(TW: sexual assault, attempted animal cruelty, and some more racist bullshit)
Raped: On some level, you have to admire the simplicity of that title. No metaphor or double entendre, no clever wordplay, just pure raw honesty. This is the Quantum Leap episode where our hero leaps into the victim of a rape in 1980, and of the frustrating injustices which occur in the wake of that massive injustice. It's a trick we've seen before in Quantum Leap's wheelhouse, wherein it forces the viewer to empathize with unfair or unjust prejudice by pitting the whole world against our sympathies. See something like "Jimmy" or "8 1/2 Months" for examples of this. "Raped", I think, is the pinnacle of this. This is an episode about how frustrating and unfair the whole world is against the victim of a rape, and that is a very real and very important story to tell.
In fact, with just one or two changes, you could tell this same story today. I'll even tell you the changes: The next day after Sam decides to press charges against the leapee Katie McBain's rapist, an article about her accusation is printed in the small-town paper which implies she's an unruly child. Later, Katie receives a nasty phone call. Change these two moments to social media trolling and you have a story you could set in 2022. It's a little depressing how true that is about rape culture. End of history, my ass. One thing I'd like to praise this episode for is that there are more shots than usual of seeing the leapee in the mirror. This is not me doing a "haha more mirror alert" gag, come on, we're talking about serious shit like rape here. No, this serves to further show that this isn't Sam's story. It's Katie's story, and we're supposed to empathize with her, and so we have more shots of her in the mirror than usual. This will pay off in a big way later.
The episode doesn't make it hard to empathize with Katie, and it does this by pitting the whole town against her. The guy who is supposed to have raped her, Kevin, shows up at the hospital to loudly deny the charges against him. The aforementioned newspaper article causes everyone in the small town's restaurant to silently stare at Katie as she joins her family for lunch. When she tries to go to the bathroom, two of Kevin's pals corner her and basically try to strongarm her into dropping the charges because hey c'mon don't be a B, Kevin's a good guy, he's a town hero, he's engaged, just drop the charges. Sam sums it up as he finally gets into the bathroom to chat with Al: The whole damn town is against Katie. Even the legal counsel is unsure if Katie can win this, attorney Nancy Hudson not liking to lose these kinds of cases. She warns Katie that the court and jury will treat her like an object... but, if I may be grim, shit, that's already happened to her in one of the worst ways possible.
The only small problem with going to trial about this is that Sam is inhabiting Katie currently, and only leaped in at the hospital. He doesn't know what happened between Katie and Kevin that night. It's not that he doesn't believe Katie, of course; it's that he can't honestly testify about the events of the night since he wasn't privy to them. This is where we reach our hand back into the maelstrom that was the Season 3 finale to find a bridge to build something beautiful. During that hellish narrative collapse, there was a scene where Al brought in Project Quantum Leap's psychologist to talk to Sam. She could only be seen if holographic Al was touching her, but not heard. Sam uses that to hit upon the solution to revealing the truth of that night. Katie McBain is there with Al in 1999. If Al holds her hand, Sam can see her. If Al and Ziggy work really hard, Sam can hear her too, and then Katie can testify through Sam about that night.
And it doesn't work. Kevin is acquitted. In another stunning moment of empathy, the attorney sadly reveals why she doesn't like taking sexual assault cases: she herself was raped, and every time a scumbag like this gets acquitted it reminds her of that injustice. All Sam can do is hug it out with her... but notably, this isn't a leap failure. Sam's still here, which means there's still something to be done. It's a big something, too. In the original timeline, Katie left town and never came back. What's going to change? How about Kevin coming back into Katie's garden at night? I want to pause and talk a little more about Kevin's actions all episode. I mentioned him showing up at the hospital, but he also has shown up in Katie's garden during the day to try and give her a gold bracelet. Here, he vented about how he got charged with rape, ending by saying that the police treated him like a criminal. WELL, BOO HOO HOO MY GUY, EVERYONE IN TOWN IS TREATING KATIE LIKE A PARIAH! It reeks of whiny petulance at even the whiff of consequence for Kevin, but there's more under the hood there.
Because, you see... Kevin did it. He totally did it, and he played the innocent blubbering town hero who got off scott-free and now he's here to gloat. No, more than gloat. Horrifically more than gloat. He's here to get his own twisted sense of justice for even being considered a criminal. Underneath that whiny petulance from before was sheer seething hatred at the possibility of consequence for him... and there's only one way to balance the scales in this little privileged sociopath's mind. He's here to fucking beat and rape Katie again. He thinks getting away with it once makes him an untouchable Adonis entitled to retribution against this uppity woman blowing the whistle on him. Uh oh, Kevin. What's that? Why, it's Quantum Leap's framework closing in on you again. You're not looming over the defenseless Katie McBain anymore about to whip your pencil dick out. You just sucker punched Scott Bakula as Katie McBain, and he's going to beat the living piss out of your reprehensible rapist ass. The sounds of a rapist getting beaten to an unconscious pulp alert Katie's family, and this time it's implied that justice will be served, and it's time for Sam to leave.
I admit I went into this with horrible dread, and it doesn't shy away from the topic in any sense of things. Even so, it's a tour de force. It handles things with grace, shows the frustrating consequences society punishes rape accusers for, lets the victim herself tell her own story to raw dramatic flair, and even lets her rapist get comeuppance via Scott Bakula's fist. It's a fantastic episode, and one of the finest handlings of a serious topic I've ever seen with this show. Maybe now that we've done a masterpiece on such a real and raw topic, we can have something a bit less serious.
The Wrong Stuff: Ah okay, there we go, that's what I'm talking about. An episode that has something to say about a real topic in the material world and takes a moral stance by making you empathize with someone else... which takes the topic and the entire concept of Sam stepping into someone else's shoes to completely gonzo extremes. It's 1961 and Sam finds himself in the middle of experimentation involving the space race. There's a bunch of soldiers and scientists who are, for whatever reason, trying to train chimpanzees to go up into space. I mean, it's no less gonzo (and tragic) than the USSR sending a dog up there. At least these guys have plans to get the chimpanzees back from outer space. This doesn't sound so gonzo so far, but I've danced around the issue so let's just say it.
The only really sympathetic character is Dr. Ashton, a primate specialist who treats the chimpanzees well. Elsewhere, we have two army grunts who like to tease the chimpanzees in their cages and are generally just really fucking mean to them. Then there's the main antagonist of the episode, Dr. Winger. Dr. Winger, as it happens, is trying to come up with new and better helmets for the astronauts. His scientific method involves putting the helmets on the chimpanzees and then bashing their fucking heads in with a pressurized weight to simulate a crash. Dr. Ashton is fucking horrified at the thought of this, but Dr. Winger's stance is that good old adage about the needs of the many: Once he has the helmets calibrated to withstand the right forces, they'll save lots of human lives, and all it will cost is a couple of dead monkeys.
The stance of Dr. Ashton, and the moral center of the episode, is that it's wrong to put animals through fatal experiments even if it's for a noble cause like saving people. Surely there's another way to test a helmet, a way to give Dr. Winger some empathy towards the chimpanzees. It comes in the climax as Sam tries to escape the facility by walking along a pipe over a lake. Dr. Winger gives chase but falls into the lake and can't swim, and Sam abandons his escape to save Dr. Winger from drowning because even if his experiments suck he doesn't deserve to die. Dr. Winger, seeing a chimpanzee he was about to crack the skull of like an egg save his life, gains some empathy and decides not to bash in the heads of any more chimpanzees. Crisis averted.
It's a very very strange episode, albeit one with its heart in the right place. I associate experimentation on chimpanzees more with the awful stuff the cosmetic industry has done to them, but the space race iconography and the tension of a tranquilized Sam in the chair about to get hit in the head while Al screams at him to wake up and get out of there makes up for it. Empathize with the animals by becoming the animals. Well, Quantum Leap did it with more tact than Tom Green. If you know what I mean by that, you know. If you don't, it may be best to keep it that way. Why don't we move on out of gonzo chimpanzee land, then?
Dreams: Interesting medley, this. The levity's gone now that we're out of chimpanzee leaps and we instead have a story about murder, revenge, and repressed trauma. The opening moments are pretty horrific, with Sam having leapt into a police detective in 1979 and investigating a house on a dark and stormy night, only to step in blood and then find the body of a brutally murdered woman. Then he finds her kids cowering in a corner, and then he finds the husband holding a gun and ready to end it all before he saves the man.
Both questions have their answer with the same man, a psychiatrist named Dr. Mason Crane. I feel like there's a cute bit of play here with that name: we have an episode where Sam's grappling with a sudden onrush of fear and trauma, and a Dr. Crane is present for it. Is this a sly reference to Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka the Batman supervillain Scarecrow, who attacks people with gas that overwhelms them with their own fears and traumas? Interesting to think about. Also it sort of reveals the answer at play, which is that Dr. Crane is the one who killed Janice. Whoops, spoiler. Well, there's some other interesting stuff at play here involving childhood trauma all the way down.
Like one of the kids, PJ, who has gone fully non-verbal after the trauma of it all and can't be pushed too hard to recall the horrors of that night lest his fragile mental state shatter from it. He does manage to give Sam a drawing of gloves, though, which end up having been on Dr. Crane the night of the murder. As for Dr. Crane, he is at least curious about Stone's trauma and uses hypnosis to make Sam relive the memory of the mysterious door he's been dreaming about, before taking Sam back to the scene of the crime to relive it further. Jack Stone's latent trauma was that, as a child, his mother died and he overheard people say she was downstairs in the hospital... to which he walked into the fucking morgue and saw his own mother on the slab mid-autopsy. Hence the door and the dead woman's body opened up that fresh wound for Sam/Stone.
At this point, the episode's doing some very interesting things. Its nightmarish quick edits to a dead woman remind me of a hellish "Good Night, Dear Heart"... but the idea of a leap flip-flop that imparts someone else's trauma onto Sam such that he can't function? That's "Shock Therapy", but without any of the huge high-stakes narrative collapse or continuity. It's just... one man's terrible trauma, and Sam forced to grapple with it and try to heal from it. I kind of like this. With the narrative journey we've been building here, it feels like Quantum Leap finding the microcosm in that messy storm of last season's finale. We survived the continuity storm, and are using that framework to tell a personal story about one guy's fucked-up repressed memory to heal from it.
Unfortunately, Dr. Crane doesn't want Sam to heal from it. He has Sam under hypnosis and regressed back to the child who saw his dead mother's autopsy, and is now trying to convince him to end his own life to tie the murder case up and help Dr. Crane get away with it. It's understated, but this is probably why the husband tried to end it in the opening: he was under hypnosis via Dr. Crane. Never mind for a second the old adage that you can't make someone under hypnosis do something they'd never normally do. Either way, Sam breaks out just in time to shoot Dr. Crane before he can kill Sam, and that's the leap. This is an interesting episode with a tense atmosphere, lots of spooky editing, and all that stuff I said about microcosm in "Shock Therapy". Very intriguing stuff. That's all I got to say about it, so onwards and upwards.
Ah, but the town's not the only thing having a drought. What Sam is here to do is mend the marriage of Billy's brother Ralph and his wife Annie. Ralph is a jaded and bitter man who buries himself in his struggling business and holds a great resentment towards Billy, and Annie is an old flame of Billy's who feels those sparks flying again now that Billy is back in town. This episode falls into the same sort of pitfall that "Runaway", another episode about trying to mend a failing marriage, did: there's more focus on trying to convince the unhappy wife to stay rather than trying to convince the pig-headed husband to not be such a jerk and treat his wife better so she'll be happy again.
Amidst all of this, Sam desperately does want to help this town and make it rain, mixing chemicals up and blowing them up in the air with a fucking cannon to stimulate the atmosphere or whatever to make it rain. Yes, the microcosmic story of mending a marriage is important, but the fate of this small West Texas town is only macrocosmic in comparison. It's still a bunch of ordinary people in dire straits who need Sam's help, and despite Al's pessimism and trying to focus Sam on just the marriage, Sam is determined. He even talks to God and asks for it to rain, basically saying "come on, after all of this you owe me at least this one". It's a poignant little scene that brings the spirituality of Quantum Leap back up. Amusing aside, speaking of: I found out on my vacation that there is a Canadian channel which actually airs old Quantum Leap reruns on weekdays. It's called Vision TV, and it seems to be a mix between old boomer nostalgia reruns and faith-based programming. I'm just tickled by the mental image of a faith-based network scheduler glancing at the show and going "Oh yeah, that show with Scott Bakula where God makes him time travel, yeah sure, weekdays at 3.".
Back on point, the way to get Ralph to not be such a jerk is to get him to vent all his frustrations with Billy by getting into a fistfight. Hey, it worked in "Thou Shalt Not..." and it has the same sort of undercurrent of "AHA! You punched me in the face 'cause you thought your wife was going to cheat on you with me, you do still love her!" mixed with Ralph's latent resentment of how successful Billy was. As they hug it out after punching each other in the face a bit... it starts to rain. So yeah. Not a bad episode, all things considered. A bit weird and muddled in places, don't get me wrong, with me being unsure if the rainmaking is truly a con job or not, or the uneven focus on trying to work Annie to stay, but it has a nice and simple vibe to it. Saving a town and a marriage. Not a bad day's work for our boy Sam.
Unchained: Oh good, another leap involving prejudice against black people in the American South. Yes, these are important injustices to call out, but at this point it feels like every other leap is set in the south. We were there last time, even! As a point of good faith, it would be prudent to mention that the rainmaker's apprentice from last time was a black man as well. No unfortunate racism happened against him in that episode. Still, it'd be nice for Al to say something like "It's 1971 and you're in Cape Cod" for once, you know? Anyway, Sam opens this leap into 1956 as Chance, a prisoner handcuffed to a black prisoner named Boone, and the pair of them hop off their prison truck and attempt to escape. It does not go well.
Boone's mistreatment helpfully dovetails us into the next discussion, how shitty the corrupt prison guard Cooley is. Make no mistake, there is some sort of latent prejudice at work in his mistreatment of Boone even if he doesn't say the Gamer Word. When Boone and Sam are caught again, he flips a coin to see which one will be thrown in the hole and has Sam call it. Sam calls tails, we see the coin came up heads... and they throw Boone in the hole anyway. A microcosm of the unfair treatment and prejudice this entire system holds to a black man like Boone. It gets worse, though. Boone is an innocent man who shouldn't even be in a prison labor camp. His crime was being in a store as it was being robbed, and the police nabbed the first black person they saw at the scene and pinned it all on him. That's pretty bad, but would you believe it gets even worse than that?
Cooley is an accomplice to the robberies, perhaps even its mastermind. The one stealing expensive things for him is a prison delivery boy named Jake. He steals the things and they both make money off of their illicit goods... but I left one thing out. We thankfully are only told this and do not see it, but... Jake commits his robberies in fucking BLACKFACE. That way, the police are looking for black people and not a white guy like Jake. This... this is fucking horrifying. It's also darkly comedic, in its own way. The society of the South in the 50's is so fucking racist it can't even tell the difference between blackface and an actual black person. It's an absurd hyperbole but one built around something so real and so tragic as racial profiling. And, of course, don't forget that as a prisoner in his labor camp, Cooley is making even more off of the suffering of Boone for a crime Cooley helped commit.
The entire fucking system is corrupt, and there's not much Sam can do to get Boone out of it. Oh, he tries the rational way by telling them that Jake was the robber and they can clear Boone's name. That doesn't work. In the first place, they have no proof and are not exactly incentivized to believe a black person now, even if a white guy like Sam is vouching for his innocence. Even if they did, Cooley is so rustled by this that he assumes Jake must have blabbed, and kills him to silence him for good. Then, just for good measure to close the book on this once and for all, he arranges for Boone and Sam to have a fight to the death. Someone will shut up about something and Cooley can get away with it.
It doesn't work. Boone and Sam work together to create a distraction, try to escape again, and when Cooley catches them and is ready to kill them AL distracts his tracking dog, causing Cooley to plunge off a bridge and die. From that, Boone and Sam are able to escape, this time for good. There's an interesting distrust of the prejudiced system built into this episode. One might expect a show that was all for only peaceful protest against Vietnam because the history book says it all works out in 1975 would go for an ending where Jake and Cooley's crimes are exposed and Boone's name is cleared. That is not what the show goes for. The entire system is rotten to the core, prejudiced against Boone at every turn, and there is no chance of finding any justice within that system. Instead, the crook who framed Boone gets his just desserts and Boone escapes the whole damn thing of his own accord.
It's surprisingly nuanced and realist when it comes to the system, and the episode does have some nice touches with Boone seeing Sam talking to an invisible man named Al and wanting to chat with him too, even inviting Al to come visit him in the Rocky Mountains where he wants to find freedom in. In the end, the episode says that sometimes the system is the problem, built to let people use and exploit it and innocent people for their own ends, and that you can't find your justice within it. That you have to break out of its framework and make a better story and a better future yourself. A good message to keep in your back pocket in this day and age.
In a bit of casting that's amusing in the future, one of the only people caught between these two extremes who has the time of day for Joe is Jane's daughter-in-law Liz. Liz is played by Anna Gunn, who would go on rather famously to be Skyler White in Breaking Bad. Funny, that. Jane has talent at singing but the family doesn't want her to try because they're worried that failing will make her sad. Jane doesn't want to try because she's got stage fright. Complicating things further is an old friend of Jane's who Sam bristles up against because he supplies stuff to the Army, and the pair get into a little spat over Vietnam. Prickly.
Well, eventually Joe gets his big break. He's going to be acting in Hamlet and there's an agent in the audience, so he'll make a good impression to impress not only the agent but also Jane's family to show he's a responsible respectable man who Jane should stay with instead of going back to Cleveland to be unhappy but living how they'd rather she live. Unfortunately for Sam, this is when the director of the play decides that to really wow the crowd they are going to perform Hamlet in the nude. I. Well. They... they certainly wow the crowd. And wow the agent enough to give Joe a deal as an underwear model, which Sam won't take unless he can get Jane to sing the jingle for this specific pair of briefs. Which he does, and Jane overcomes her stage fright and wows everyone, just like Sam was brave enough to monologue to be or not to be with his dick out.
Like I said. Strange episode, but its heart and sympathies are in the right place. Sam is doing his best to be a good partner to Jane, and help her spread her wings and prove that her way of life out in the city is just as happy and prosperous as a "normal" life in Cleveland would be. He changes the future for her happiness, and shows that he cares. It's very romantic, it's got some good songs, and the nude Hamlet thing is gonzo enough to make you sit up and pay attention. It's not a bad one by any means, and one can have a lot of fun with it.
The next episode writeup will not be fun. Fasten your fucking seatbelt, because we have hit a breaking point.
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