the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm. Vivian's reason for doing this is that she wants to start doing good in the world, which seems to resonate with Alia. As we hit the climax, the pair of Sam and Alia are cornered by Zoey, ready to finally get her revenge and blow Sam away. Alia pushes him out of the way of the shotgun blast...
...and leaps, in a cascade of blue light. That's what all this was about. I mistrusted Alia in the last episode, wondering if she was really legit. It turns out that she was. She wanted to break free of her evil ways, and be a person who does good things. Like Vivian, stuck in a sadistic system of prison brutality, who decided today was the day to do a good deed. Oh, and who's that sitting at the head of this sadistic system? Why, it's Zoey. This was a story about Alia's redemption, about breaking out of Project Evil Leap and becoming better. I've no idea where she leapt to, but one hopes she's free. Too bad Zoey is about to shoot Sam... but he shoots first. I'm not sure if Zoey is killed here because she leaps out and the warden is fine, but either way, she's gone.
And then we wrap up that intriguing murder mystery with some deus ex machina. I'm usually not one to complain about a sprinkling of magic dust from the "Plot Convenience Fairy". That's not the type of media critic I am. With this, though, I can't help but balk at how neat and tidy it is. In the final minute of the episode, Al via Ziggy just explains the entire murder mystery plot. How the warden got Carol Benning pregnant, forced her to have a makeshift abortion, and how it went wrong and Carol bled to death. Oh, and the particularly sadistic prison guard in this episode was in on it. Yes, it's bringing corrupt misdeeds to light and showing that this prison complex is as noxious as Project Evil Leap, but it goes to show how the macrocosm time travel story crowded out any room for intrigue and it all had to be wrapped up in a neat bow, and fast, once Zoey was out of here.
Regardless, it is a good episode of the show. I like that it did come on the side of giving Alia some redemption and freedom from her evil project, and comeuppance for Zoey. Maybe she's dead, maybe she's not, but Project Evil Leap is still out there. Thames is still alive in the future, at least. One wonders what the deal with them and Lothos would have been. Ah well. Ending aside, I do like that it tied the microcosm and macrocosm together, and I enjoyed myself. Now let's settle down for a nice ordinary story about-- MARILYN MONROE??
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