A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 4 (Quantum Leap Season 4) [4.1]

(Hey, it's me, from the present! We just talked two days ago about the state of the blog going into September and October, so I won't belabor that again. Short version is, you get four more posts on Season 4 of Quantum Leap as I simultaneously start Season 5 and prepare for hopeful vacation time. It's going to be one hell of a finish, if its opener is any indication... but you're not ready for that part yet. You're stuck weathering a similar storm of turbulence with my past self, and so I will turn you over to the capable hands of late August/early September 2022 which typed these words. Take it away, slightly younger me... right after my current self warns you a little of what's ahead. Here's your warning: Season 4 gets fucking real and rough and raw. I will do my best to TW its mature subject matter, so do please tread cautiously in this very heavy season.)

(Continued from 3.4)

(TW: extreme racism, attempted hate crimes)

We're back at it again for the fourth go-round. We're deep into the weeds of this show and how it works now, and I suspect it will be heartfelt business as usual... once we escape the predicament the show left us in. To recap, and to give this intro some body, Quantum Leap's third season ended with a hellish narrative collapse which upturned the entire premise of the show. Lore and continuity ran rampant, threatening to end the gentle microcosm and cut off our connection to the simple empathetic stories forever. At the last moment, wounded and deliberately invoking a character who should not have been invoked in this particular bad end, a stroke of lightning shocked us out of the pure hell of this maelstrom on the sea of history.

All's not well, though. The show's flip-flopping of its macrocosm and microcosm may have been partly restored, but now its two leads are flip-flopped. Sam Beckett, the leaping everyman stuck in the past trying to change the future, has swapped roles with Al Calavicci, the slightly lecherous but good-natured hologram ally giving Sam advice from the far-off future of 1999. Now Al is a flesh-and-blood person, and Sam is a hologram that only Al can see and hear. The storm has not passed. Hold on tight to the sails, my fellow drifter through history. One way or another, we're going to escape these macrocosmic hellscape. I've endured way worse, and I'll get us through. I promise. In we go to the storm. In we go... to Quantum Leap, Season 4.

The Leap Back: Well, I set up most of the weird flip-flop right there in the opener. Thanks to the lightning strike, Al is now the leaper and we've leapt to a point within his own lifetime instead of Sam's. Specifically it's 1945, and Al has leapt into Tom Jarrett, a war veteran back home after years as a POW captive by the opposing side in the war. This is a familiar role for Al, as it's basically his own backstory, but things are just a little more complex for these two. They're simultaneously taking on the role of the opposite and sharing each other's aspects. Al is slowly losing his memories like Swiss cheese, whereas Sam is slowly regaining them now that he's actually back in his present of 1999. At the same time, Sam is suddenly prone to making lecherous jokes while Al is a little more reserved and prudish. 

Make no mistake, though. Narrative collapse is still a present danger. The danger of Quantum Leap ending its story hangs over us like a storm cloud... but it looks so inviting this time. If Sam is a hologram as part of Project Quantum Leap... that means he's home. He finally made it back to the present time! There is the issue of Sam not being able to leave the imaging chamber, though, due to it being locked down from the lightning. Normally you could use the handheld computer to open the door, but Al has that with him in 1945 and it has no power since Ziggy won't be built for another 50 years. The solution Sam comes up with is a Back To The Future trick. They send a letter to Project Quantum Leap from 1945, with instructions for it to be delivered in 1999 so the exit code can be keyed in. It works, the door opens... and Dr. Sam Beckett made it home.

Home is even better than he could have imagined, as he remembers a fact that has been kept from him all this time. Remember Donna, Sam's lost lover from way back in "Star-Crossed"? The woman Sam reunited with her father, changing her history for the better but not necessarily ensuring that she'd get with Sam? Turns out that particular poignancy is out the window. Donna is Sam's wife in the future, and is very glad to finally have him back. The Sam Beckett we see here is very different to the one we've been following. With his memories back, he's got confidence and even a little bit of swagger for a physics genius. This is the real Sam Beckett, but not the one we've been following. There's a lovely scene that will pay off in the ending where Sam and Donna look at the stars, Sam pointing to one that's 54 light years away and noting its light was born when Al was in the past, and it's just now reached their eyes.

And yet, there's still the problem of Al, and what he has to do in 1945. Mirroring his own life, Tom Jarrett (and isn't it a bit of extra mirroring that both Sam and Al's first leaps are into soldiers named Tom?) left a girl behind in his hometown, a girl who moved on and got engaged to someone else. Unlike Beth, though, Susan here seems perfectly happy to accept Tom again and break things off with her fiancée Clifford for Tom. Clifford does not take this well, and as we learn late into the episode he's going to knock out Tom and Susan and push their car off a fucking cliff to make it look like they both ended their own lives. A petty "if I can't have her NOBODY CAN" move... but it leaves Sam to make a choice. Sam the hologram can do nothing as Clifford prepares to kill Susan and Tom/Al. There is, however, one thing he can do. The one thing he's an expert at. Sam can leap.

With seconds left on the clock, Sam makes the choice. Thanks to the mix of sharing aspects, there's enough Al in Sam and Sam in Al for him to be able to pinpoint Tom/Al and leap into him, saving Susan and Tom from Clifford. The odds are low that Project Quantum Leap will be able to recall Sam, and he'll be adrift again in the sea of history to put right what once went wrong. As he most always does, Sam goes through with it. Al is his friend, and Al's saved his life too many times for Sam to not return the favor. Besides, even if Al had been able to fix Tom and Susan... he'd be the one trapped in the past. There's no guarantee they could have pulled him out. Sam, even a Sam with all his memories back, is too selfless to let that happen. He says goodbye to his wife, and hops on in and saves the day... once again adrift in space and time.

This is the price of the narrative collapse, of lore and continuity coming in. Sam gets home, and has to give it all up again for the sake of the microcosm. So Tom and Susan can live happily ever after, so his friend doesn't die in the past. In the process he will forget his wife again, a necessary evil given how many of these leaps are romances. It's tragic and bittersweet, but Diana focuses on a star so many light years away to look up at its light, connected by the light of a faraway star which shed that light long ago, when her husband was running around in the past making something right. The narrative collapse has been averted. Would it have been so bad if things ended here? On one hand, you could see how the show could end with Sam's happiness having made it back. On the other... all those lives yet untouched. Tom, Al, and Susan would have died. 43 other lives, lives I've not seen yet, would remain unchanged. Dr. Sam Beckett can do so much more, and he shall... in times and places we've yet to see.

It's definitely an interesting episode, finally showing us a glimpse of Quantum Leap's present in the far-off 1999. Yet, there's a humbleness to that microcosmic decision of Sam's. To save three people at the cost of his own happy ending. One wonders how things will eventually end for Sam... but for better or worse, we're back to how things were before. Back to one man trying to make a difference for the regular people of history, and to write a better story. We can only hope that he can write a better story for himself, at the end of it all... but the storm has passed. Back to our hopefully smooth sailing. Back into the Quantum Leap. 

Play Ball: There's something a little poignant about the subject of this leap being baseball-themed. After tearing itself apart and struggling to put itself back together over 90 minutes, Quantum Leap has returned back to near the start: remember that the pilot ended with a brief baseball leap where Sam stole all the bases. I even think there's a callback here where he tries to steal up to third and it doesn't quite work. It's 1961 and Sam has leapt into a guy named Doc, a former major league player who's now on a minor team. Doc has a friend on the team, Chucky, and this is the person Sam is here to help.

Chucky is... a bit of a hothead. Like two seconds after we meet him he's ready to beat the shit out of a heckling spectator, and later he's drinking which only makes his fuse even shorter. Temper, temper. Things are just a little muddled, as Al insists Sam is only here to help Doc get into the major leagues again but Sam is insistent on making things better for Chucky. Chucky's got a lot going on, like the temper problem or fooling around with the owner's daughter (the owner being pretty flirty herself towards Doc, it must be said), and Sam has his work cut out for him. Helpfully, he finds that Chucky's estranged father is still alive and nearby. Unhelpfully, the man is content to watch his son from the sidelines and not get involved with his life. There's a sad story of shame there passed down from the generations: how his own father ended his life after losing his job during the Depression, and how that informed him to leave his family after he lost his own job. 

There's something of a sweet bit where, when Al asks why Sam is so invested in making Chucky's life better instead of focusing on who he's leapt into, Sam says that Chucky reminds him of Al when they first met. Al also was down on his luck, prone to anger, and Sam saw a soul in need and befriended him. It always is sweet when these two can contrast a leap with their own experiences. Unfortunately we're in the second act, so time for the low point. The owner of the team catches Sam trying to get Chucky out of her daughter's bedroom and kicks them both off the team. Oh no! However will we get to play baseball now-- oh the replacement pitcher gets arrested by immigration? And Sam and Chucky are the only two fit to pitch for the Big Game? Hmm.

Look, I am not one to get nitpicky about narrative contrivance. This is a story, not a documentary, and the things happen because someone made them up to happen in that order. That being said, this crisis and resolution is just a bit quick and neat. One could imagine it being stretched out a bit and resolved by some direct action from Sam, rather than just a stroke of luck. Either way, they're back on the team and Sam is pitching well. In fact, he's pitching... exactly what the history books say Doc pitched. Sam's not changing things at all, so he pulls himself off of the mound to tag Chucky in. He still manages to win the team the game by pulling off an amazing catch at the last second. That gets the attention of a major league scout for the New York Yankees, who offer Chucky a chance to play and Doc the opportunity to be a pitching coach. Oh yeah, and Chucky's father shows up to say hi and the two decide to go out for coffee, a relationship beginning to rekindle.

In the end, this episode's okay. It has its good moments, like the Sam and Al talk about why Sam befriended Al, and some generally good making things for the better stuff. There are a few dud jokes that don't land for me in the hour, but honestly I've had worse from this show. It's fine, and it does at least herald a return to the kind of story I came to this show for. Let's hit a home run and move onward to the next. 

Hurricane: Well, it's basically what it says on the tin... or is it? This time Sam is a deputy sheriff named Archie, and he's assisting his girlfriend Cissy in battening down the hatches and helping those in need before a massive hurricane wreaks havoc on their town. Said hurricane, Hurricane Camille, is a real hurricane which hit the US in 1969. I know a little about hurricanes, though not as much as someone down south: Up here in Newfoundland we get the leftovers of them, and usually they amount to a stormy day. Every so often they hit us hard, though, like Hurricane Igor in 2010. All of this is to say that the stock footage of the high winds and devastation only add to the mood of a storm coming, and I can definitely feel the anxiety brewing along with it. Funny that I've been treating the narrative collapse between seasons 3 and 4 as a metaphorical storm, and now we have a literal one. But there's also a different metaphorical storm coming.

Cissy is going to be killed, and that's what Sam is here to stop. The metaphorical storm at the heart of things is of jealously, with Cissy's ex-boyfriend Joe showing up at the shelter and the show making sure to frame him ominously, watching on as Sam and Cissy smooch or keeping him in the foreground, making you aware of him. The vengeful jealous ex-lover, striking back in revenge because if they can't have their beloved then nobody can? That's sort of what is happening here, but it's not Joe. Joe is a red herring. The real crazed vengeful ex-lover is Archie's ex, Lisa, who we see in the opening and assume left town. Well, she shows up again at the shelter to try and convince Archie to get back with her, and Sam's helpful words about some things not being able to be changed are twisted by her.

Yes, she can change the future! She can kill Cissy and then she and Archie can be TOGETHER FOREVER! This leads into a brief flirtation with, of all things, a trolley problem as Sam is out in the storm and they threaten him having to choose between evacuating old people from an apartment or coming to Cissy's rescue. Thank the lord they don't fiddle with that too much: Sam is able to save the old folks and make it back just in time to keep Lisa from stabbing Cissy. He even inspires Cissy to become a psychologist, to help other people. I surprisingly don't have much to say about this one. Not that it's bad, by any means. It's quite a good episode of the show! It's just that a lot of that good is summed up by telling you about the atmosphere and the shots of the storm. Even the plot itself with its fakeout and reveal are quite clever. It's definitely an enjoyable episode, and I'm hoping for another one just like that next ti---

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!

Justice: I think the show has set a new record now for raw unfiltered uncomfort via exposing the worst parts of American history. This episode, you see, involves poor Sam Beckett coming into close contact with no less than the Ku Klux Klan. Close contact would be bad enough. Worse yet, the teaser has Sam leap in just in time for his leapee to be inducted into the order. Sam is revulsed. I am revulsed. My skin crawls every time one of these fucking racists talks or laughs or jokes or even breathes over these 45 minutes. That's part of the real lingering horror. The worst of humanity is still human. They laugh and joke after the ceremony, all buddy-buddy and friendly. Sam even notes in narration that they're farmers, like his family. Humble working folk he could almost relate to. Almost. Except for, you know, the massive fucking racism they believe in.

Fuck any screencaps with the racists.
Here is Nathaniel instead.

The rhetoric is horrible, but dismally familiar. Paranoid white people with privilege who are afraid that if the scary black people get any sort of foot in the door, that white people will become a minority and the whole world will go to hell. There are people who earnestly believe that shit today, as there were in 1965 when this leap was set. They are wrong, and their attempts at halting material social progress must be halted. Sam is here to prevent these deluded bigots from ending the life of an innocent black man named Nathaniel, who only wants the right to vote. The bigots won't give it to him, he will protest this injustice, and the bigots will kill him for this perceived insolence. Injustice and justice. We'll come back to that.

What can Sam do against this system? He has to play along, to a degree, pretending to agree and say that hateful N word and writhe internally for doing it. His leapee, Clyde, has a family. His father-in-law is leader of this Klan sect, his wife very much holds the same belief that she doesn't want black people rising up and gaining rights... he can't change these people's minds in one leap. What he can do is help change the mind of his leapee's impressionable son. To make him apologize for saying that hateful word in front of the family's black hired help. To teach him that the hate his grandfather holds was passed down from his father, and his father before him, and it takes a bigger man to break the chain and decide that better things are possible. 

These racists don't want better things. They want the same thing. Them on top, and the black people on the bottom. Forever. They are willing to uphold this status quo with vengeance and violence, and they dare to call it justice. NATHANIEL AND HIS FELLOW BLACK MEN DEIGN TO PROTEST FOR BLACK RIGHTS? THEY MUST SUFFER FOR THIS INDIGNANCE, JUSTICE MUST PREVAIL. Sam manages to warn them away from their protest for the night, but is caught having warned them off and is in big trouble with the racists... who have now decided that they will bomb a black church. A dozen or more innocent black children will be blown up by these reprehensible bigots, in the name of their justice. The Klan tie up Sam, call him a traitor to their proud white race, say that the penalty for such treachery is death... but Sam sees right through them. White, black, it doesn't matter to them. They just want to hurt people. His leapee's father-in-law shows some shred of humanity and isn't going to kill him, just leave him tied up while they enact their twisted form of karmic justice.

Thankfully, with a church full of kids who are pure of heart, they can see Al and he can warn them to escape. Speaking of pure of heart kids, Sam's leapee's son saves him from captivity as they arrive just in time for the church to go boom... but everyone got out in time. Still, the Klan are ready to lynch poor Nathanial for his insolence, ready with the noose... until Sam joins him and says they'll have to hang him, as well. Go ahead. Kill one of your own, in the name of your twisted justice. Hang a man in front of his wife and child because he dared speak out against the status quo. You sad, cowardly idiots hiding behind your hoods acting like brave knights won't last. Material social progress is coming. You can't stop it, no matter how hard you try or how many black people you kill. 

This does, at least, tug on that one shred of humanity the leader has as he decides not to kill tonight. When a second-in-command cries for blood and murder and precious justice, he punches the man out. This does not absolve these people in any way, of course. Utterly reprehensible, all the same... but still human. Still swayed by human wants and needs, like family. That's the thing about bigots. They are people. Terrible people, but people all the same. One hopes that Sam made a big difference here. Nathaniel will go on into politics, but it's his leapee's son I hope learned to be better in the future and break the cycle of bigotry. So, yeah. A good message about fighting against bigotry and learning to accept change. It made my skin crawl over 45 minutes and I don't think I'd ever watch it again. Get me the hell out of here.

Permanent Wave: Between paragraphs there, I went for a lovely vacation for 10 days. It was very nice, and stepping away for a week and a half definitely helped after that last episode. More distance from 45 minutes of racism, please. What we have instead is quite a stellar episode with a few interesting things going on behind the camera. For one, Scott Bakula is also in the director's chair. The trend of actors directing later episodes of their own series is a thing I know. Granted, I know it mostly from 90's Star Trek, and now I'm wondering if Bakula ever directed an episode of Enterprise. The other fun fact is that this episode focuses on a young boy, and playing him is a little babyfaced Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Neat! What sort of antics will this future Nolan alumni get up to?

Witnessing the brutal murder of a local pharmacist in Beverly Hills, 1983. Ah. So we're not escaping any levity in the slightest. Sam, for his part, has leapt into a hairdresser named Frank, whose girlfriend Laura is the mother of young Kyle. Kyle supposedly caught a glimpse of the killer, but the main conflict of the episode comes from Laura not wanting Sam to go to the police for anything because of some trauma involving her former lover getting hit by the mob after witnessing a crime. The pair of them are marked for doom, according to Ziggy, so it's time for Sam to get to work. There's a sweet beat or two where Sam uses the idea of playing pretend to help calm Kyle down, first playing at Captain Galaxy and Future Boy to get him to bed and then later using that analogy, along with telling him about Future Boy's invisible friend Al, to try and coax Kyle through the traumatic event to get some information about the killer out of him. It doesn't work well.

I have to wonder if Bakula was behind the editing as well, because this next scene is real good. One of the hairdressers at Sam's place, Chloe, comes over to give Kyle a Rubik's Cube to play with. I was sitting here, expecting some cute scene about Kyle or Sam solving it super quickly and impressing everyone, only for the scene to suddenly turn to chaos as someone's shooting through the window and Chloe gets grazed with a bullet. It hits you completely out of left field, like someone shooting a gun at you through your window really would. No buildup, just BANG BANG. With that, Laura and Kyle are too terrified to go to the police and thus end up leaving for Frank's cabin... but Detective Ward, the officer who Sam's been trying to keep off of Kyle's heels until the kid is ready, is heading up there before Sam can call him. Hmmm.

Yeah, he's a baddie. Phil was killed due to business involving illicit drug trading, and Ward is in on it and desperate enough to kill a kid to cover his tracks. Instantly this shoots him up to high tier on the Official Quantum Leap Scumbag Ranking, right up there with the other racists and murderers. The entire sequence at the cabin at night is shot like a fucking horror movie, with dim lighting and shaky cam and Dutch angles. Bakula's direction only adds to the atmosphere, and he does a good job in making the scene feel scary. Well, Ward's about to kill a child so he can stay out of jail and keep his thousands of dollars and keep committing crime. Or he says he's going to kill Sam because Sam knows everything, but let's be real. We're in ACAB territory, he'd pop them both. Thank God Chloe has a gun and pops him! Good job, Chloe, you did it! All's well that ends well--

SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS, SHE WAS IN ON IT TOO! NOW SHE'S GOING TO KILL THEM ALL SO SHE CAN STAY OUT OF JAIL AND KEEP HER MONEY AND KEEP COMMITTING CRIME! All the clues are there in hindsight, of course. How a woman tipped Ward off to the cabin before Sam could call, or the mysterious shell corporation paying off Phil called Eloch, a fucking anagram of her own goddamned name. That's Bond villain level shit, come on... and I didn't catch it because I was willing enough to accept Ward being a scumbag 'cause, again, ACAB. So this shit completely floored me. She almost feels bad about having to kill Kyle, but that almost isn't enough for her to repent. Even worse, another fact of Chloe really stings with this reveal: that Laura was getting her fashion discounts. The woman was making thousands off of drug trading and was still hunting for discounts, how greedy can you get? Anyway Laura beans her in the head and Sam shoots her with Ward's gun when she won't relent. Day saved, Laura and Frank are gonna get married, happy family.

Despite the lack of levity, this is a really damn good episode of Quantum Leap. With Bakula's name as director I was paying more attention to see his particular flourishes, and I could notice them. They accentuate the piece, and it's just a real white-knuckle murder mystery thriller. We've had episodes like this, like "Her Charm" or "Piano Man" where someone's trying to kill Sam and those close to the leapee and it's full of a handful of great action scenes as punctuation to character drama. This one doesn't feel quite like those, its big action set pieces more just chaotic shootouts that occur all of a sudden and interrupt the character drama. It's a really good episode that surprised me and is well worth a watch. I wonder if we'll get some levity next time.

Oh, they're doing a sexual assault episode. We will not. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA--

(Continued in 4.2)