(TW: homophobia, more hate crimes, suicide attempts, and more attempted sexual assault)
Running For Honor: This, more than any other episode, has my critical approach straddling between two timelines, a foot on each side of 1992 and 2022, of how this is both progressive and of its time, and how its antagonistic shifts make perfect sense and attack my resonances to their very core. The handful of things I looked up about this show after watching it suggest that it is the most controversial Quantum Leap episode of its time. In 1992, I can certainly believe it. In 2022, honestly, I think the likes of "Justice" or "Raped" are more jaw-dropping. That doesn't mean my jaw didn't drop at this, to be clear... but it would help if we define the parameters of what we're talking about.
We'll just say it. "Running For Honor" is about gay rights. Specifically its laser focus is on gay rights in the Navy, and how the entire goddamned heart of it is a homophobic nightmare. Rotten to the core. Tommy York's former roommate, Phillip Ashcroft, was gay and expelled from the academy for it. Phillip now works at an underground newspaper and has drawn the ire of a homophobic Naval academy vigilante gang calling itself the Chain, composed of Tommy's Navy buddies, who will kill Phillip in two days time. Sam saves Phillip from an attack by the Chain, and later the goons confront him in his room. YOU HAD BETTER HAVE A GOOD REASON FOR BEING THERE, TOMMY, OR OTHERWISE YOU ARE NOW OUR ENEMY. When Sam refuses to be a bigot, he gets a target on his back. It's on now, and the Chain are determined to weed out what they see as degeneracy in the Navy. Even if it means murder.
Make no mistake, the Chain are violent vigilantes who hide behind masks to enact their so-called "justice" against gay people, even going so far as to abduct Sam and string him up by a noose. It wasn't tied to anything, but that was their warning. QUIT THE ACADEMY AFTER THE TRACK MEET, OR NEXT TIME IT WILL BE TIED TO THE TREE. The show knows damn well what it's doing here. I mean, come on. Masked vigilantes who try to hang the "other" who they want to root out in the name of justice? The show is equating these homophobic bigots with the KKK, which it showed with equal disdain not so long ago on the TV screen. For 1992, this must have been groundbreaking and progressive stuff. I can't deny that, and it's a real moral stance on an issue that was still being fought on the battlegrounds of social progress. It's admirable, but that fact is going to lead us to my biggest problem with this episode.
I am about to make a sweeping generalization about culture and society, circa 1992 and 2022. There will always be bigots and bad actors fighting against material social progress so this isn't always true, but here it is. In the time when Quantum Leap was made, the battleground issue of social progress involving the civil rights of black people in America was considered "solved". Black people were oppressed and discriminated against before then, they fought for their rights and won them, and we now see that racist systems of oppression were wrong. That is a massive oversimplification on my part, but it's on those terms that we play in the general pop culture. Civil rights being "solved" meant that, when Quantum Leap hopped back into the past to deal with black issues pre-civil rights, the audience and our time-travelling leads knew that the oppression the black people in those episodes face is unambiguously wrong. Sam and Al are unanimous and clear in their distaste for racists, Al even mentioning that he marched with the civil rights cause as an ally way back in "The Color Of Truth".
In much the same way, you could generalize the struggle for gay rights. Depressingly, it still is kind of a battleground of social progress today, but please bear with me for the sake of the critique. In the past, gay people were oppressed and discriminated against. They fought for their rights to exist and get married and be recognized as equals and won them, and we now see that homophobic systems of oppression against them were wrong. That is the lens through which one would view this episode today. If that rebooted Quantum Leap that's coming out in two weeks (as of me writing this) had a gay rights episode, its Sam and Al equivalents would be unambiguously on the right side of history and in support of gay rights, opposing the homophobes of the leap's era. In 1992, however... gay rights were still a battleground. They weren't "solved" such that it was blatantly obvious that being pro-gay rights was the right thing to do. Homophobia ran rampant in popular culture at the time: you'd lose count over how many 80's comedies used the F-slur as an insult. It was still a battleground and there wasn't the benefit of hindsight to say it was solved... and so, in the midst of the battle (and from a modern lens), Quantum Leap just fucking muddles itself on this issue over and over, to the detriment of my enjoyment and resonance.
To a lesser extent, Phillip Ashcroft's extremism is a big problem. He has two planned schemes for dealing with the homophobia of the Chain, and neither of them are very good. The first is publishing a goddamned list of every closeted gay cadet at the Academy. JESUS CHRIST, PHILLIP, YOU DON'T FUCKING OUT PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR FUCKING CONSENT TO MAKE A POINT! His second scheme is to take his own life via hanging, but also have Chain graffiti around his place and to call the police before he does it, framing the Chain by making his ending look like a homophobic murder. As grim and ill-thought as that is, we'll come back to how Phillip is talked out of this and who by because the resolution itself is actually not that bad. Before that, though, we have to finally tackle the big thing. That which torpedoes the episode for me. All this muddled confusion in the middle of a battle for social progress pushes one part of the show to a tense breaking point. Let's talk about Al.
Out with it. Al, in this episode, is vehemently opposed to the idea of gay men in the Navy. There's all this nonsense talk about how you have to be able to trust in the man next to you in the heat of battle, and later in the show when a Navy admiral is spouting the same stuff Al is actually agreeing with him. Jesus Christ, what am I watching? One of the leads of our dumb time travel show is agreeing with the bigots of the past! Now yes, Al has often been put in ideological opposition to Sam on a lot of leaps. He's not a perfect paragon of a man, a five-time divorcee and womanizer. Yes, he learns a lesson in the episode and admits at the end that he was wrong and that Sam (and the social progress fighting for gay rights) was right. Yes, on some level that can be seen as a touching story about gaining empathy and understanding for people who are different than you, and is in broad strokes the type of story I like to see. Yes, it even makes sense that Al's backstory as a Navy man means he was a complicit part of the same rot of this system which is so homophobic and needed to be rooted out. I get all of that, I really do. Mechanically, it all makes sense.
But on the other hand, like... Fuck, am I really that unreasonable if one of my lines in the sand is not making one of the leads of this time travel show I like into a fucking bigot so he can just learn a lesson at the end? Even if Al ended up often being ideological opposition or devil's advocate, this is just pushing him way too far for my liking. The show understood this for the episodes about racial inequality. It never in a million years would have had a civil rights leap where Al felt icky about the idea of, say, interracial marriage only to come around at the end. A main character holding such a bigoted belief would be so obviously unthinkable, both to us in 2022 and the writers in the 90's, because civil rights are obviously the right thing to fight for. When it comes to gay rights, though, it's all muddled and so there's an uncertainty and this sudden horrible desire to fully put Al on what we now know as the wrong side of history.
Somehow it's even worse, because there are a handful of moments in this episode where Al has what can only be described as gay panic in regards to Sam. A few beats played for comedy where Al is hyper-attuned to Sam's body language or him getting a cup of tea instead of coffee. Yes, some leaps have Sam taking on aspects of the leapee... but Al is treating the possibility of that with sheer fucking horror. Sam, to his credit, gets to call him out on how ridiculous he's being (the highlight being a rant about tea to the likes of "WHAT, IS TEA GAY NOW? DO YOU THINK THE BOSTON TEA PARTY WAS JUST ONE BIG GAY BOAT FESTIVAL?"), but again it's the same general objection. You made a lead of the show a bigot to teach him a lesson about not being a bigot. Again, am I that out of line for not wanting the leads to reflect such backwards prejudice? In my mind, that's what the side characters encountered in the leaps are for: encounters with the historical thinking of the time which can be countered by the enlightened thinking of the future. Not Al, though. As much as I will let this roll off of me and will be able to continue to enjoy Al in other episodes, there's always going to be that memory sticking with me of the time they made him anti-gay rights. Yes, the show cleans up after itself by making him admit he was wrong. By staining him with this bigotry to begin with, you leave a mark that can never be cleaned up by an "I was wrong" speech.
Speaking of cleanup, the Chain are disbanded pretty handily by Sam confronting them in the locker room before they're about to head out and get Phillip. Much like the KKK before in the climax of "Justice", Sam calls them a bunch of cowards who have to hide behind masks to commit their bigotry, telling them to look in the mirror at their own faces and ask if being violent vigilantes and murderers is what they want. The rest of the Chain basically shake their heads and walk away from it all, finding it's all gone too far. It's just a little neat and tidy, but things are better with the resolution of saving Phillip. The man who talks him down is... Coach Mertz, who has been supportive of Sam all episode and is himself a closeted gay Navy man. He's the best example of gay representation in the episode, and the fact that this all had the framing device of a track meet kind of cuts against all that nonsense Al and the Admiral were spouting about "oh no I wouldn't want to be next to a gay guy in the middle of a war". This man is responsible for a bunch of athletic guys in sports gear who then all go take showers... and him being gay doesn't fucking matter in the least in regards to his ability to be a responsible leader in athletics. Just like how Phillip was a good student and would have made a good responsible Naval leader, and his homosexuality has fucking nothing to do with his ability to do that job. Phillip ends up finding a better calling, though, as he ends up working for a little bar in New York you may have heard of, called the Stonewall. Forget a responsible leader in the Navy. Phillip becomes a leader in the gay rights movement itself, fighting not for the military complex but for the rights of people like him. Proof that he would have made a good responsible leader, even in the Navy.
Indeed, history would agree with this episode's take. Two years later, Bill Clinton would put Don't Ask Don't Tell into effect. Not perfect by any means, and repealed in the 2010s, but a step forward and an acknowledgment that being gay has nothing to do with military prowess. Two years is all it took to make Al's views more outdated than they already were. The battlegrounds of social progress march on and on. The general culture today can see that the homophobic oppression of gay people are wrong... and now we have a battleground fighting for the social progress of transgender rights. One wonders if that new Quantum Leap will have an episode on trans rights. If this episode's any indication, their heart will be in the right place but they'll be too close to the fight to really definitively plant their flag. It will be a controversial and progressive step forward for this day and age... and in 2052, some blogger will look at it and find it a muddled mess that didn't know, couldn't know, that trans people fought for their rights to exist and get married and be recognized as equals and won them, and the people of the future now see that transphobic systems of oppression against them were wrong. It would be a lovely future that I hope comes about. In the meantime, we have to hop to another episode of this time travel show.
Temptation Eyes: Well, that stuff above was pretty damned exhausting. This time we've got... well, I'd want to call it lighter fare but it sort of has the specter of serial murder hanging over it. Make no mistake, there's a beautiful story inside this episode. It just happens to be set against the backdrop of a madman strangling sex workers to death in San Francisco in 1985. I get this weird sense of parallel with Jack The Ripper, halfway across the world and 100 years in the past. Pity I don't have a copy of From Hell and Sean here with me to delve into that more. Sam is Dylan Powell, a TV news reporter who's reporting on the murders along with his trusty cameraman Ross. Also at the grisly scene of the sixth murder is Tamelyn Matsuda, a psychic who the police have hired in desperation to try and get some clue of who's killing all these sex workers. Tamelyn is the focal point of this leap, as she'll be victim #7 on Valentine's Day in just under two weeks, and so Sam has to do his thing and try to save her life.
There is, briefly, a bit of skepticism and doubt from Sam and Al as to whether or not Tamelyn really does have psychic powers. Okay, you guys. Come on. God, the devil, and ghosts are all real. Is ESP really that too farfetched for you? More to the point, as the audience we were privy to Tamelyn's vision of the crime as she touched the victim's pillow and saw it, kind of like Stephen King's The Dead Zone. We already know she's got the sixth sense. What the show decides to do with it, though, is far more interesting than just solve murders. This episode is a bittersweet romance between Tamelyn and Sam. I want to make that last sentence very clear. I did not mean that the romance is between Tamelyn and Sam pretending to be Dylan Powell. I meant what I said. This is a romance between Tamelyn and Sam Beckett.
No, instead we get a whirlwind romance for the next 12 days, set to "I Want To Know What Love Is" by Foreigner as shots of Sam and Tamelyn going on dates and stuff are intercut with the phases of the moon. Valentine's Day, when Tamelyn is supposed to die, will be a full moon, and so this is building up the time and letting you know that her fate's still not averted. Sam can't just skip town with her or anything, either, because the killer will just keep killing people before getting caught if he does nothing about it. The man must be stopped. There's a brief flirtation with catching a guy they think is the killer, but it's a red herring. He was only a copycat who killed one person.
No, the real killer is Sam's camerman Ross! Who went on a killing spree because he and Dylan were about to be fired, and so has resorted to murder with dual purposes. On the one hand, he and Dylan can cover the aftermath of the killings on the news and skyrocket their careers back into relevance because the TV-viewing audience loves grisly murder. On the other hand, he's only killing sex workers and he sees this as cleaning San Francisco up from what he deems degeneracy. Now Tamelyn and her romance with Dylan have broken up the news pair again, so Ross is going to throw her off of a building. Sam gets there just in time to save her, but Ross ends up throwing himself off the building. Yeesh. There's almost something to be said about Ross's motives, but like the whole "SAM DON'T BREAK THE QUANTUM LEAPING RULES" thing, it comes out of nowhere, is half-hearted, and doesn't really resonate with what came before.
No, in the end this was about the bittersweet romance. Sam saved Tamelyn from being murdered, but now that means he's going to leap and never see his beloved again. The pair get to say their fond farewell, as Sam leaps off to another time and place. It is a pretty good episode, when it's about the romance and Tamelyn seeing Sam's true self. I am absolutely all about that shit. Everything around it is kind of flimsy, but I can't completely fault it. It's rock solid and moving in all the places where it counts, and after the nightmare of last time that's a breath of fresh air. Hopefully the next lets me breathe easy too.
The Last Gunfighter: Yeehaw, it's time for an episode about the Wild West! That Quantum Leap would do one of these is unsurprising, as every sci-fi show seems to manage to get a Wild West episode in somehow. Various levels of contrivance need to occur in them to get it to happen, and usually these are fine enough like time travel or a hologram. (Ironically, the biggest stretch I can think of is Enterprise's "North Star" which posits an entire planet of people abducted from the Wild West who never advanced their culture beyond those signifiers.) Of course, watching Quantum Leap, one has to wonder what contrivance will get us into the Wild West. The limit point of leaping is within Sam's own lifetime, keeping things within that boomer sphere between 1953 and... I think 1985 is the closest leap we've seen to the present? Anyway, do you break the rules to wring out an episode in the Wild West?
Nah, you can find a way to keep Sam in that timeframe and also do a story about the Wild West. But wait! Even in the 1950s, the timeframe of the Wild West was ancient history! Yes, it was... and that's exactly what the episode is about. It's set in 1957 in a tiny little town called Coffin, Arizona. Quaint and westerny, I know. Sam has leapt into Tyler Means, an 82 year-old man who is a local celebrity for his grandiose stories about his life long ago in the bygone days of the Wild West. This is a story about the last gasp of living history for the Wild West, when the last people who remember it are old relics past their time. It's about memory versus history... and history's gunslinger just walked into town.
There's also the wrinkle of Tyler's family, especially his grandson who idolizes him and grew up loving all those stories of his grandpa being a heroic cowboy. If Sam doesn't do things just right, the grandson will end up a juvenile delinquent and a criminal. Money for a good college education would help, like funds from a TV deal, so having Tyler live with his honor intact is what must be done. Tyler's grandson is stubborn enough, when Sam still has doubts about having a duel, to take Tyler's gun and confront Pat himself. Pat, honorable as he is, will still duel Tyler's replacement. The kid is only 13 years old... but Pat killed a man in the before time of the Wild West at age 15. Sam eventually duels him, as TV drama must dictate... but wins by just quickdrawing faster than Pat? They make it up and Sam manages to get Pat in on the TV deal as a consultant too, to try and make things right and get another expert of the time in on the show.
Yeah, this one isn't bad. The tension over how Sam will get out of having to have a gunfight is definitely there, even if the resolution of "I drew faster but didn't kill you" is a little neat and tidy. Still, whatever. Let it roll off your back and move on. It's a fun 45 minutes of all the Western tropes and manages to also be a fun story about living memory vs. the theme park idea of sanitized history. Coffin is a tourist trap with all the signifiers, but Pat and Tyler are the last people alive who remember what it was really like. I like that angle, and it's what I'm going to take from it as I ride off into the sunset of the next leap. Hi-ho, writeup, away.
The singing is fine and all, it's just that you have to be careful who you run afoul of. Enter Bobby Lee, a nightclub owner who wants to give the girls a shot and thinks they have great talent. He especially takes a shine to Lynette, and this is a problem. He likes to be a very smooth guy who'll reach up and put a hand under the girl's chin, all suave and romantic. Let me just put my thumb over to the left here, under the Caps Lock key. CLICK. BOBBY THESE ARE 15 YEAR OLD GIRLS YOU ARE SUAVELY FLIRTING WITH JESUS CHRIST NO. Lest you think the episode has lost its mind, it knows Bobby is a scumbag. If Sam doesn't change things, Lynette will be locked into a hellish contract with Bobby, who also is a part-time pimp. The implications are right there, but if you somehow still missed them?
Well how about more flirting at Bobby's club while the Dovettes take five, which offscreen leads into Bobby pushing Lynette against the wall and beginning to force himself upon her? Thankfully Al catches them and Sam can pull him off of Lynette, but that only pisses off Bobby and actually pisses off Lynette because Bobby won't let them play unless they apologize for stopping what was about to become a full-on assault. Yeah, that's right. The attempted rapist wants an apology for being prevented from doing his rape. Worse, they end up doing it in the end. Sam does not say "I'm sorry", but he does have to say "Please let me sing in your club, Bobby" at the end. Blugh.
Bobby Lee can't really be redeemed, but Sam is determined to shore things up between Lynette and her father the reverend. All he asks of him is for him to come to the club and hear Lynette sing, to hear the talent she has and see how happy it makes her to go on stage. He doesn't have to go hog wild and let her drop out of high school or anything, but the way he's acting now is totally boxing her in and driving her away from him in her heart. All episode, Sam tries and tries to mend things, but nothing seems to be working... but then the reverend hears her sing. Then he heads back to his church to vent to God about how much he misses his dead wife, and how much he regrets having driven his daughter so far away. Better things are possible, though, as Lynette and the reverend reconcile as she enters the church and sings him a song. Oh hey, it's like a song can connect two people and help them better understand each other. Didn't I watch a show about that one time?
Gags aside, this isn't bad. You got a high-level scumbag, and a better future being made involving two people understanding each other and learning to respect the other a little better. I would have liked a little more comeuppance for Bobby Lee, gross as he is, but ah well. I can go back and watch the clip of Scott Bakula beating up Kevin the rapist from "Raped" if I really need that dopamine hit of "scumbag gets comeuppance". This is a soulful little episode with a lot of good songs, and great choreography from Scott Bakula in a beehive and pink-sequined dress. What else do you need from this weird time travel show?
Ghost Ship: The title there implies a pretty spooky episode, and what we get does have those spooky riffs. In one mad way it reminds me of "Portrait Of Troian" because it has Sam and Al debating the existence of supernatural stuff before an end-of-episode tweeeest. It's also kind of a bottle episode, having only four other actors besides the leads and taking place entirely on a plane. Said plane is flying over the Atlantic in 1956, with Sam having leapt into its copilot Eddie Brackett. Oh hey, flying, that was the first ever leap! Sam still doesn't know how to fly a plane, but to be fair he hasn't exactly been able to go to flight school in the middle of his leaps now has he?
The only problem with going back to America is that the newlywed wife, Michelle, is feeling under the weather. As it so happens, she is suffering from appendicitis and won't live to make it back to America before that thing bursts and kills her. Lucky, Sam has some medical expertise and knows what to do to make Michelle comfy and try to treat her with what he's got on a little plane. Unluckily, he also has to try and convince Captain Cooper that going back into the Bermuda triangle to make it to Bermuda is the only way to save Michelle's life. This is easier said than done, as will crop up again in the climax, but Cooper agrees.
Once they're right in the middle of the fucking thing, the other shoe drops and the weird shit starts happening. Sam spots a ship in the water which Al identifies as an old WWII-era ship... and when Cooper comes back to the cockpit, the ship is nowhere to be seen down below. The instruments fuck up once again, the radio picking up a strange song instead of Bermuda. Al's hologram fades away, and is it due to an inconvenient power failure in 1999 or is it the triangle messing with him from the past? Well, surely a level-headed captain like Cooper can pilot us out of this mess! Oh, did I mention that Cooper has latent PTSD from being the only survivor of a crash in the Bermuda Triangle during the war, and lost at sea for a week afterwards? And that he's flashing back to his war days and about to divebomb the entire damn plane into the ocean to get imaginary German U-Boats? Lovely.
Even without Al to help him, Sam (with the help of Cooper's wife Wendy, who's been acting as a flight attendant for this trip) snaps Cooper out of his literal and metaphorical tailspin so they don't crash into the ocean, resorting to tossing some of the rich couple's luggage out to lighten the load so they can climb back up. It's wild that they have the restraint to not make the rich husband a spoiled asshole. Yes, he asks for drinks like a spoiled asshole at the start, but once the crisis starts he gives a shit and cares and helps. It's a good change of pace. They make it to Bermuda in time to save Michelle, and Al comes back as Cooper tells the story of how he got saved by a ship called the USS Cyclops when he crashed in the war, only for it to get sunk and him to survive that shipwreck.
Cue the twist as Al tells us... the USS Cyclops sank in 1918! Ohhh shit, Cooper was on a ghost ship the entire time! It's the name of the show! Ghost ships and the Bermuda Triangle are real, just like ghosts and ESP and God and Satan... well, probably Satan, it was ambiguous whether or not that was just a bad dream. It's an engaging little leap with a smaller scale, but that works to ratchet up the tension. Sometimes a bottle episode like this can be the most tense, and being caught in an airplane in the Bermuda Triangle definitely is. I liked it. I think I'm going to like the next one, too, if it's making fun of what I think it is.
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