Monday 13 June 2022

A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History (Introduction)

(Well, here we go again. Another long-form project of sorts that I hope will be finished before late September, when my writing business kicks into high gear with the Halloween blogging and NaNoWriMo. Until then, it's the summer! Warm sun, sandy beaches, grilled delights, cool drinks... and the beginning of this project, the long-awaited critical analysis/trip log of Quantum Leap. Before that, though... Well, I will let my past self explain. It's a little long and meandering, but put your trust in me and follow along as I grind my axe finally, won't you?)


Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about betrayal.


I am writing this on May 24th, 2022. Night Of The Loving Dead Part 2 is currently being published on the blog as I write this. By now you may have read the coda, where I go into an existential crisis over the show threatening wild shit like aliens or a metaphysical battle between the sentient forces of prosperity and curse. Zombie Land Saga put me in an awkward spot of worry, the first time the show has ever truly done that to me. I've been here before, though. Over the last five years, I've voyaged to some of the highest heights in my internal landscape. The media I've talked about has moved and changed me, inspiring me on a fundamental level to think and do and create better. I sincerely cannot thank it enough for that. There's no such thing as perfect media, though, and on several occasions these important things have betrayed me and my trust. They've let me down, and those compounded letdowns compared to my own beliefs and tastes have led me here today, to exorcise the negativity in my heart and vent my frustrations once and for all on this page here.


The project I'm about to start here is going to be a look at the 90's sci-fi series Quantum Leap, episode by episode. Before I dive in, both metaphorically and literally, I need you to understand how I came to this series. I need you to understand the depths of my frustration with tentpole sci-fi media, and how each and every one I loved ended up breaking my heart in some way. When I use a word like "betrayal" to describe my slow building dissatisfaction with these things, I have two definitions for it. The first is if the media actively contradicts the values and resonances that I saw in it for the sake of cheap pathos and drama. The second is if the media starts going way too much up its own ass in continuity references and callbacks at the detriment to those aforementioned values and resonances. A show that was about something becoming an Ouroboros about itself. Hey, I think I used that metaphor in the Zombie Land coda. 


Well, I have to strike while the iron's hot and get this out there before I watch a frame of Quantum Leap. Come on, coffee shop pal. This time we're not just sitting down with a cup. This time we're ordering to go, and I'm taking you on a tour of the damaged parts of my internal landscape. I've shown you the beautiful parts, but now let's go to the darker parts. This is where the things I loved let me down, and once I get it all out there? Well, I'm hoping you'll have a deeper understanding of me, what I believe in when it comes to media, and why I'm diving headlong into an old 90's show as my chosen form of redemption. Take my hand. It will be okay, I promise. I want to show you my pain, so that I may heal from it and you may understand me better. Wouldn't you like that? I know I would, and I know I like you for having stuck around with me for this long. I hope you like me that much as well. Okay. Let us begin.


The beginning of this streak definitely came with my decision to watch through a bunch of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ferried along by a thoughtful and wonderful guide, I saw just what they saw in the show. The best of humanity travelling throughout a cosmic sea, seeing sights and wonders but also nightmares and terrors. The goal, as always, to explore... but not just to explore what was out in space. To explore the depths of their own souls, and learn and grow and be inspired by the wonders and terrors out there. There's a reason the entire show is framed by John De Lancie's Q putting humanity on trial. He wants us to prove we can be enlightened and better people out in the deep reaches of space. For the most part, on my curated journey, the show succeeded at this. Dig just a bit under the surface, though, and you find terrible things. Places where I ventured off the beaten path and found my own terrors to learn from. TNG mostly follows on the first definition of betrayal for me, betraying the resonances and inspiration I gained from it for the sake of bad drama. Let me tell you about an episode that wounded me greatly, if only for a bit.


"Hollow Pursuits" is an episode I have only seen once and can never watch again for fear of actual trauma. It introduces one Lt. Reg Barclay, a recurring character who ended up in one of my favorite episodes of the show's run ("Realm Of Fear", for you keeping score) and it does so in horrific ways. Reg Barclay is an anxious mess of a man who's not the greatest at his job, and worried that his colleagues don't respect him. He's proven right by the writing. The senior crew of the Enterprise, the main characters of the fucking show, shit-talk this poor guy behind his fucking back. They even make up a name for him and call him Broccoli, but they don't ever express their frustrations to his face. They're duplicitous assholes who are nice to him in person. It's all "Oh hey yeah Barclay, that's good, you're fine, see you later" and then as soon as he's out of the room it's "GOD THAT BROCCOLI IS AN INCOMPETENT ASSHOLE WE SHOULD TRANSFER HIM OFF THIS SHIP AND GET RID OF THAT FUCKING IDIOT!". As an anxious wreck myself, this is a deep-seated fear of mine, a worry that causes me actual panic and distress to think about. The show that personifies the utopian ideal of understanding and enlightenment is having its main cast validate those horrible thoughts and do it to another anxious wreck of a man, all for the sake of some cheap fucking John Hughes-level understanding of social conflict. At that point, I don't care what the rest of the episode is about (embarrassing portrayals of the crew in Barclay's ideal holodeck escapism, for the record.). How dare you. How could you?


Still, the good parts of that show stuck with me in early 2018 as I went into... Sailor Moon. It's interesting to me how much I've grown and changed in the four years since. What I once saw as an unimpeachable classic on its best days has lost a little luster over time. Like TNG, I curated it down to about half its length, but even then there was some bad shit. I once used a Patreon request to get my friend Sean to watch some of the early episodes and write about it. To make things short, he found them a little mean and wrote more about Re: Cutie Honey instead. It was a good writeup, but man do I still feel a little lousy for suggesting media that struck a bum note with a pal. (One day we'll watch The Straight Story, Sean, which I hear is the best Star Trek movie ever made.) The point is, Sailor Moon lit a fire in me of hopeful ideals and idyllic naivete that better things were possible. I will love it for that forever, and always remember when it was a classic to me. As for how it wounded me? How about the intermittent arc in the second season where Mamoru tries to break up with Usagi in a grand noble attempt to save the world and it's all a big scheme by his future self to make them love each other more by tearing them apart? It is a vile thing, born out of needling in added conflict for the sake of it and betraying the show's own values of trust and understanding for the sake of toxic misunderstanding bullshit that could be solved with a genuine fucking conversation. Then there's the "heel turn" by Sailors Neptune and Uranus during the sheer narrative collapse of the finale of the series, and this really soured me. I saw those two as having grown and learned that better ways were possible in the third season, thanks to their exposure to the ways of naïve idealism. To revert them back to that grim practicality plan and really play the role of pretending to be totally evil baddies on the side of the antagonist for an episode just to pad out the finale a bit more still makes me wince to this day. They learned nothing because if they did, then we wouldn't be able to wring out another episode's worth of needling conflict to make Usagi and the audience squirm. I've grown and changed, but my feelings on this haven't. It was unacceptable to the me of 2018, and it's unacceptable to the me of 2022.


Still on the magical girl track, let's talk about the show which succeeded Sailor Moon in my internal landscape. Let's once again talk about Symphogear. I've still not fully regenerated from it, so it's still a rosy show in my mind and one of my absolute favorites. That doesn't mean it hasn't let me down, though. It took a while, but it did. In season 3 it brought back the crazed Dr. Ver (PRICK), a selfish psychopath with delusions of becoming a hero adored by the masses and willing to destroy most of the world to rule over its survivors like a king. His defeat the previous season had a great message about not letting him die as a martyr but instead living and paying for his crimes. Season 3 completely ignored this, giving him an active role in saving the day in the climax before killing him off and letting him die a martyr. That really didn't sit right with me. The next season had an entire plotline about brain diving into a character's mind to find the secret to powering the titular Symphogears. It was love, but the way it chose to express this was by showing said character's abuse at the hands of her mother, only to then go "oh it was okay, she loved you because she looked sad whenever she had to hit you, and you turned out stronger in the end because of it.". Again, that didn't sit right with me at all. And, you know, may I just say that I had a friend who tried out the show on my gushing insistences and had to drop it two episodes in because the typical gropey anime humor present in those early episodes actually triggered them? This thing I loved sincerely set off unpleasant memories in someone, all for the sake of dumb tropey jokes. Another friend has been watching with me, but has definitely been made uncomfortable by some of these elements as well. For a show about mutual understanding and bringing people closer, all that shit added was a wedge to drive someone away forever from this thing. That's not the path to the utopic ideal, and again I feel kind of lousy for having stirred up such bad thoughts in someone. I still love this show for its good, but it is not without sin.


Ah, but now we come to the main thrust of why I want to escape into Quantum Leap. The big three and their various betrayals. Put simply, they pulled the second betrayal. They went too far up their own asses in a continuity spiral and made me lose whatever elements I was vibing with them for. This is the kind of shit I was yelling about in the Zombie Land Saga coda, where a show about zombie girls overcoming the stereotype of zombies to save their home expanded into a metaphysical battle of blessings and curses with possible aliens. If there's a poster child for where this disdain began to blossom in me, it can be none other than Enterprise. Enterprise had its definite ups and downs and is not perfect in any sense of the word, but when it was on form it intrigued me. It had hopeful messages about the future gaining inspiration from looking back on its imperfect past, much like I do by looking at old media. It was a rocky relationship, but Enterprise and I had some sort of connection. Then the latter half of the show began. Its third season became a grim gritty serialized war arc where multiple war crimes were committed by our protagonists as some "needs of the many" justified bullshit. There were some semblances of interest and coming together to unite against a common foe, but it was like trying to fight the tide. As bad as that was, the fourth season just completely broke up with me. The hopeful themes about the future gaining inspiration from the past? All but completely snipped. (I managed to find the last remnants of them in the final episode, but I am basically the only person out there who likes the finale to Enterprise.) Enterprise descended into continuity porn hell, referencing the old 60's series over and over and over and FUCKING OVER again. Star Trek itself descended into a hellish landscape that just could not fucking stop reminding you of shit Kirk and Spock got up to, and the franchise seems to have been that way for... well, ever since. I lost most interest and haven't checked out any of the new Star Trek shows since, because they still don't pass my sniff test of not having rolled in that pandering referential stink. Maybe I'm missing out. If you watch and enjoy them, live your best. I don't know if my heart can take it.


Around the same time as I was watching Star Trek circa 2005 eat its own tail, Star Wars was doing the same damn thing. My Star Wars fandom has been a little more lax over the years, but let me explain the strange generational line I straddle with the films. In 1995 I got to see the original trilogy for the first time, unaltered, and enjoyed them. In 1997 for my birthday I got to own the movies myself, as the new Special Editions. I was pleased to own them and excited to see the new changes. (The only ones which annoy me to this day are the ones added to Return Of The Jedi: the rest I have learned to live with, unlike many Star Wars fans.) In 1999 I was in a theater in Nova Scotia, watching a new Star Wars movie on the big screen. So, you see, the original trilogy is a childhood classic but the prequel trilogy were "my" currently releasing Star Wars films. I enjoy the six films. What I enjoy most is George Lucas's unwavering determination to just throw shit in there to see what sticks. Sometimes this works, like mixing his love of Kurosawa cinema with Flash Gordon serials. Sometimes it does not, like adding in Buster Keaton-esque slapstick with Jar Jar Binks. Point is, George Lucas is mixing in a bunch of weird shit to Star Wars influenced by the media he saw as a baby boomer kid. I appreciate that creative mixing, even if it does not always work. When Lucas sold the movies, JJ Abrams took over the first shot at creative mixing and passing the torch, and Star Wars became an Ouroboros. The nostalgic shit that Abrams threw at the wall to mix into the mélange of Star Wars was... Star Wars iconography.


All three of the sequel films do this, but it's how they do it. I do not care for The Force Awakens. I've tried three times and I just do not care for it. Mixing Star Wars with Star Wars to add more Star Wars to your Star Wars did not work for me. The Last Jedi, on the other hand, is a Star Wars film I quite liked. It did that mixing thing like before, but it was mixing things emotionally rather than via sheer iconography and pointable Star Wars-y things for you to recognize. It was a story about the failure of that iconography, and how the next generation could be inspired by it but also learn and grow and change by it. As Yoda's ghost says in the film, "we are what they move beyond". It's a very on-brand message for me, one that I hope I've lived up to in my own growth and change beyond the media which inspired me, and I still think fondly of the movie. Half of the world lost its fucking minds at this, and the Disney corporation acquiesced to their toxicity.\ It pleaded and begged for people to give them money. We'll do anything. We'll bring back Lando. We'll bring back Palpatine. We'll cut Kelly Marie Tran's part in the movie down to 90 seconds. We'll retcon all that Rey shit about her not being related to a legacy character. More Star Wars shit you recognize, just please come back. It was pathetic. There was a halfway decent story buried in there about choosing your own legacy, I'll grant, but buried under such a cowardly walkback for the sake of helping a bunch of 40 year-olds pretend that it's 1980 and they're 8 years old again? No thank you. With the Disney+ shows bringing back young Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett and all that, Star Wars is firmly stuck choking on its own tail. Choke on it, then, if you're so goddamned hungry.


Which brings us to the biggest franchise thorn in my side yet... and, regrettably, it's Doctor Who. While everything I just said was happening, Doctor Who was in the 13th Doctor era. Somehow over that four year time span the show managed to pull off both forms of betrayal to me at once. It betrayed its own values by turning the Doctor, a chaotic character who opposed oppression and rigid control in all its forms, into a fence-sitter fighting for the Status Quo and The Way Things Are. The kind of person who would defend space Amazon against a violent strawman trying to destroy a capitalist hellscape because he believes better things are possible. Or give her enemy up to the Nazis and make a joke about them seeing the real him as she peaces out. Things like that already made me not vibe with this Doctor Who era for obvious reasons. In hindsight, I almost admire Series 11 for its insistence on not falling back on recognizable Doctor Who iconography until its New Years' special had a Dalek. It failed more often than it succeeded, but on some level I give it the same general brand of respect I gave George Lucas above for daring to try something new.


And then Doctor Who started choking on its own fucking tail. 2020 was when the show finally teetered in my mind, falling into the same hellish pit that Star Trek had. Whereas Star Trek seemed incapable of doing anything without invoking the original 1960's series, all of Doctor Who in 2020 seemed to suddenly magnetize towards a unified ritual devoted towards a specific era of its past. The David Tennant years, 2005 to 2010. Big Finish box sets, Titan Comics crossovers, whatever the hell the Time Lord Victorious was... it was all centralized on modern Who's most popular Doctor coming back. This would not be so bad if the main show didn't join in on it, too. The Master is back as a cackling evil villain to be foiled. Gallifrey is destroyed for no thematic reason beyond resetting the Status Quo back to 2007. Fob watches! Judoon! Captain Jack! All of this culminating in the one-two punch of Ascension Of The Cybermen and The Timeless Children. The former I hated because it was cloying teasing nonsense delaying the finale to wave some mystery keys at the audience. The latter makes The Rise Of Skywalker come out the better in comparison to it. Doctor Who is turning blue in the face with its own tail in its mouth as it rewrites the fundamental history of the show and makes the titular character the lynchpin of her planet's society and power... to explain one slightly weird moment in a story from 1975. Utterly embarrassing. 


It took a year and a half later, during the tail end of the Flux story arc, for me to really lose my fucking mind and patience with Doctor Who. Like Ascension, it was a tangled mess of dangling plot threads being teased before us with a voice going "ooooh maybe I will resolve something but you will have to keep watching to find oooooout". The final episode proved it had fucking nothing, dropping those threads like nothing because it was bored with them. It had nothing to say that was resonant with any aspect of culture or humanity. Doctor Who had become a show about itself, spreading beige Doctor Who-branded gruel all over its own tail and trying to lap it up while it choked to fucking death. Somehow this conjured up the end of this era of the show, but I'm even more worried. As I write this, Russell T. Davies is taking over from Chris Chibnall for the next era of Doctor Who. A true sense of throwing out the shitty substitute for Tennant-era nostalgia in favor of the original architect of it. Ncuti Gatwa has been cast as the next Doctor Who, and I am excited to see his era. However, one big fucking horrific snag is in the works for 2023... and his name is David Tennant. Yes, for the 60th anniversary he is back along with Catherine Tate. Rumors are abound as to how and why he's back, but the worst case scenario would be Jodie Whittaker retro-regenerating into him. An absolute regression back to 2008, When The Show Was Good. That's not moving forward and growing to me. All I hear are the strangled gagging sounds of this thing I once loved trying to breathe as it shoves that tail further down its fucking throat. As I write this I genuinely do not know if I have it in me to watch whatever Doctor Who content comes out next year with David Tennant. I may just have to wait for Gatwa and an actual fresh start, and someone to GIVE THIS SHOW I LOVE THE GODDAMNED HEIMLICH MANUEVER ALREADY BEFORE IT FUCKING DIES FROM ITS OWN DISGUSTING NOSTALGIA-BAITED BILE!!!


So that's where we are. All the sci-fi things I love, suffocating in my eyes under their own needless bullshit. It's even spread to other things I enjoy: Ghostbusters Afterlife, a film I will be covering in October for spooky blog time, does this for its own franchise. I kind of liked that 2016 film, and Afterlife seems like its own Rise Of Skywalker: a desperate pathetic plea to angry nerds to pacify them and let them pretend that they're 8 again and all the big scary changes have been rolled back. Unlike that film, however, this appears to have fucking worked on the Ghostbusters fans, and that's so horrific to me that I may end up metaphorically hurling here. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Since I wrote that, Jason Reitman has announced a sequel to Afterlife, describing it as "the next chapter in the Spengler family legacy" . Like both Doctor Who and Star Wars before it, Ghostbusters seems determined to narrow its infinity of potential down and reduce its story to This One Legacy Family You Recognize being the only people who can catch fucking ghosts. Good Christ.) I need an escape from all of this. Until Doctor Who, at the very least, stops fucking around with this pandering and maybe becomes fresh again. The idea for my escape and fitting alchemical revenge came in the form of Quantum Leap. Yeah, that's what all of this is about. I need you to understand my mindset going in, and this meandering scrawl was it. Let me try and sum up what I'm hoping to accomplish here. A thesis statement, if you will. Those usually go at the top, but who are ya, my college professor? Okay. No more fucking around. Let's try and be concise.


The antidote to all of this is what I used to see in things like Doctor Who and Star Trek, and still saw in things like Sailor Moon and Symphogear. A story that cares less about increasingly complex lore and calling back to it, and more about resonating with something deep and personal and introspective. Smaller stories about helping ordinary people learn and grow and change, just passing through, doing the right thing. There are many pieces of media which do this, but Quantum Leap feels like a fitting one for some personal redemption reasons. It's a sci-fi show, yes, but it seems like one that actively refuses to get bogged down in continuity and story arcs. Standalone episodes about one guy, a doctor no less, moving to a different place every week. Literally occupying their place in the world (I don't know how the titular quantum leaping works yet), learning about their lives and interpersonal connections and conflicts... and doing his best to make things better over the course of 45 minutes before moving on. That's it. Empathy, compassion, understanding, and a desire to make a difference in the world via positive action. That's the kind of antidote I need. 


Not only does this sound a lot like the structure of Doctor Who or Star Trek (leaping into another life is just like the TARDIS or Enterprise travelling to another time or planet) but without the lore to bog it down? It stars Scott Bakula. Scott Bakula, as I know him, is Captain Archer on Enterprise. The guy who was out there inspiring the future to be better during the first half of Enterprise. A man who learned and grew on his own cosmic voyage. A man to aspire to. Then Enterprise betrayed me, and the legacy of that man changed. I tried taking it back with a revenge replacement project on Enterprise's final season, but no. This will be my revenge. You continuity hound bastards took Scott Bakula from me. I'm taking him back in the name of my internal landscape, of my own utopic ideal. I'm even structuring the project like I did Enterprise: quick capsule reviews of every episode, written right after I finish each. A real-time roadmap of my quantum journey.


Do I expect it to be perfect? God, no. I've been burned before. Besides, there are certain rustlings and things I've heard that make this seem like it won't be perfect. Certain issues with race, or episodes that focus less on ordinary people and more on Big Important Historical Events. I will call them as I see them on first viewing, but I remain confident that there will be more good than bad. That's it, then. No more epic battles for the fate of the universe with recognized iconic aliens invented half a century ago. No more flashy fights with ideological opponents exchanging magic blasts as well as ideals. Time to come back down to Earth. Time for a simple story about helping people, inspiring them to be better, changing things for the better.


Time to Quantum Leap.

2 comments:

  1. I find it very strange that your respite from the tendency of these franchises to disappear up the anus of their own self-nostalgia is a show which I have always thought of as laser-targeting the generalized nostalgia of baby boomers in the last 80s for their own youth.

    I hope this goes yell for you. Oh boy.

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  2. Hi! After this blog was recommended to me on Discord, I just had to check it out. So far you've definitely managed to intrigue me, so hey, good job!

    First of all, I didn't know this would be your first contact with Quantum Leap. That's a very interesting premise for me - someone who has grown up with the show and loves it to bits. Here's hoping you enjoy all the good bits and forgive all the bad ones.

    Second of all, your post about betrayal resonates with me. I've experienced both types of betrayal you describe and I hate them as well. I'd even add a third type of betrayal, one I didn't even think was possible before the 13th Doctor era: the betrayal of quality. It's not just that Doctor Who went bad - it's the fact that it went bad in a way that made it a show about nothing. No message, no moral stance, not even enjoyable entertainment. The writing got so abysmal that the show couldn't even manage being an inoffensive, forgettable piece of pleasant fluff. That's how bad it got.

    Happy leaping and I'll see you on the other side.

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