8 1/2 Months: Oh good, a teen pregnancy episode! So much for levity. Still, that's not to say what we get here isn't good. The vibe I get from it is similar to episodes like "The Americanization Of Machiko" or "Jimmy". I don't mean the "oh God they keep saying slurs why WON'T THEY STOP?" vibe, but the "Wow, everyone is judgmental against this person for a bullshit reason, really makes you think about that specific inequality!" vibe. On multiple fronts this episode is about empathizing with the situation of the leapee, Billie Jean Crockett, a 16 year-old girl in 1955 who is 8 1/2 months pregnant. Quantum Leap has always been about this empathy by way of using sci-fi metaphor to literally put Sam in someone else's shoes, but it reaches a whole other level with this episode.
Something I wondered back when "Blind Faith" came out is just how much of Scott Bakula is there compared to the person he's leapt into. In that episode he leapt into a blind man but he could still see. What would happen if, for instance, he leapt into an amputee? Or a little person? How would the quantum process compensate for the fact that Scott Bakula has all his limbs but the leapee does not? Or the height difference? This episode doesn't really answer those questions, but maybe one will tackle that subject in the future. What the episode does do is far more interesting; it creates a tangible psychosomatic link between Sam in 1955 and Billie Jean in the waiting room in the present day. The long and short of it is that Sam starts rapidly going through the motions of an actual pregnancy, four years before that one Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He gets nauseous, he has bizarre food cravings, and he's feeling contractions.
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Yeah, that's the point of the leap, by the way: Billie Jean will give up her baby for adoption, never see the child again, and never be able to reconnect. Sam has to work out a way for her to keep it, and that's the uphill unfair struggle that so many pregnant people in past, present, and future have to endure. I'd say the shaming is less now than it was in 1955 for Billie Jean, but then again look at the hellscape going on in the US over reproductive rights. Sam has to fight tooth and nail for Billie Jean to keep this baby, while at the same time worried that with the psychosomatic link that he'll have to deliver it, and how the hell can he do that? At the last minute, it all works out. Billie Jean will be able to keep the baby, her father will be supportive, and Sam hops out just in time before the little baby comes into the world. It's a poignant episode that still manages to be resonant today, and it's good that we have something to give empathy and understanding for all the pregnant teens of long ago and right now. Lord knows we need more of it in this day and age.
Future Boy: There's a lot to dive into with this episode, but there's a pitfall that we also must avoid. That pitfall is the very thing I fled to Quantum Leap to avoid: it's lore and continuity. I could spend the majority of this writeup yelling about how the episode both enhances the lore of quantum leaping, and also contradicts its own continuity for the sake of telling its story. If I did that, I'd be missing the point of why I'm here in the first place. I'm here for a better story, remember? A more human, interpersonal, and resonant story than made-up gossip about time travel and a thing Al said a season ago not matching what he says here. Still, we do have to talk about both things. Let us try to find a happy medium, and not lose our way on the path of the microcosmic.
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| Jiminy jilickers, Captain Galaxy! |
Now here is where we must at least look at the path of lore and continuity contradiction, looming ahead like a fork in the road. The reason Mo will end up being killed by a train is that he was trying to run away from being committed to a mental institution by his daughter. Sam wants to ensure that Mo doesn't end up in a ward, but Al and Ziggy... support this? No no no, hang on here. Al wouldn't be on the side of having a man committed. Al, who lost his sister Trudy to the negligence of such a place? He's the one who's suddenly all for it? I don't buy it. Thankfully, that's not how things are going to go. This is another case of "Ziggy was wrong" for the sake of getting some antagonism and drama in to this 45 minute episode, and whoever wrote it didn't give a crap about what Al said in the Jimmy episode. In 1991, watching weekly, I wonder if anyone did peg this. I'm binging this shit in the future daily so it's much more noticeable for me. Either way, Sam is working not to get Mo committed, and so he tries to learn more about him. First though, fun facts.
A fun fact about Mo is that his actor, Richard Herd, has popped up in practically everything I've been watching lately. Back in "Good Night Dear Heart" I mentioned my dabbling in Voyager and how the actor who played Tom Paris in that show was in that one. Richard Herd was Tom's father, a Starfleet admiral, in a Voyager episode I watched recently (which also featured Lt. Barclay and was generally very good). I also enjoy watching old Seinfeld episodes on the weekends, and Richard Herd is in that show also as George Costanza's boss. Hell, the way I first recognized him in this episode was from his appearance as one of the aliens in the V miniseries from the 80's. That's some good sci-fi right there, let me tell you. Okay, I think we got lost down a rabbit hole. Let's get back on the path.
Mo has been estranged from his daughter Irene for quite some time, after the death of her mother, and generally spent more of his time acting than being there for his family. Irene's desire to put her father in a hospital is out of a lingering duty of care, if nothing else. Mo is a scatterbrain who forgets to do things sometimes, like turning off the stove. Irene is genuinely worried that her father is going to burn his house down and she won't be there to protect him, so best to put him in a place where people will be able to care for him. Sam argues that being a bit scatterbrained doesn't mean that you have to go to an institution. We all do things like that sometime, like leave the stove on or forget your keys or build a steampunk time machine in your basement called a time-o-meter--
Yeah, Mo's been fully inspired by his Captain Galaxy show where he wears a tinfoil helmet and travels to the future to see Martians or whatever, and has built a fucking time machine in his basement. To you and I, this may look completely gonzo off the deep end. Certainly, it is a little gonzo, but do keep one thing in mind: the premise of the show proves Mo right. Time travel is an actual tangibly possible thing in this world, and Sam is the embodiment of that proof. A man from 40 years in the future is interacting with Mo right now. Hell, the track Mo is on when it comes to time travel theory is the same string theory which made Project Quantum Leap possible. When Mo tells Sam his theory using a string to represent a timeline, Sam tells him of the theory of balling the "timeline" string up so different points of your life touch each other and you can leap between them. He even says the words Quantum Leap! It's the name of the show! Hot diggity damn, it could work!
And then Mo decides to show off his time machine to Irene and the evaluating psychiatrist after a lovely dinner and the damn thing goes haywire and starts sparking and shorting everywhere to nearly kill them all. So that's not a good look. At Mo's hearing, Sam tries to convince the judge that Mo's not out of it for being a visionary when it comes to time travel. After all, two days ago the Russians launched Sputnik, and if you told someone 12 years ago that the Russians would have a thing in space it would sound crazy. Just like how you'd look mad in 1957 for saying in 12 years men will be on the moon. Despite Sam's pleading, Mo gets sentenced to go into the institution. At which point he defenestrates himself from the office window to run back home to his time machine. Good lord.
It almost works, too! For a brief moment we see a blue aura around Mo, the same aura that surrounds Sam when he quantum leaps. He's 40 years early with a steampunk cobbled together time machine, but it almost works. Irene and Sam manage to talk him out of trying again, and Mo lets his heart out to them. He didn't want to time travel to see the wonders of the future, or the glories of the past. He wanted to go back in time to when his wife was pregnant with Irene, and be a good father and husband to them instead of focusing on his career. He wanted a second chance to mend his broken family and do right by them. You can see the lore and continuity looming over this moment. AHH HA HA, IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT, THE QUANTUM LEAPER CAN'T CHANGE THEIR OWN PERSONAL HISTORY, NOT UNLESS MO HAD ANOTHER HOME TO WRECK AS KARMIC BALANCE! Block it out. Mo doesn't know that, and it doesn't even matter that we know that. It's a human and emotional moment of admitting fault and wishing you could go back and make it right. Mo can't go back and make it right... but he can begin to mend things between himself and Irene in the present.
So Mo doesn't have to go away to an institution, but he does leave one thing behind: Captain Galaxy. He's going to hang up his space boots for a while to spend time with Irene and mend his relationship, but as his last hurrah he reads one last letter from the kids: a curious little boy from Elk Ridge, Indiana, asking how Captain Galaxy's time machine works. To which his TV hero, Captain Galaxy, can explain using the metaphor of a string being someone's timeline. Again we need to shut out that looming voice. WOOOO HOO HOO HOO LITTLE SAM WATCHING CAPTAIN GALAXY INSPIRED HIM TO INVENT TIME TRAVEL, AND THEN HE LEAPT AND TOLD MO ABOUT IT, IT IS A BOOTSTRAP PARADOX YEEHAW!! Shhhh. This is a moment of paying it forward. Captain Galaxy was one of Sam's inspirations. Now that he's all grown up, Sam used what he learned to go back and repay the favor by helping his hero make a better life for himself. Hanging up his space boots and lore adventures in favor of reconciling with his daughter. I think that's lovely, and more interesting than a bootstrap paradox. This show bootstrap paradoxes itself all of the fucking time. Who created Peggy Sue? Or the moonwalk? Or the Heimlich Manuever? Boring question. Lovely episode, though. Now what have we got next?
Private Dancer: Well, the tease for the leap is Sam as the headliner of a bunch of Chippendale's dancers while a bunch of women scream at how hot the men are. That tease and title are a swerve, though, as the episode isn't about Sam and his leapee, "Rod The Bod", who is a dancer at a club in 1979 New York. Instead he's here to help a waitress at the club named Diana, and prevent her from falling down a rabbit hole of stripping, drug use, and prostitution which will end with her dying from AIDS. So, you know, that's certainly light fare. Despite all that, the episode manages to define itself well thanks to one simple little fact that the whole hour is built around.
Sam, to his credit, learns from this, and even starts practicing sign language on his own to communicate with her better. Allies have a lot to learn, after all, but Sam is coming at it with good intentions. Diana is already on the precipice of being forced into a life of bad decisions, having no family or friends in New York and resorting to living out of a rusty old van. Still, Sam believes he knows a path to a better future for her: auditioning her for a jazz dance troupe run by a black woman who frequents the club Sam works at, Joanna Chapman. This comes too early in the episode for it to be a success, and indeed it does not work. Not that Diana isn't talented: Joanna admits that she's got good moves. It comes back to her being deaf. In the fast-paced audition, Diana couldn't read Joanna's lips to understand her directions, and Joanna just thinks that her production is far too fast to slow down for Diana.
And so, Diana has her van towed and is in desperate need for money... and hey, one of the girls at the club can get her a few hundred bucks. All she has to do is show one of her clients a good time on a date, if you know what I mean. That's-- hey, hang on a second. I know that girl pimping Diana out. Heidi Swedberg! She was... George Costanza's fiancee on Seinfeld! That's two episodes with Seinfeld actors in a row! What, are we going to have Sam leap into fucking Kramer next? Well, anyway. Sam saves Diana from making a huge mistake, and manages to get her another shot at dancing for Joanna. This time Joanna realizes that Diana is really fucking good at dancing and is worth the extra attention required for her to understand stage direction. Crisis averted. I really did enjoy this episode. Diana endeared herself to me, and it is indeed very good representation having both the character and actress being deaf to let that experience be known just a little to everyone else. A winner in my book, and let's hope the next one is too.
Piano Man: I get the sense that I have seen this before. In many ways, it feels like the broad stokes of the second season episode "Her Charm": someone who saw a crime starting a new life elsewhere to escape the criminals, who are determined to kill the witness so they can get away with their crime, there's budding romance between Sam and the person he's on the run from the criminals with, and a final act twist where it turns out someone has been in the pocket of the criminals all along and that's why the hitman has been able to keep up with the attempts at evasion all episode. The broad strokes are the same, but there are some differences to make it an interesting enough watch and not a total rehash.
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| [VFX: car on fire} |
So here's where we get into a big difference between this and "Her Charm"; the chemistry between Sam and the female lead. This really isn't a hot and cold relationship where they alternate between arguing and flirting. Lorraine just wants closure, but she's still reminiscing about the good times with her ex as they play the piano together. There's also the running gag of her being a bad luck charm, with many of her previous boyfriends ending up suffering terrible injuries and some bad mishaps during her time with her ex in the past. Even on this trip, just about everything that can go wrong does go wrong. For a show that's played with God and the Devil, I would have liked them to make something about this bad luck. Make it play havoc with Ziggy's odds or something, I don't know. Something gonzo and strange.
There are some off beats, it must be said. Like how Sam tries to "protect" Lorraine in the second act low point by driving her away, telling her he doesn't love her any more and giving her the closure she thought she wanted as she angrily drives away. I don't like that kind of miscommunication bullshit, and all it does is enable the hitman to chase her down in the car so Sam has to engage in a car chase to save her. The car chase is admittedly pretty cool. How about the ending? At multiple times in the episode, Lorraine calls her fiancée to let her know they're alive but in peril and where they're at. Oh my now I wonder who could have been guiding the hitman to find Sam and Lorraine every time? Yep, it was the fiancée, who actually turns out to be the very criminal Sam has dirt on. There's a final confrontation in an airplane hanger and then Lorraine's bad luck kicks in and a goddamn engine falls on this guy. Rather gnarly for Quantum Leap when it's not a nightmare concocted by Satan.
And so, Sam and Lorraine live and they end up back together. I don't know. On the one hand, it's an exciting episode of television with lots of car chases and guns shooting. On the other, I don't really know if it differentiates itself enough from "Her Charm" to be as good as that episode. That episode had a strong emphasis on injustice and how crooks never face due process, but this one doesn't have anything quite as strong. It has glimmers of it, like the bad luck thing or the better state of the relationship between the two leads on the run, but nothing quite so rock-solid. If you're going to do a scenario like one you've already done, you'd better have an equally solid but different foundation to set it on thematically. Otherwise you end up with this, which is just fine.
Southern Comforts: This makes for, at the least, an interesting contrast with the previous episode. Yes, it's a theme that Quantum Leap has covered before, but it's a slightly more important one to highlight than "don't tell anyone about anything if you're on the run from a hitman because they could be in on it and secretly trying to kill you". Instead we find ourselves in the charming world of New Orleans, 1961, with Sam in the body of Gilbert LaBonte. The name threw me off all episode because they pronounce it very French, like "Jill-bear". I suppose it does fit Louisiana, after all. Anyway, Gilbert is the proprietor of a brothel, with lots of women flirting with a bunch of horny men. You can imagine the jokes when Al comes in and sees he's basically arrived in horndog heaven.
Sam's here to save one of the brothel girls, Gina, from disappearing that night and then being found dead a month later, beaten to death. So that's always fun. Thinking it's going to be some random bad actor horndog coming into the brothel, Sam closes it for the night. It's not, but nice try anyway. No, the one who will do it is Gina's husband, whose abuse and possessiveness Gina fled from and found a roof over her head in Gilbert's brothel. Gina's actually the cousin of the main brothel girl, a woman named Marsha who's very flirtatious with Sam and arranged things to help her family out. So, yes, we've got another anti-abuse episode but it's mixed with a pro-sex worker episode. That's pretty neat!
What's not neat is the vengeful husband, Jake. There's no sympathy or anything here for him. He may be one of the worst examples of an abuser yet on this show. I dunno, there was that French guy from "Honeymoon Express" who was willing to kill people. Actually, he's a good comparison point to Jake, since they both treat the objects of their abuse the same way: as objects. There is no concept of love driving Jake to pursue Gina across Louisiana to find her again. It's all about ownership and reputation. Jake runs a well-to-do boarding school and it would not look good for him if his wife ran out on him. Gina is his girl to do with as he pleases, up to and including sneaking into the brothel and getting out his belt when she doesn't obey his every command. Worse yet is the slimy way in which he escapes justice for doing this: Gina is too afraid of him to press charges, and with no charges he can walk away a free man. HAHAHAH I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT TO HER AND SHE'S TOO SCARED TO GIVE ME ANY CONSEQUENCES! What an absolute scumbag. How do you beat a person like that?
Glitter Rock: Speaking of contrasting prudishness with horndog nature, we've got this. It's 1974 and Sam has leapt into a rock star, a member of a band called King Thunder. With the style of music, as well as the white face paint with stars and stuff, King Thunder seem like an obvious reference to Kiss. On the other hand, they're explicitly British rock stars and the episode's title is a play on the musical genre of glam rock, which immediately makes me think of British acts like T. Rex or Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. Influences aside, Sam has been thrust into the role of a hedonist rock star, King Thunder's Tonic, and has to sheepishly throw off all the advances of the many women who want to make it with a rock star while Al's jealous.
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| Freak out in a moonage daydream. |
There's a lot more going on than that, and the episode plays a little shell game with a bunch of potential sources of strife that could be what end Tonic. Will it be Phillip, the weirdo fan who seems oddly obsessed with Tonic? Will it be an angry stagehand, as a light nearly beans Tonic while they're rehearsing on stage? Will it be his fellow bandmate Flash, out of jealousy over Tonic not playing his songs at the show and Flash's girl making the moves on Tonic? Will it be their manager, who's been making a bunch of high-risk investments with the band's money on the stock market? It will be one of those, but it will not be the fan Phillip.
No, Phillip actually is focused on Tonic because he believes that Tonic is his father, having had a one-night stand with his mother 15 years prior. The pair of them even have the same distinctive extra webbing on one finger, but Phillip doesn't want a shitload of money or anything. He just wants to know who his father was, and for Tonic to admit it. Well then, where in the shell game is the killer, where could they be-- oh it was the manager Dwayne. It can't help matters that Sam confronts him before the show to tell the guy he knows that embezzlement is happening, but he won't say anything as long as Tonic gets his fair share of the money. I guess that promise isn't good enough for Dwayne, who steals another of the band's wigs and then paints himself up in a glam rock disguise to ambush and stab Tonic as he's leaving the show. Phillip manages to warn Sam in advance, though, and no stabbing happens. That's good.
As for Phillip, a better future is made. While talking with the other bandmates, it basically does confirm that Tonic did have a fling with Phillip's mother. Even though Phillip wasn't asking for anything but the knowledge, Sam still decides to at least offer the kid a job as a roadie with the band, to keep Tonic's son close by and maybe make some sort of familial bond. I did enjoy this one quite a bit! The glam rock aesthetic is fun, and some of the songs are pretty good rock bangers. The shell game of who's going to kill Tonic kept me interested and invested. Yes, if the episodes can stay at this quality, we'll have a good time.
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