Miss Deep South: There's a temptation to call this an archetypal Quantum Leap story, with a little derision thrown its way. While it is true that it plays off of a few beats that the show has hit before in the past, it would be wrong to call it an instance of the show going through the motions. This isn't quite Quantum Leap by numbers here, but there are familiar elements at play. Sam has to do a thing his leapee's good at but he's no good at, there's the worst of humanity on display with a shitlord who Sam has to give comeuppance to... and oh yeah, Sam's leapt into a woman again. For real this time, not like the fakeout in "M.I.A.". Kind of funny to think about that episode in comparison, though, for one reason. Sam does more complaining about high heels and skirts in that 30 second leap teaser than he does in this whole episode, and he's leapt into a beauty pageant contestant.
Yes, it's 1958 and Sam has leapt into Darlene Monte, who as mentioned is participating in the Miss Deep South beauty pageant. The better future Sam is here to create isn't exactly by getting Darlene to win. Al's data suggests that Darlene comes in third, which isn't bad! A bronze is respectable. Al is absolutely in his element here, but Sam is just enough of a gentleman to keep Al from being a total horndog. Besides, there are worse horndogs at play here. We meet our two other central players pretty quickly. Sam befriends a fellow contestant and coincidental roommate named Connie, and the pair of them are met in the lobby by the pageant's photographer, Clint Beaumont-- OW MY EARS! What is that? Oh, you can't hear it? Sorry, that was my TOTAL SCUMBAG ALERT going off at maximum volume. Clint Beaumont is the worst, and we'll talk about that now.
I can't not talk about the strange synchronicity at play for me personally with this episode. See, between that gonzo spooky one and this, I was on Netflix and a documentary caught my eye on the front page. It was called The Most Hated Man On The Internet, and it was about a prolific and infamous peddler of revenge porn online from about a decade ago. A man who not only hosted nude images of women without their consent, but posted their social media details along with it to incite trolling and bullying from his rabid cult of personality. A man who would have, if not stopped, escalated this practice to also post their home addresses, almost certainly getting these women killed by his cult of followers who would literally kill in his name. A man with no empathy for these women whatsoever, who would publicly say they deserved all the hate and scorn and life-ruining for sending their nudes out to someone in confidence in the first place. A man who would say that publicly, while privately employing a hacker to hack into women's e-mails and siphon lewd images from them for posting on his site.
Let's be clear. Clint Beaumont absolutely sucks, and gets a good comeuppance in the episode. Clint Beaumont is also not real. He's a paper tiger, a cartoon, compared to this very real monster I learned about on Netflix a day before watching this episode. That real scumbag got legal comeuppance, and I do hope his victims felt satisfied with that serving of justice. As for Clint Beaumont's justice, it's a little trickier. For one, Sam has a difficult balancing act to maintain. He wants to save Connie's future and reputation, but he can't neglect Darlene's future by throwing the beauty pageant. Darlene will become a doctor in the future thanks to placing third, so Sam has to do well enough at beauty pageant things to place. Here's where everything intertwines. Clint Beaumont is not a bug of the beauty pageant process. He's a feature.
Sam gets to cut against beauty pageant culture a little in his pre-pageant interview, when he refuses to give Darlene's measurements because what do her three sizes have to do with anything? There's also the very 1958 contract of purity which Sam has to sign to swear that Darlene's a virgin? Again, the fuck does any of that have to do with this? I'll tell you. Sure, we hear about these girl's hopes and dreams and see their talents in these shows... but at their heart, they're about superficially judging these ladies on how pretty they are. It's right in the name, and Clint Beaumont is rooted right in there like a weed. So, at the poolside swimsuit shoot where Sam gets to confront Clint about taking the nudes of Connie and gets the pageant supervisor involved. Great, right? Except all that does is get Connie disqualified for being a dirty nude photo-taker. Bad end for her, but at least the actual nude photo-taker is out, right?
NNNNOPE HE'S STILL COVERING THE EVENT! Deep-seated rot. Sam confronts the supervisor, and it's here we learn how systematic this rot is. This is a cycle of exploitation and profit for Clint Beaumont. He did it to the supervisor, a former pageant contestant herself. He's been doing this for at least a decade. Sam helps her realize that this shit can't go on, just as Connie is trying to exchange her life-ruining pictures which Clint still has and is teasing her about for sex. Cue comeuppance, then. Sam kneeing Clint in the gut and dangling him out a window to make him give up the film. The little worm caves immediately, and the supervisor gives him the boot. Good. Connie's future and reputation are saved, but what about the beauty pageant? Sam still has to ensure Darlene's future.
Well, for his talent... he sees a poster for an upcoming Jerry Lee Lewis show backstage and decides to play Great Balls Of Fire on the piano live on stage. This is fine, that song already existed in 1958, he didn't secretly invent it. I can live with that and it is a bop. Such a good bop, in fact, that Sam won the pageant. There's a certain sense of euphoria which overtakes Sam in this scene, as he wishes his sister could see him as the winner of the pageant. It's very sweet! So yeah, we have seen a lot of these elements before. Sam struggles at doing a thing while also giving a scumbag comeuppance and stopping a woman from ruining her life. That doesn't mean this doesn't do it well. On the contrary, it does it quite well. Let us hope that the next one does things just as well.
Black On White On Fire: IT DOES NOT HOLY FUCKING SHIT. This... this hour of television was many things. Raw, unfettered chaos from a chaotic moment in American history. The typical microcosmic look at how ordinary small stories are affected by such a grand-scale event. A serious and introspective discussion about race and prejudice. That's all what the episode has on its mind. Some of it even kind of works and I can see the good intent paving the road. Other times, it just steps in it in a way which makes me wince. Sam has leapt into Ray, a black man in Los Angeles in 1965 who has a white girlfriend, Susan. Both Ray's brother Lonnie and Susan's father, a police captain, are totally opposed to this interracial relationship. The episode attempts to play off the opposition beyond just "racism": Lonnie is a militant activist and distrustful of his white oppressors, and Susan's dad is worried about that militancy hurting his daughter.
Let me circle back to Vietnam, and a point I made last season in "Animal Frat". That episode had Sam in opposition to violent anti-Vietnam activism by stating that the pen was mightier than the sword, and that instead of causing property damage to protest the war, activists should just write about how bad it was over there. I didn't like that. I felt it was coming from a place of privilege where Sam already knew how the war ended and was telling these activists to just sit back and wait until 1975 because the history book says that's when Vietnam ended. I fully acknowledge that Sam's intentions in "Oh my god we've got to stop this riot" are based on saving people because that's the kind of person he is. I get now that the civil rights footprint of the Watts riots wasn't as impactful as the episode made me think. All I can do is relay to you what I was thinking as I watched this unfold on the TV. Sam's insistence to end the riots made me think of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had to say about the white moderate. The status quo of racism isn't going to be changed by the pen. Sometimes you just need to hurl a brick into a window for the status quo to perk up and take you seriously.
At the very least, the episode won me back a little as Sam resigned himself to not being able to stop the riot, instead getting the help of Lonnie's crew to break into a pharmacy so he could set up a makeshift clinic to treat the wounded. This is better. Not impeding whatever social progress will come out of this chaos and bedlam, but doing what you can for the people caught in the maelstrom who are hurt and need help. Susan is also here, having left her father to come and be with Ray during this madness, and here's where we hit some more snags. Susan is the thing Sam's here to change, and he has to keep her alive during this riot. Hmm. There is just something staggeringly wrong about setting an episode of this show in the middle of a black riot over racism and civil rights, and making the focal thing to change "oh no what about the poor innocent white woman?". Worse yet, after a scene where a black woman comes in asking for help for her bleeding son and then screams at Susan to stay away from him because she's white, Susan has her own existential crisis about racism. She gets sad and realizes that for her, everyone will always judge her for the color of her skin if she stays with Ray and how she could never live like that.
Susan. SUSAN. That is the material reality that Ray, Lonnie, and every other black person has to endure every day. What they still have to endure in the modern day! The privilege is astounding here. You experience an iota of the very real prejudice black people have to go through and you have an anxiety meltdown. This also cuts into a certain naivete Susan has, where she earnestly believes that because she does good deeds around Watts that the community will see her as One Of The Good White People and not one of those bad white people oppressing them. They do not, and the shattering of that illusion is what has her in this spiral. Privilege crashing down around her with the rest of the broken storefronts and VFX of cars on fire. On top of all that, once one of Lonnie's crew dies he decides to go full antagonist and take her as a hostage.
Sam has to go out and try to find her, but remember that he's in the body of a black man. After like five seconds out there some cops with batons beat the shit out of him and go to arrest him. Of course, Susan's father is there and tries to find his daughter via Sam. This then leads into the finale, where Lonnie and Susan are holed up in Lonnie's apartment. Lonnie claimed that Susan was his hostage so that no other black people would die in the riot, but Susan sees right through him. He hates white people, and he's going to kill her anyway. It's up to Sam to talk him down, giving an impassioned speech to get Lonnie to put down the gun and let them go. He shows Lonnie that Ray loves Susan, and would he really kill that love? That gets Lonnie to relent... just in time for the snipers outside to take him down as Susan screams that it was all in vain because he'd let her go. Funny that she can see right through Lonnie but not the other side of it. Lonnie was going to kill her, no matter what happened outside. The police were going to kill Lonnie, no matter what happened inside. Sam cradles Lonnie's body, lamenting the pointlessness of this loss, and that's our leap.
I really don't know about this one. It has a foot in the right place, showing the human cost of a real-world tragic event with loss and prejudice and suffering. By the end Sam looks like he's been through a meat grinder, along with the rest of Watts. On the other hand, there's just too much privilege in here for me to have really vibed with it. Susan and, to a lesser extent, Sam both suffer from this in not understanding these things. Then again, I'm white as well so I can't ever truly understand it myself either. All I can do is relay how I felt watching this hour of television, and I hope I've done that. I also hope that there's lighter fare ahead.
The Great Spontini: This one was pretty good. Neat aesthetic and flourish which themes the climax of the episode, as well as tackling a serious real-world issue with a level of tact and grace. It's a good bit of levity after last time, if nothing else. It's 1974 and Sam has leapt into the titular "Great" Harry Spontini, an aspiring magician who does all the usual dangerous tricks: sticking the swords into the box and sawing the girl in half and all that. Sam is left completely inept and bumbles around in the middle of the show, half nervous wreck and half going through the motions, almost making it a comedy act. Harry's daughter Jamie is his assistant, and she's more competent than Sam is now because he doesn't know shit about magic. Neither do I, to be fair, but I work in words so let's see if we can't cast a magic spell to get to the point of the episode.
Abrakazam, abrakadabble, the theme of this show is... a custody battle! Holy shit, it worked! Here comes Harry's estranged wife, Maggie, with her lawyer/fiancée in tow wanting a divorce so she can marry him! The lawyer's all smiles and handshakes, oh come down to the courthouse tomorrow Harry, it's all just a formality, only for him to go PSYCHE and actually be arguing for Maggie to get custody rights of Jamie. The basic argument being that Harry is a broke-ass aspiring magician who lets his 12 year-old daughter get sawed in half at nightclubs, and lives in a trailer with her instead of having a Nice Job and living in a Nice House like Maggie has. She ran out three years ago after seeing Harry's dreams go nowhere, got herself said Nice Job and Nice House, and now wants to give Jamie all of that. Sam is here to keep Jamie in the care of Harry, and so we begin.
Jamie doesn't want to leave Harry, as she has grown a better familial bond with him than she has with her mother. In fact, there's a resentment to her mother for abandoning them three years ago. Jamie doesn't want to live with her, but she's a minor. The courts are only thinking of "what's best" for Jamie, her own consent and happiness be damned. Maggie, at least, is a sympathetic antagonist who maybe could be convinced that "what's best" for Jamie is staying where she is, and maybe even mending the relationship she broke when she left them. That's certainly the angle Sam takes, doing his best to speak reason to her about Jamie and obeying the legal process to leave Jamie at her place before the hearing. Her lawyer fiancée, on the other hand... Hmm. Al immediately distrusts him and throws a lot of derisive language around, but I have to wonder how much of that is deserved and how much of that is resentment over losing his first wife to a lawyer.
No, the problem with the lawyer is that his real agenda doesn't seem to be "what's best" for Jamie. His real agenda seems to be "I am going to win at lawyering, Harry, and you will lose". It's not enough that he's now with Harry's wife, it's not even about Jamie's well-being. It's about winning, plain and simple, for the sake of his own glory. You can even see his true colors in the climax. Earlier in the episode, they set up this death-defying magic trick called the Table of Death where you have like 45 seconds to lockpick yourself off of this table before a pressure plate covered in spikes falls onto you and impales you. Sam gets caught in it as Jamie is testing it, sure that pulling off the Table of Death trick on stage will get them on TV and get them the money to buy the magic shop he's always wanted. He can't lockpick himself out and Jamie saves him just in time, getting mad at him for deliberately fucking it up.
Got that? Okay. During the hearing, Jamie sneaks out of her mom's house and goes to try the trick again. Al finds her doing it and teleports back into the courthouse yelling JESUS CHRIST SAM SHE'S GOING TO DO THE TABLE OF DEATH YOU HAVE TO STOP HER!. Sam runs out of the courtroom, contempt be damned, yelling about how Jamie is in trouble. Maggie, to her credit, is also concerned about why her estranged husband is suddenly running out of a court of law yelling about their daughter being in life-threatening danger, and follows. Mr. Lawyer? He just sits there and asks where the hell Maggie is going. Sit back! It's over! We won!!! There's not a moment of concern for the well-being of the actual child in question here. Not one true care for "what's best" for her. All this asshole cared about was winning the case and beating Harry.
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| The real magic of the episode. |
So yeah, it's a good one. Custody battles for fathers are still a stacked deck of sorts, but the episode handles it with the dignity and grace it deserves. The lawyer falls on the mid scale of Quantum Leap scumbags, but man those highs are pretty high. All in all, I had fun with this one. I have to wonder what sort of wild adventure we're going to get next, so as always we'll just hop right into it.
It's Becky who Sam is here to save, as according to Al she's found stabbed to death in a matter of hours. Okay, so clearly they're flagging Mad Dog as the violent baddie, so maybe the rest of the bikers are just a regular old boy's club. Not quite. That Dillon has some baggage, as he interacts with the owner of a roadside diner named Ernie and they talk about the motorcycle in Ernie's garage. It's a beauty that belongs to Ernie's son, who's still MIA from the Korean War but whom Ernie believes will come back one day. Dillon was also a Korean War veteran, and that changed him. So here's a strong theme, the trauma of war and what it can do to people. We see that Ernie lost his son but is still living in the blissful naivete of hope that he'll come back from Korea one day. Later we'll even see piles of Christmas presents from every year he's been gone in the kid's closet. The losses of war certainly does do that to people who lose people in a war! How did it affect Dillon?
Oh, he's uh... he's drunk as hell and attempting to assault Becky on a beach while all the other bikers cheer. Oh. Ohhhh dear. I'm beginning to think that maybe Mad Dog isn't the only bad biker in this bunch. Lucky Sam is there to get Becky out of there, and it's when they're holed up in the diner that we get another theme: Becky's love for the words of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac wrote a book called On The Road which influenced Becky's wanderlust and youthful rebellion, and she believes in that ethos too much to abandon the biker life to go back home. What does Sam do to convince her? He heads up the road a few miles to a cabin where the actual Jack Kerouac is drinking himself into a stupor. I confess, once again, to not being erudite enough to have read Jack Kerouac. I can't judge the accuracy or poignancy of his words on paper. What I can tell you is that this Kerouac is an odd fellow, with every word out of his mouth sounding like it should be read in a smoke-filled beatnik coffee house as part of a slam poem or something.
Well, the climax comes when the bikers find Sam and Becky and are ready to throw down. Amusingly, big tough Mad Dog with his scary knife which he's totally going to kill everyone he doesn't like with? Yeah, Sam lays him into the fucking dirt with one roundhouse kick. What a wimp. There's a telling and horrible line from Becky when Dillon's about to throw down with Sam where she says he won't hurt Sam if he doesn't fight back. Holy Jesus this man is an abuser, beat his ass. Sam does, the bikers are arrested, and Jack Kerouac himself comes into the diner to slam poetry his way into inspiring Becky to become a waitress at the diner and be there for Ernie when, inevitably, he finds out his son's not coming home. This was a very strange episode. You could have made it about abuse, about Korea and war vets, about Jack Keroauc and wanderlust and freedom. Instead they made it about all of these things at once and it feels very strange and unfocused as a result. You can blend multiple things together with craft and expertise, but this ain't it. As it stands, it's a bunch of stuff over 45 minutes. Hopefully next time is better.
A Little Miracle: JINGLE BELLS, WE'RE DOING A CHRISTMAS ONE! Never mind that I'm writing this in August. Who has a sense of time while they're Quantum Leaping? Regardless, we've got to deal with Quantum Leap's first (maybe only, who knows) Christmas episode. What do they do for it? Let's see if you can guess before I tell you when I tell you the parameters of the leap. It's Christmas Eve 1962 in New York City and Sam has leapt into a personal valet. He works for a wealthy capitalist named Michael Blake who isn't feeling the Christmas spirit and wants to demolish a shelter for people in need to build a glamourous plaza in its place. So, let's see. Wealthy capitalist, Christmas Eve, a better future to be made involving empathy for the less fortunate? Now I wonder what sort of story this episode is going to tell?
Yes, alright, let's spell it out. This episode joins about seven billion other pieces of media in being loose adaptations of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Funny enough, it also looks to the future, to Doctor Who's crack at doing A Christmas Carol. Both stories have lead characters who are aware of A Christmas Carol as a story and have them basically go "How the hell do I make a wealthy capitalist gain empathy for the less fortunate on Christmas Eve? WAIT, THAT'S IT! IT'S JUST LIKE A CHRISTMAS CAROL, I KNOW WHAT TO DO!!!". So that's just what Sam and Al plot: how exactly to get this guy to see reason and not destroy a shelter for the needy. Amusingly, they use Scrooge as a shorthand verb for this process. "We're going to Scrooge him", for example.
Before I get into the plan, though, there is one prickly issue. See, the shelter that Michael Blake wants to bulldoze isn't just any old anonymous shelter for those in need. It is specifically a branch of The Salvation Army. Which, if you want to know why that's a problem, just pop "Salvation Army LGBT" into your search engine of choice and prepare to be horrified. So yeah. That is prickly to say the least, but I honestly don't know how much of that was known in late 1990 when this was made. I don't think the people behind the show knew, but that still doesn't mean I'll turn a blind eye to it in 2022 because to hell with that. Very little about the story would change if the shelter were just an anonymous mission instead of a Salvation Army building, so I'd hazard a guess it was chosen because people would associate the Salvation Army with a charitable group helping people in need. Even so. Prickly.
Okay, back to the structure of A Christmas Carol. You show the rich capitalist ghosts of their past, the people they could be helping in the present, and the grim material reality of their lonely death if they don't stop being such a miserable jerk with no empathy. The past is Sam contriving to get a flat tire while driving Blake around, ending up stuck in his old childhood neighborhood and having him reminisce about the good times he had there. He even meets up with an old friend selling chestnuts on the street and actually seems happy for a bit before he finds out another friend of his died, and died due to losing his job at a bagel bakery which Blake himself bought out as part of his capitalist empire expansion. Well, you gave the capitalist a bit of empathy for the needy. Too bad now all he wants to do is drink in his private loft.
Well, that just means it's time for the ghost of Christmas present, and I guess that's Sam in this case. He insists on taking Blake down to the site of his building as well as into the Salvation Army place to show him the warm empathy he wants to bulldoze in favor of cold capitalist hedonism. Blake, still shook up from his revisit to the past, agrees and is almost swayed by the empathy and holiday spirit present in the shelter. It almost works, but at the last second things get just a bit too saccharine for Blake and that cynicism comes back out and NO I WILL BE BULLDOZING THIS BUILDING IN A WEEK, MY PLAZA IS MY LEGACY AND NOTHING WILL STOP THAT! The past and present failed to move Blake, so now it's time for the future. It's time for a real ghost.
What does he do to convince Blake, then? He shows him the future. Holographic projections of Blake's grand plaza, then news footage of Blake going bankrupt ten years later and his tower getting bought and renamed, before Al sits atop Blake's headstone and cackles. That, as with Ebeneezer before him, is enough to snap Blake into existential horror at the fact that his capitalist legacy will be worth so much as a handful of dust in the future, and he should make things better now while he's alive. Al even adds in a fucking Star Of Bethlehem to shine down on Blake to show him the light. So it is, then, that Blake sees the error of his ways and gains empathy for the less fortunate. Gosh is it a fun bit of idealist optimism to imagine a world in which capitalists can gain empathy by being shown the material reality of the less fortunate. Wish it worked in the real world, but I'll take it in the show.
Oh, but wait. One last twist. Al wasn't the one who added a holographic star as the final touch. Oh my God it was God all along! A fitting way to add in that deity, given the holiday celebration. What a fun little episode this was! It's a solid loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and Dean Stockwell going full ham is worth the price of admission alone. I never thought Quantum Leap would tackle the story, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense. A specter jumping through time to make a story better for other people? That's perfectly fitting with Quantum Leap's ethos. Definitely one I'll rewatch when it's actually the holiday season, but let's hop on to something a little more seasonally appropriate, hm?
Dissatisfaction at being a homemaker, and wanting to go back to college and get a job now that the kids are getting older and will be going to college themselves in a few years. Emma Rickett wants to be her own person, instead of someone whose only satisfaction in day to day life is how clean she can get the house. Hank, the patriarch, can't wrap his head around this shit and it's driving a wedge between him and his wife. It's telling that in the opening, he expresses a pro-civil rights stance and yet he can't comprehend why the hell his wife might feel a bit stuck in her ways by cooking and cleaning. Things are further complicated when the parents run into an old high school friend of theirs, Billy, who was on the speech team with Emma back in school and is now a widower with a teenage daughter himself.
This is when things get a little prickly. Al and Ziggy's data are insistent that Emma will run off on the family to get with Billy, destroying the family unit and ruining the futures of the kids. This is yet another subject that's personally relevant to Al, as his own family was torn apart by the same sort of homewrecking. Al is therefore insistent that Sam work on Emma, convincing her to stay and keep the family together. Now, I'm sympathetic to Al having a personal stake in this, I really am. At the same time, with this approach... there's nothing but bittersweet outcomes. Either Emma stays in her housewife cage and sacrifices her dreams of satisfaction for the sake of her family, or she breaks free and flies away with Billy, wrecking the happy home she made with Hank in the process. Sitting there watching, the solution seems obvious. You don't need to change Emma's mind to make her stay. You need to change Hank's mind and let him see that his wife will be happier if she can flourish and be independent.
All the Billy stuff ends up being a red herring though, or maybe just a powder keg to set off the sparks between Emma and Hank. Emma did not run off with Billy in the original timeline. Emma ran off into the woods and fell off a cliff and died, her sad skeleton being found 30 years later. That leads us into the climax where Sam rappels down the cliff to save Emma, while Fourth Of July fireworks burst and illuminate the night sky. That, friends, is Quantum Leap in a single shot. The grand tapestry of America history exploding in the night sky, while in the shadows on a cliffside, Dr. Sam Beckett works to save an ordinary life. He does it, Hank and Emma understand each other a little better now, and... wait, what? Sam holds his sister upside down over a well to stop her from bullying Butchie? What the fuck? Strange episode. Little muddled in the middle there, but it came through in the end. Mostly. Well, let's hope the next has some levity.
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