A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 1 (Quantum Leap Season 1)

(Hope you made it through that long intro! Now that we're on the other side and you hopefully understand where I'm coming from, here is me talking about the first season of Quantum Leap, episode by episode, a little bit after I watched each one. At nine episodes it's nice and slim, a good appetizer, but every other season has 22 so I'm guessing I'll have to split these going forward. Either way... here we go. Oh boy, as the man says.)

(Continued from Introduction)

Well, here we are again. It's a weird bit of temporal grace, me writing this. It is May 31st, 2022, and this is going to be the last paragraph I write before I watch Quantum Leap. For God's sakes I don't even have a name for this project yet. I will probably come up with something succinct and grandiose involving quantum singularities and microcosms and other weird alchemical-sounding words like that. It's just how we roll here. My coffee shop metaphors fail me 'cause this isn't me sitting down with you to tell you a story. No, this time you're along for the ride. I pulled you along the deep dark twisted wounds of my internal landscape, and I hope you understood me better for it. Now that you know where I'm at, it's time we voyage onward. Together this time, in a spiritual sense. You're probably not literally watching the show along with me or anything, but you're travelling with me all the same. I'm travelling episode by episode, and you're travelling word for word. What is a blank Notepad file below for me is a journey through Season 1 of Quantum Leap for you. I'm building the road of words for you to travel along, and maybe together we'll find some of that small-scale small-stakes enlightenment and respite I've been needing.

Wish me luck, my friend in words. Time to build your road of words. It's time, at last, for the Quantum Leap.

"Winning? Is that what you think it's about? I'm not trying to win. I'm not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. It's not because it's fun and God knows it's not because it's easy. It's not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it's right! Because it's decent! And above all, it's kind. It's just that. Just kind."

Genesis: Wow. The moment's finally arrived, people. A year ago when I finished Symphogear I teased my impending internal regeneration. With Genesis, the first episode of Quantum Leap, it has arrived. Like The Next Generation's "Encounter At Farpoint" before it, Genesis manages to just perfectly encapsulate the empathetic idealism of its show's message within 90 minutes. (Yes, like "Encounter At Farpoint" it could also fuck all that up as soon as its next episode, but I don't know if that's the case yet.) In 75 minutes we learn of the life and family of Tom Stratton, an Air Force pilot from 1956 who's trying to reach Mach 3 in an experimental fighter jet called the X2. Already I'm drawing my own strange timey-wimey parallels based on the timeline of my own internal landscape. I know we just had a big exorcism of the sci-fi stuff, but it helps me to compare what this is doing to those as a fun talking point. So, when I see Scott Bakula take on the role of a pilot trying to break a speed barrier, I can't help but think of an episode of Enterprise called "First Flight". It was the third-to-last of season 2, and arguably the last great episode of what we'll call my Enterprise, the hopeful thoughtful show about the future gaining inspiration from the past. Perhaps the folks on Enterprise had that reading in mind when they wrote the episode, but I'm coming at it the other way around, like a Temporal Agent in my own mind.

Even without a space show episode from 2003 hanging over it, you can draw parallels. We learn along with Scott Bakula's Sam who he is and what he did as we watch the episode. It's fitting that his own experimental quantum leap should shift him into Tom Stratton's life, as the pair of them are chasing the dream of progress and advancement in the field of exploration. More than that, we get to learn about Tom's family through Bakula having to play his role and learn about them. We learn all about Tom's wife Peg, expecting a baby, and their young son. Again, this is exactly the small-scale stuff I have been wanting from a show like this. Even when we get the sci-fi infodumps from Dean Stockwell's Al (who is clearly relishing his role as both spiritual guide and rowdy party boy) they only serve to add to the idea of the small scale. The history book says that Tom Stratton dies piloting the X2, and his wife loses their baby due to premature labor caused from the stress of his failed flight. Sam can't get back home until he changes history and tells a better story, letting Sam live through his flight. There's some tension over the fact that Sam doesn't know how to fly a jet, but we have that spiritual guide in Al to help with that much. It's Sam himself who ends up saving the life of Tom's wife, though; she still goes into premature labor and the sudden medical knowledge Sam remembers from his past life is enough to change the future and save her and the baby.

At which point Sam finds himself as a baseball player in 1968, a team that has one last chance at glory to win the game and end some ball-playing careers on a high note. Small stuff, but it's here to showcase that Sam's going to keep quantum leaping throughout time and space, as well as giving Al some more things to explain. The highlight, though, and the sheer point of this leap beyond Sam winning the game at the end (with an AMAZING scene of him getting three strikes but the other team fumbling the ball enough for him to steal an entire run all the way back to home plate) is the tearful and heartfelt phone call Sam is able to give to his father, who's still alive in 1968. My partner in leaping, let me tell you; this scene emotionally wrecked me. Sam's able to give his deceased father one last goodbye, one more conversation with him. He created a better future for Tom Stratton and his family, he's about to create one for the baseball team... but here and now, Dr. Sam Beckett creates a better future for himself. He even looks up to the sky, at God or the author or the quantum stream or whoever, and thanks them for the opportunity to have one more talk with his old man. Then it comes. Dr. Sam Beckett, Scott Bakula, just says the theme of the show out loud. The ethos that made me want to come here in the first place.

"Maybe this quantum leaping isn't such a bad deal after all. Getting a second chance to put things right, to... make the world a better place. Who knows what I can accomplish before I'm done?"

I don't know, Sam. I want to find out together, though, and I believe in you. In 90 minutes, I believe in you. Let's see if you can keep up the good work. 

Star-Crossed: Well then. This episode was sort of a slow burn for me. I appreciated what it had to say at the end, but the beginning bits were really making me wince. We've leaped to June 1972 and into the life of Gerald Bryant, a college English professor from Ohio. Gerald Bryant also happens to like getting into relationships with his fucking students, either solely in exchange for giving them A's in his class or because he actually does have romantic feelings for them. Either way, that's gross and I don't like it. Luckily neither does Sam and that's the thing he has to change here in 1972: the official wrong that has to be righted is preventing Gerald Bryant and one of his students, Jamie Lee, from getting together and ending up in an unhappy shotgun wedding. Everything about Jamie Lee in the first half is just a little cringe, as she makes grand romantic gestures to her professor in the classical lit style of the Bronte sisters or Romeo and Juliet and Scott Bakula is just sitting there like "oh dear god no what is this girl doing?". It'd be funny if it felt like the show was making them as a joke, but I didn't get the whiff of them sending up such things. It feels sincere.

For better or worse, this is an episode about gestures of love and romanticism. That's where the other half of the plot comes in, wherein Sam sees that a lost love of his past, Donna, is at the college at a student. They fell in love in the future, but she left him at the altar and it's a source of heartbreak for him. Now he's back in the past, though, and he can change the outcome and rewrite the story so they end up together! We get Al telling Sam that this is a quantum leap no-no, messing with your own personal history for selfish gains. Lots of time travel stories have rules like this, and it varies how they're dealt with. I kind of like the way Sam learns to accept it, but at first he tries to bring the romantic gestures towards Donna. You know, while he's in the body of this asshole professor who's in a relationship with one of his students. Sam seems oblivious to all this, because it's him in there! They're star-crossed lovers, and it's fate and destiny that they should end up together, and as a quantum leaper he can rewrite the story to make it better for them both! Okay, maybe I was a bit premature in complaining about Jamie Lee's grandiose romanticism, because it feels like part of the point of the episode is contrasting those gestures with what Sam is doing. Sam is falling into that exact same trap she did, where it's destiny that he and his lost love end up together.

Eventually he does the right thing, though. He realizes that Donna left him at the altar due to abandonment issues stemming from never reconciling with her father, and so his plan is to get her to meet him in Washington D.C. before he ships out for Vietnam. The good news, as Al puts it, is that this will work and heal Donna's abandonment issues. The bad is that there was a man she left at the altar before Sam; if he does this, he'll make her story better but it won't guarantee a happy future to come back to with her as his wife. There's some dialogue at the end that cuts against my read a little, but I like that Sam still goes ahead with his plan anyway and reconciles father and daughter. It shows a true love for Donna, a desire to heal a hurt in the heart of someone he cares for deeply. That's a good definition of what love is. It's not just cheesy pick-up lines or big grand sonnets about your love for a girl being brighter than the moon and the stars or anything like that. It's a simple gesture. The person you care so much for has this deep-seated hurt, a wound in her internal landscape, and so you go back and heal that wound. Not for your own benefit, and not even just because it's the right thing to do. Because you love that person, and you want them to be happy. Donna will be a happier person with less pain in her heart because of what Sam did for her here in 1972, and that's what a loving partner can do for their significant other.

Some final stray observations: Jamie Lee's jealous boyfriend looks like he walked off the set of Revenge Of The Nerds, but even he gets a little enlightenment. I particularly kind of like the cliffhanger where Sam opens the door to get punched in the face by him... and after the break Sam punches him back just so they're even before giving him more advice and inviting him along on the road trip to D.C. so he and Jamie Lee can reconnect. Which they do, so that solves the main problem he leaped here to do. Also I can't not talk about how, in reconciling Donna and her father, Sam is forced to sneak into a hotel late at night. It's June 1972, in Washington D.C., and that hotel is the Watergate. Only our second episode and we have Sam as an accidental player in the History Of Things. Hmmm. Cute gag. Let's see what else we do with it...

The Right Hand Of God: This was fine. Compared to the last two I don't think I have too much to wax poetic about. Really, it's the type of episode I expect from most of this show going forward. They can't all be beautiful masterpieces that set my personal resonances alight. Better that the show have more of these than any sort of strict failure state. What the failure state of Quantum Leap looks like, I don't know yet... but this ain't it. Well, there's one weird moment in the climax. Anyway, we got a boxing episode! Sam's a boxer named Kid Cody in 1974, and Kid Cody has been in cahoots with an unscrupulous bookie by throwing boxing matches. Through contract shenanigans, Kid Cody is now managed by nuns and Sam befriends one Sister Angela, who has a dream of building a chapel/shelter sort of deal in the low-income district of Sacramento, California.

Sweet Jesus, Sam, that's not Kid Cody!
You've leaped into Little Mac!

The path to telling a better story is clear here, Sam's going to win the big boxing match that the bookie wants him to lose, and use the money to make Sister Angela's dream come true. The only problem is, as with the pilot, Sam doesn't know how to box. Al tries to help him a bit, but you can't exactly spar with a hologram. What we need is a good old-fashioned Rocky-style training montage, and that's what we get. Well, that and some meditations on faith and doubt. Kid Cody probably couldn't pull this shit off, being unscrupulous himself... but as Sam tells Sister Angela, he's not the Kid Cody who throws fights any more. He's different now, because he's Sam, and so he works hard and trains to get good at boxing. I really like this aspect of Sam's leaping; finding himself in the body of someone skilled at a task he knows jack shit about and has to quickly learn in order to write a better story. He's an amateur, and that's how I feel sometimes writing these things. I really felt it writing Night Of The Loving Dead, and that's just the honest truth. Even so, if we can all learn and change, then I can too. I'm doing my best to learn from the setbacks and pitfalls of my prior mistakes to tell you a better story, and that's just like what Sam is doing in trying to learn how to box well.

Then there's his grand plan for winning. Kid Cody has a girlfriend named Dixie who's a stripper, and since it's 1974 Sam happens to see an incident of streaking on the TV. (It was a thing back then, I think.) So, his grand plan to win the boxing match is... have Dixie streak in the middle of the fight and distract his opponent long enough for him to get in a good punch and win? Wait, what the fuck? That this is suggested at all is odd enough. It brings to mind the stranger moments of Enterprise when the show decided to just randomly be Horny On Main to... I don't know, wake up the 18-35 M demographic? It doesn't even work and then Al has to show up in the ring to give Sam help by putting his holographic hands through the other boxer to show Sam where to punch. He won the match, he bet all his money on a different fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman (that I guess he remembered the outcome of from the future?) and everyone gets some money and it's happily ever after for Sister Angela. Sometimes, a base level of competence is enough. The streaking thing's weird but I still have enough good will to the show to not drag it down for that. This was a decent episode, and it's still what I'm looking for from the show.

How The Tess Was Won: Well, I asked what a failure state of Quantum Leap would look like, and I think I just got it. I basically completely bounced off of this one, I'm afraid. So far I've been seeing Quantum Leap as this microcosmic thing about making a better future for ordinary people. This one still falls into that, technically, but it has two faults with it for me personally. The second comes right at the end and recontextualizes the whole hour, so let's just roll with the first: Outdated Gender Role Shit! We're on a ranch in Texas in the 50's and Sam has leapt into the body of a veterinarian named Doc, examining a piglet. The exposition here is quick: the titular Tess is a talented ranch hand who is being pushed into marrying a Good Fella so she can be less tomboyish and step up into being ladylike. Tess is having none of it because there's no man who's better at ranch stuff than her and thus the plot of the episode is this ridiculous wager where if Sam can be a better cowboy/rancher than she is, she'll get married and pass on the ranch and land to her new husband who is clearly The Best Man At Ranching In All Of Texas.

As someone who flirts about the vague and hazy gender role line like a wisp, I roll my eyes at Gender Essentialist Role Shit like this. Okay sure, it's the 50's when this is set (and 1989 when this is made) and Gender Roles are still a thing, but that doesn't mean I have to like them in the Year Of Our Lord 2022. Indeed, I don't. I don't know how to express it beyond I felt rubbed the wrong way by all of this, this insistence that the tomboyish and skilled cowgirl Tess needs to be "more of a woman" by settling down with a Strong Cowboy Man. Sam's not that good at it, either, and she beats him at most everything. Which, I thought Sam was a farm boy, but I guess it's different than being a ranch boy. Put him in front of a cow and he'll do well, I suppose. All signs point to Sam having to beat Tess at the ranch contest to get her to marry him as the thing he has to make right. It's not, because at the last minute another ranch hand confesses his love for Tess right after and the implication is that she picks him because he doesn't care about the ranch, and loves her for her. 

On the one hand, it's good that the contest didn't matter and that Tess picked her partner based on her own agency and who she actually wanted rather than some dumb contest to prove some masculine nonsense. On the other, it begs the question of if Sam actually did write a better story here or was just swept along for a ride beyond literally riding horses. What is this, a 13th Doctor story? He had to have some bearing on events here! Well, there is something. A twist at the end. See, that pig Doc was looking after when Sam leapt in? Sam keeps it at his place, naming the pig Piggy. There's also this kid with glasses who's like Doc's assistant or whatever, though he spends most of his time out on the porch playing guitar. It's the end of the episode and Sam is looking for Piggy, calling out "Here, Piggy! Soo-ey!" and such, inspiring the guitar kid to start singing a song about Piggy Soo-ey. Sam suggests he change it to something catchier... like Peggy Sue. When the kid changes the song to that and starts singing it, then Sam leaps off to his next adventure.

Do you get it? DO YOU GET IT? SAM WASN'T HERE TO WRITE A BETTER STORY ABOUT TESS AND LOVE AND GENDER ROLES OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT! HE WAS HERE TO INSPIRE BUDDY FUCKING HOLLY TO COME UP WITH THE SONG PEGGY SUE! At the last moment, the show completely ignores the ethos and theme it's been working with so far for a silly little "twist" gag about inspiring a 50's songwriter to create a famous song we know them for. This is literally a joke taken from the end of Back To The Future, used as the big narrative substitution for the story we've been telling about Tess. What the fuck? I expected, going in, that we'd have shit like this where Sam accidentally does an American History in his leaps. I was hoping that it would balance this kind of shit with smaller-scale stories about ordinary people. Hell, "Star-Crossed" did it better two episodes ago. You had the story about Donna learning to trust and love again, and it also managed to do the joke where Sam accidentally causes the Watergate Scandal. 

With this, they make it all but clear that the real purpose of Sam's leap into 1956 Texas was to get Buddy fucking Holly to write That Song We Know Buddy Holly Did. I don't like that. If you wanted to make the episode about that, make it about that. If you wanted to make it about Tess learning love, make it like Star-Crossed and about that plus your dumb Buddy Holly joke if you're that convinced it's sooo funny. This way just doesn't work. It's a twisted mirror of what I've been vibing with so far. The show tells one story and then instead of making that story better it writes a different one as a dumb cliche gag. It honestly makes me question now if what made Sam leap in 1972 was Donna meeting her father or him actually causing Watergate. I'm not a fan, but let's cross our fingers and hope this is the exception rather than the rule. 

Every episode of this show has Sam see who he's
leapt into by looking into a mirror. I'M HOME!

Double Identity: Alright this one was better in nearly every respect. That's more like it. The opening, showing Sam has leaped into the life of an organized crime man named Frankie from 1965, is straight up just the opening to the Godfather. The look and feel of it just invoke the start of that movie. Hey, if you're gonna invoke something for style, it might as well be one of the best films ever made. There's a lot to love about this, like Scott Bakula singing Volare. It's still a dangerous situation he's in, the guy he's leapt into being involved in some fooling around with a lady named Teresa. Dangerous because Teresa is also the lover of a rival crime boss, so Sam is risking getting whacked by going through his usual motions. There's a really tense scene with Sam and the rival crime boss, Don Geno, in Teresa's barbershop where Al has to feed Sam Italian to reply back to the guy to avoid getting his throat cut. Typical of the approach where Sam is the fish out of water in over his head and Al has to use one of his many skills to get him out of it.

What I find really strange is how the computer's calculations for Sam to leap are oddly specific and twofold. He has to A) plug a hair dryer into an outlet outside some random house and B) bring Teresa back up to the Don's attic where he first leapt into this body. Sam leapt in just after Frankie was... shall we say, finishing up with Teresa, so going back to his house to get with this girl again is brazen and risky. At first, I was thinking this was going to be another aberration of sorts. This doesn't seem like a story about writing a better future, it just seems like Sam is going through the convoluted motions to make sure he can take another leap. Well, the things are connected. Fooling around with Teresa in the Don's attic gets them caught and the Don is about to kill the both of them. That sort of third act tension is to be expected, sure. It's what the show did after that that really course corrected where the previous episode faltered.

See, Sam sent two of his mob boss bros off to do the hair dryer thing. They did it, and it ends up blowing a transformer outside and setting off a blackout across the northeastern United States. This is a real blackout which happened in 1965, so once again Sam Beckett is the secret arbiter of an event in American history. Well, the blackout gives him the distraction to overpower the Don and stop him from shooting them, before he leaps off again. What, is that it, I said to the TV? Nope. Sam's next leap... is into the body of the Don, seconds after he was overpowered. Now that he's the Don, he has the authority and ability to arrange for Frankie and Teresa to get married and have a happier time together. Oh, but that's not the last thing he has to do to leap: he has to call the right Bingo number in church so an old lady can win at Bingo. 

Now see, I like this better than the last episode. It has a better focus on romance (which Sam is very good at, as quite a lot of these plots focus on his empathy and understand towards his romantic partner of the week) than last time, and a better use of Sam Beckett Doing A History. Sam causing the 1965 blackout isn't the secret twist point of the episode, it's a natural step in the plan to ensure Frankie and Teresa's survival and romance. Even the Bingo thing at the end can help redeem Buddy Holly from the previous episode for me: I can reasonably headcanon that inspiring Buddy Holly is the last thing he had to do, and not the real point of the episode. Not only is this a good episode of the show, but it helped smooth out one I didn't like. Goddamn. That's pretty good. In addition, it has killer scenes like Volare or the hairdressing confrontation between Sam and the Don. I really enjoyed it, and I'm glad that the show can deliver a hit again after a miss for me. 

The Color Of Truth: Quoth the Beckett, oh boy. I mentioned, near the end of that rambling introduction where I expressed all my betrayals, that I was expecting Quantum Leap to have "certain issues with race". I never expected it to come up this soon. Yeah, so Sam's leapt into the body of an elderly black man. In Alabama, in 1955. From that description alone you can tell you're in for one hell of an uncomfortable 45 minutes of television. Watching it, I couldn't help but compare it in my head to another 45 minutes of sci-fi television which raised the serious specter of racism in 50's Alabama and made me uncomfy. That would be "Rosa", the Doctor Who episode from the Chris Chibnall years. It was not a comfort watch, and a show I've only seen once before. I'll say what I said back then: as a white person from Eastern Canada, I am way the fuck out of my depth in analyzing any of this shit.

That being said, in comparing the two, I think we can dig out a little bit of analysis to show why this one comes off a little better. For all that it was a prickly and uncomfortable tense viewing experience, The Color Of Truth pulls it off better than Rosa. There's two parts to this. The first is that Quantum Leap makes things feel a lot more raw. Jesse Tyler, the man Sam's leapt into for the episode, and his family really go through the wringer here. Burning crosses left on their lawn by bigots, or being called the N word. You could never in a million years get away with that on Doctor Who. At the same time, there's a reason why you just can't do shit like air a network TV show that puts burning crosses on a black family's lawn or calls an elderly black man the N word in this day and age. That's just the way material social progress works. Even as raw and unfiltered as it may seem comparing a 1989 show to a 2018 one in terms of how it can show bigotry, I think the reality of racism in Alabama 1955 would be so much worse than what either show pulled off. I cannot imagine it. I do not want to imagine it, but it is an uncomfortable truth of history.

Ah, but then we come to the second part of it. The plots. In that big intro I railed the Chibnall years for going full macrocosmic up-its-own-ass. Rosa offers us a time-travelling racist from the 51st century who wants to set civil rights back by stopping Rosa Parks from taking a bus seat, and to stop him the Doctor and friends have to occupy the bus and become part of the event. After all this Watergate and Peggy Sue bullshit, I dreaded Quantum Leap doing the same sort of thing where Sam is the one who kickstarts the Civil Rights Movement in the South. He's not. He stands up for civil rights and is against the racist system of the time, because it's the right thing to do. Al is also staunchly anti-racist, even professing to being an ally and marching for the cause during the time. The story Sam has to change isn't kickstarting civil rights; it's saving the life of Jesse's employer, Miss Melanie, from being killed by a train on a crossing. Sam will save her life, of course, but he's also not going to stand by and let racists get away with being racist without giving them a piece of his mind. The whole thing is started by Sam, immediately upon leaping and finding himself in a diner, taking a seat. An absolute no-no derided with shock and horror by the white patrons, and some are ready to beat the shit out of him for it. 

It's a dangerous thing, given that Sam's in the body of a black man, but it's the right thing to do. Every bigot in town is bigoted because it's what they've always known. To them, black people being an underclass is just the Status Quo, The Way Things Have Always Been. Hmm. Remind you of the ethos of another sci-fi show? Sam gets a passionate speech where he tries to get Miss Melanie to see that better things are possible, that things don't have to be the way they always were. That they can change, and change for the better. It becomes a matter of life and death when some bigots Sam pissed off run Jesse's granddaughter off the road, thinking it was him in the car. The closest hospital is whites only, but Sam goes there anyway, hoping to appeal to their human nature. They don't take it, at first, until Miss Melanie uses her own privilege to get them to help the girl. Sam, for his troubles, gets arrested for breaking segregation laws, but he did the right thing. There's a tense scene where Miss Melanie drives after him and hologram Al is yelling at her to stop the car before the train that will kill her does so, and I think somehow she hears him? Or time was changed enough that she did stop?

Saving her life doesn't let Sam leap out, though. No, that comes later, after Miss Melanie bails him out of jail. At first it seems like she hasn't learned anything from this, wanting to just go back to The Way Things Were as she sends Sam to go get her lunch at the diner. Then she comes in and decides to eat it there... and invites Sam to join her. That was the point of the leap. A microcosmic better story. Sam didn't inspire a civil rights movement as Jesse Tyler, but he saved one lady's life and made her consider, just for a moment, that better things are possible and that the status quo doesn't always have to be written in stone. The story can always be rewritten, and in a few months from this time? Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King and countless other activists and allies will start the first major rewrites. That's not Sam's authorship, though. Sam's authorship, I feel, should always be the small stories. Making one old lady reconsider thr way things have always been? That's a fine story to tell. This episode's definitely prickly, and it does some things that you could never do today for obvious reasons... but you know what? It is a better story than Doctor Who's Rosa. Now, hopefully I can get out of uncomfy land and talk about something a little more straightforward.

Camikazi Kid: Leaping away from the issues of racism and bigotry in the 50's, we leap just half a decade ahead to 1961 for a story about... domestic violence. Oh. It's an important issue to talk about and shine a light on, of course, to dissolve such toxic shadows via exposure. Sam's leapt into a dorky kid named Cameron (Cam for short, hence the... odd title portmanteauing his name with the word "kamikazi". I don't know what they were thinking with it) whose sister Cheryl is getting married to a typical jock type named Bob. Bob's a real shitheel, he and his posse never really growing out of the high school mentality of letter-jacket wearing bullies who treat those weaker than them like shit. They play keepaway with a girl's bag and then strip poor Cam and throw him in a dumpster after he stops their "fun little game". Hmm. A bunch of immature men flaunting their big-dicked masculinity and using their strength and influence to control and frighten those weaker than them with threats of violence and bullying? Sounds like abusers and enablers of said abuse.

Something like half the season so far has involved plots where the goal of telling a better story is tied directly to bringing two people together as a happy couple. Sam's direct goal this time, given to him by Al and Ziggy, is to stop Cheryl and Bob from getting married because Bob will be a fucking abuser to her and Cheryl won't live out her dream of joining the Peace Corps. Sam already didn't like this guy because he seemed like a bully, but hearing of their future really makes him determined to stop the wedding. It turns out that Sam's own sister ended up in a bad marriage with an abusive shitheel, and so this story takes on a symbolic bit of healing for him as well. He honestly regrets not being able to do more to help his sister, not seeing the signs of her abuse sooner, and so as Cameron he's going to do his best to help Cheryl. Already the signs are there that Bob's started. Sam notices bruises on the back of Cheryl's neck, which she says happened when she fell. A classic lie, tragic and terrible as it is, and one Sam isn't going to let Bob get away from. Cameron may be a dork, but Sam's only riding in Cameron and has the guts to stand up to Bob, grabbing him by the neck to let him know just how a woman would hypothetically have gotten bruises like that rather than "falling". 

The next big dramatic beat's at the wedding rehearsal dinner where Sam overhears Bob and his dad talk in the bathroom about how Bob is going to get into the used car business like his father and the dad's bought a house for them. You know, denying Cheryl her Peace Corps dream but also keeping it from her until after the wedding. It's a solid ratcheting of the drama, but I can't not mention the oddity that came before. Before all that, Sam is in the bathroom talking to Al, at which point this black kid in a tuxedo comes out of the stall. Inexplicably there is this scene of Sam showing this kid wild dance moves. They look rather familiar... no. No, not again, Sam. He's not going to-- OH GOD HE'S MOONWALKING OKAY. OH GOD ANOTHER KID COMES TO GET THIS KID AND CALLS HIM MIKEY, OKAY. OKAY. OH GOOD GOD. Okay. So Quantum Leap has decided to inject some levity into the middle of this tense and raw story about preventing domestic abuse... by adding in a scene where Sam inspires Michael Jackson's dance moves. Pro: This is just in the middle of the episode and not the big twist like Buddy Holly. Con: WHAT IN THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING PUTTING A JOKEY JOKE ABOUT INSPIRING LITTLE MICHAEL JACKSON TO MOONWALK IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR EPISODE ABOUT DOMESTIC FUCKING ABUSE???

Right, well, then Al inspires the confrontation that comes next. Sam has confronted Bob about his lies regarding the Peace Corps and the house, but Cheryl still believes his bullshit platitudes. So, Sam takes Al's advice and... challenges Bob to a race for pink slips? I'm sorry, what does a damn car race have to do with stopping this guy from hitting his fiancée? Al's logic is that emasculating Bob, via a dorky kid like Cameron beating him at a macho manly thing like Car Go Fast, will drop the mask for Cheryl and let her see the abusive bully monster behind it. It's a far-fetched plot, but it does work. Al's genius solution to winning the race is using their knowledge of the future to hook nitrous oxide to Sam's car so it gets boost power... and it works! Sam wins the race! A furious Bob then tries to run Cameron down for losing the race and making him look weak, to which Cheryl is aghast. Bob just tried to kill her brother. Cheryl breaks up with him on the spot, Bob tries to grab her, and Sam whaps him one in the face. What's that, Bob? Someone hit you back? Not so tough now, are you? Bob even tries sending his boys after Sam but they're done with him as well. Trying to run a dude down in your car just isn't cool, dude.

This was a good episode. Just... Michael Jackson? Really, guys? There's a time and a place to add the levity of "ha ha ha Sam Beckett done a History". It is not within the boundaries of an otherwise serious issue episode like stopping domestic violence and disabling an abuser from committing abuses. I feel like this struggle is going to come to define the show in my internal landscape. I already know how it defines the microcosmic, with its stories about rewriting the stories of ordinary people to tell a better one. Quantum Leap's macrocosmic isn't continuity, or returning evil aliens. Quantum Leap's macrocosmic is American history itself, and how much of it and its culture this show decides was the work of Sam Beckett's leaping after all. Peggy Sue, the moonwalk, the 1965 blackout...  They're minor so far. If they compound, if you make half of American history itself a product of Sam's intervention... then we'll have a problem. For now, though, I enjoyed this one. Much like the last, it's a serious and uncomfy issue, but told in a smaller scale that Sam could more directly affect. He told a better story, and Cheryl lived her dream of going to the Peace Corps and changing the world for the better. I like that. Only one more to go this season, for some reason... so let's close off the first chapter of this Quantum Leaping. 

Play It Again, Seymour: And it's film noir with a hint of Casablanca. Much like how "Genesis" made me think of the opening episodes of The Next Generation, here I'm reminded of the latter show's dalliances with noir/Casablanca, namely "The Big Goodbye" and "We'll Always Have Paris." Both are very good episodes of the space show, and invoking both Casablanca and a film noir like The Maltese Falcon or something brings up an obvious inspiration. That inspiration's even who Sam's leapt into today, in a fashion: a PI who looks a hell of a lot like an older Humphrey Bogart. Sometimes the symbolism can be on the nose, y'all. The rest of the episode is drenched in that film noir aesthetic. I know it when I see it, and I'm seeing it here. Even Sam's narration to himself just feels more film noir when it's done over lots of saxophone and trumpet.

Here's lookin' at you, Bakula.

There's a certain metafictional aspect to this leap, as well. Sam's mission is to solve the mystery of the murder of his PI partner while avoiding getting killed himself, and that leads to the usual aesthetic signifiers of love and revenge and murder and bitter feelings. For the most part, it's 45 minutes of Scott Bakula playing at being Bogie. As per usual for the show, Sam is writing a better story by solving the murder mystery and ensuring that Detective Nick Allen doesn't end up with bullets for breakfast. The very nature of authorship and writing a better story is a factor in the story, though. At first Sam finds a strange sort of familiarity with the story. He knows, before it happens, that he'll be cleared of the murder of his partner. It's like a sense of deja vu for him. Did he remember this story from the news? Did a young Sam get involved? That mystery gets solved once he looks in Nick Allen's desk and finds a manuscript. Nick Allen doesn't just live the noir life; he writes about it, and Sam is remembering reading the book on this sordid case.

I do wish the episode leaned more into this aspect, but the leans we get are pretty good. Al actually manages to dig up the book, but all it reveals is that the title will foretell Nick Allen's death in the affair as well. Then there's the titular Seymour. The title of the episode is, of course, a riff on that famous phrase from Casablanca which isn't actually said in Casablanca. Seymour is a sort of nerdy newspaper boy who tags along with Nick Allen and the femme fatale of the episode to investigate the murder mystery, his scrappy little sidekick who grew up in an orphanage library and speaks in all the stock film noir afflections. There's some prickly beats in the second act where Sam lays into Al for being his joking lecherous self, and then into Seymour a scene or so later for being a film noir-talking dork. It's not very nice, but for his part Sam realizes the error of his ways and gets to apologize to them both at once in a nice scene on the way to the airport for the final confrontation.

And then we get Famous History intruding upon us again. There's a minute-long scene at this airport where Sam is approached by a dorky kid who thinks he's Humphrey Bogart and asks for his autograph. I had no idea who the hell this was, but I knew that since the scene did nothing but distract Sam from the plot for a minute or so that it had to be one of these Buddy Holly/Michael Jackson surprises. To the episode's credit, Sam doesn't inspire this kid or anything, he just meets him. I guess this is as unobtrusive as possible one of these can be, a quick little aside that doesn't completely tonally derail the episode. On the other hand, it kind of does just stop the plot for a minute to go "HEY LOOK IT'S THAT GUY, YOU KNOW THAT GUY!". Well, I didn't know that guy. So I had to look it up. That guy... is Woody Allen. Oh dear God. Now, this episode aired in 1989 and Woody Allen's bullshit didn't become public knowledge until a few years after this. They didn't know at the time. We know now, though, and I must definitively say ew gross to hell with Woody Allen. 

How about the end of the episode, then? Indeed, the end of the season. Sam inspires Seymour to become a crime writer, using all that film noir lingo to his advantage in creating his genre prose, and then we invoke Casablanca some more as he moves to get Nick Allen on that plane with his sweetheart. Not only did he rewrite film noir, but he kind of rewrote the end of Casablanca so Bogie gets to be with the lady. Or, well, this guy who looks remarkably like him. Yeah, the episode wasn't half bad. Not without its prickly bits, but it's a decent little genre murder mystery. I did enjoy it.

And that, friends, is Season 1 of Quantum Leap. All the other seasons are 22 episodes, but this had to deal with being a mid-season replacement so we only got 9. You know what? That's fine. With these 9, I can already map out some important things. I can understand what makes Quantum Leap resonate for me. The idea of leaping into the past to rewrite it on a personal microcosmic level, creating a better story for ordinary people? That's the kind of shit I'm here for. In that regard, I got exactly what I wanted out of this season in a lot of respects. It being Scott Bakula doing it all also gives me all those fun resonances with the half of Enterprise I prefer. On the other hand? Yes, it's true that Quantum Leap doesn't have anything like long-running continuity it can draw from to disappear up its own ass like Doctor Who or Star Trek. That doesn't mean that I don't have a new ideological enemy, though. It's those moments where Dr. Sam Beckett does Interaction With History And Famous People. Things like his intervention causing that 1965 blackout aren't so bad, but then you have the famous people. Inspiring the lyrics to Peggy Sue, or the moonwalk. If there is a macrocosm lurking within this project, a personal nemesis for me to confront and battle, it is History. On the one level, Sam is rewriting history for the ordinary people and telling a better story. On the other, Sam is History. When he inspires Peggy Sue or the moonwalk, he's not rewriting history. He is becoming History itself, a Status Quo which creates itself. 

It is a terrible foe, a foe which reads against the rewriting authorship to definitively state that Everything Is As It Should Be. Right now, 9 episodes in and at the end of Quantum Leap's first season, the balance is more towards the microcosm like I want it to be. History will intrude again, insisting upon itself and insisting that its quantum author write it, As It Should Be. It calls to mind a particular reading of the final episode of Enterprise, wherein the history of Enterprise is rewritten by the winners. Be they the Federation, or the forces behind Enterprise's final hours, the history I was vibing with was rewritten to be a setup of the Status Quo. To them, Everything Was As It Should Be. This sentiment must be fought, and just like I battle against that dread beast of nostalgia which choked the life out of the shows I loved, I'll battle it here.

There's always a better story to be told. Bring it on, History. 

TO BE CONTINUED...