(Hello again! Weren't we just here talking about Perfect Blue? Yes. As I said before the spooky marathon began, I had to slip the final Quantum Leap writeups in the middle of the spooky season due to running out of time. Shouldn't have dragged my heels back in Season 2, but oh well. So, we'll be alternating every day now for the next week or so between Quantum Leap Season 5 and spooky media. Today you get the opening to Season 5, and it's a whopper. Let's just let the me of the past get to it, and hold on tight for the beginning of the end.)
(TW: attempted suicide)
Welcome back, my friends, to the beginning of the end. What a summer we've had, leaping through time and space on the back of microcosmic currents. We survived all sorts of things and made about 75 stories better. Now it's the fall, and we've got to ride things out one last time. I peeked ahead a little with the old metaphorical telescope, and I can tell you that Season 5's going to be a bumpy ride. For one, they pulled a Sailor Stars and updated the theme song. Unlike Sailor Stars though, I don't really dig it. Maybe it will grow on me, but it took the soft and light theme with its synth and its sax and turns it into this BRACING EPIC THING that just sounds off, like the show is trying to do a non-copyright infringing version of its own theme. Maybe things will stabilize when we get back to normal leaps... because what we left off on is hardly a normal leap. Last time, after saving Al from a bad future where he was executed for a crime he didn't commit, and after briefly threatening a narrative collapse where he was erased from history and replaced with Roddy McDowall, we ended the season on a leap with terrifying macrocosmic implications.
Time to face them, because the hero of our time travel show has just leapt into Lee Harvey Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald, Part 1: Welcome to Season 5. Welcome to sheer macrocosmic hell, swallowed whole by Big Important History and stuck inside it on an endless loop. At least, that's what the bombastic opener is doing. Evidently this originally aired as a big 90-minute TV movie, kind of like how the pilot episode was presented. My Blu-Ray splits it into two episodes, so we'll cover it like that. I also want to flag, upfront, the impetus for this episode coming into being. This aired in the fall of 1992. A year prior, Oliver Stone's movie JFK came out, a movie bursting at the seams with every conspiracy theory under the sun about what really happened in November 1963. A year later would be the 30th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. Nestled in between, swallowed by history, is this episode. There's more to the motivation to do an episode on Lee Harvey Oswald, but we'll have to circle back to that rather than just say it outright.
Before much more can happen, he leaps again... but we're swallowed by history. The potential of leaping has been limited, and Sam is pinballing back and forth along six years of Oswald's timeline. The usual leap date included in the episode is actually two to reflect this, stuck between October 1957 and Nov. 22nd of 1963. When one is swallowed by the jaws of history, things like this happen. We're trapped within history, and worse is that its power threatens to consume the very heart and soul of the show. Season 4's finale only had the threat of narrative collapse by killing Al temporarily. The battle for the ethos of the show is being fought right here, in the maw of history, and history is starting to win. We have seen, in the past, that sometimes the leapee forms a psychosomatic link with Sam and imparts some of them onto him. That's exactly what's happening here, but since we're playing for bigger stakes it's far more potent.
Sam sporadically becomes subsumed by the personality of Lee Harvey Oswald, talking and acting and thinking just like him. It all comes back to that metaphor of history swallowing our microcosm whole. Oswald is just one man, yes, but it's like some sort of fucked-up alchemy. He became a historical event unto himself by taking those shots on November 22nd, and it's that very force of the arc of history which is slowly taking over and corrupting Sam. Yes, we have to keep in mind that this is a real man who really existed, an ordinary man who killed another ordinary man who happened to have a lot of political power. Oswald in the episode, though, represents something else. In a mad way, he's presented as Sam's dark mirror. Certainly we actually see Oswald in the waiting room in 1999, looking at his sudden reflection of Scott Bakula and yelling about it... but when we're in the past and Oswald takes over Sam?
Oswald embodies everything that Quantum Leap and Dr. Sam Beckett fights against in leaping through time and space. A bad-tempered, sexist, abusive, racist, and willing-to-kill reprehensible scumbag. All the corruption that Sam rooted out to make better futures is present in Oswald in this episode, and taking over his thought process. Indeed, Sam/Oswald shows pretty much all the nasty qualities I mentioned in a lengthy bit of Part 1 set in a bar in Japan, ending in him getting in a bar fight with a trouble-stirring sergeant and almost shooting him with a tiny pistol. Al has to bring Sam back to the forefront by asking him about quantum physics, talking Sam back into the pilot's seat and making him drop the gun.
Indeed, this is probably Sam and Al making a better future already. It gets a little lost in the maelstrom of Big History looming over us, November 22nd and all... but there's little doubt that Oswald would have blown that guy away. Al was able to get Sam to back down, and so there is a man alive now who Oswald would have killed. No matter what the show does involve Kennedy and Sam/Oswald, we have to keep that in mind. It's worth talking about Al a little, before we go on to the second half. Amidst all of this, the show is playing that opposing viewpoints business it likes to play between Sam and Al. Like believing in the supernatural or not, or in "Running For Honor" where-- NO NO NO I'M NOT GETTING INTO THAT AGAIN. Here, Al is convinced that somewhere in this six-year swirl of history they will find evidence of The Conspiracy To Get Rid Of Kennedy, with Oswald at the center of it. Sam isn't so sure, but Part 1 certainly does end with a leap to 1959, where Oswald takes over and starts blabbing military secrets to the KGB in Moscow. It's an abrupt ending because this was meant to be a 90-minute affair, but if syndication and Blu-Ray can split it abruptly, so--
Lee Harvey Oswald, Part II: --can I. Shit, we jumped tracks too. Before I get back into it, I should mention the introductions to both episodes, which are very cinematic with an ominous orchestral score as the credits roll over old black and white photos, first of Kennedy and then of Oswald. It really gives this aura of being subsumed by history, the magnitude of the event visible from the opening alone. Back into the show, some more of that dark mirror corruption and instability of the very nature of Quantum Leap itself is happening. This is a case where the history almost perfectly synchronizes with the theme of what's happening to the ethos of the show itself.
Oswald, you see, is attempting to defect to the Soviet Union by spilling his military secrets. Specifically, a whole bunch of top-secret stuff about a covert plane he had to track during his service at a radar outpost. Said covert plane is none other than the fucking U2. Remember the last time that plane came up in Quantum Leap? It was in Season 2's opener, "Honeymoon Express", where the whole deal was Al trying to get Sam to prevent the Russians from shooting it down to prove the merits of Quantum Leap to the government, to turn it into a macrocosm about Big Historical Events. That episode rejected the idea of Sam being there to stop the U2, instead being about helping an ordinary woman get out of a bad situation. To once again be able to bring up the U2, as macrocosm continues to slide us further down the maw of history? There's something there. At the very least, though, Oswald doesn't tell the Russians anything they don't already know about the U2, so we can be spared the thought of Sam causing it to be shot down.
It's here where we hit the beginning of the darkest point of the show, with perhaps the darkest thing it's done... and this is a show that's had racists and sexual assaulters and all sorts of other fucked-up shit. Al is convinced that, in order to figure out how to get Sam out of this and change history, they have to first play along with history. To not deviate from what the history books say about Oswald in this moment in time. What do the history books say, then? They say that Oswald, facing deportation from Russia, attempted suicide. So now Al has to spur Sam on to do the same thing, in a warm bathtub with some razor blades. This is horrific, and shows how far we've fallen into history. Al is urging Sam to do that because of fucking history, and Sam does it. He leaps out like just before, or after, or something like that. I'm going to be honest with you. Artery injury is one of my phobias. I can't watch wrist or throat trauma. I didn't actually see the specifics of this scene because I was squeamishly looking away and scared out of my fucking mind.
The point of it is, other than making me squirm on my couch, that we just finally lost Dr. Sam Beckett to the abyss. We've jumped to April 1963, and a second after Oswald's attempt to kill General Edwin Walker. We'll later learn that Al attempted to get Oswald's influence out of Sam's head by putting the real Oswald in 1999 into the quantum leap accelerator to flip-flop their influences back. A noble attempt from Al, but it only leaped more of Oswald into Sam... and this is where we at last lose him. It's Scott Bakula striding around and acting, but make no mistake. Our hero is nowhere to be found in 1963. That is Lee Harvey Oswald, and as Al tries to get through to him after a jump forward to New Orleans, we can see that Sam isn't in the driver's seat anymore... right as we leap to the big day.
Now, as history and macrocosm and every metaphor for consumption and corruption has taken over and twisted Dr. Sam Beckett and his values, nay, the very heart and soul of Quantum Leap itself, is when I feel we should get into why this show was made. Why did Quantum Leap dive into the quagmire of Oswald and JFK? It all comes back to that movie, the one Oliver Stone did. I'll link a video of him explaining it, but I also want to type it out, so. Quantum Leap's creator, Donald Bellisario, recalls his teenage son coming back from that movie in 1991 and talking up a storm about the whirl of conspiracy around the Kennedy assassination. Bellisario thought all of this conspiracy theorizing was bullshit, and was convinced that Oswald did it alone. Bellisario actually met Lee Harvey Oswald, if briefly, at a radar station in the late 50's, and supposedly perked up in November 1963 when he saw Oswald's face on TV. So, that's the impetus for this 90 minutes of history swallowing us whole. Donald Bellisario heard about the movie JFK, thought its conclusions were bullshit, and threw Scott Bakula into it to set the record straight.
Two immediate possibilities are present. The first is a massive disruption of known history: that somehow Quantum Leap will save Kennedy. As nice as it would be to have a man not get shot in the head, Quantum Leap wouldn't do that and I didn't expect it to. Look back to the Vietnam episode for why; the cost of equivalent exchange would be too much. The second and more horrifying is that we remain trapped in the maw of history. That Scott Bakula, trapped in the dark heart of Oswald, is the face and trigger finger which takes those shots. Even if we could absolve Sam and say that he was not himself, that he really didn't pull the trigger, that would be too much. It would be way too much, and it's a final plunge that the show can't take. How the hell do we escape?
We use a microcosm, an ordinary story that's part of an extraordinary day. The answer is the age-old question that every American boomer can answer. Where were you when you learned that Kennedy had been shot? Sam told Al his answer, earlier. He was 10 years old and on the farm with his father, learning how to drive a tractor, when his mother came out and told them both the news. As Scott Bakula as Lee Harvey Oswald sits in his little sniper's nest, Al tries reaching out to Sam again and reminding him of that story. Reminding him of the ordinary, the mundane. Of being 10 years old on the farm. It is enough, and Sam grabs the lifeline and leaps out of Lee Harvey Oswald...
...and into another real figure of history on that day, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill. In the real world, Clint Hill hopped into the president's car and protected him and Jackie Kennedy from any more fire. On the show, Sam immediately darts for the motorcade, too late to stop Oswald from shooting Kennedy but managing to get up there and do much the same as Clint Hill did. This is a bit of a danger when you put fictional characters into real history. Yes, in the show, Sam does what he can... but it also has the effect of stealing the valor from a real person who did what they could during a real moment of crisis. Nevertheless, I can do my best and tell you about Clint Hill and his little act of heroism in the middle of the chaos that Oswald caused.
So it is, then, at the hospital, that Sam weeps over it all. He was subsumed by history, by Oswald, not strong enough to break free of the arc of history and stop the inevitable from happening to Kennedy. Here's where Al consoles him, and tells him he did change something. This is a bit of a cheat by the show, but it posits that in Quantum Leap's original timeline, Jackie Kennedy was also killed, and that Sam leaping into that agent did change history on a certain level. Unable to change what our history book says, the best Quantum Leap can manage is making its own history books slightly worse before putting them in line with ours and calling it a net positive change which Sam has helped bring about. Our episode ends, then, with the same sort of photo montage, but this time of Jackie Kennedy and the funeral for her late husband, the President of the USA.
That brings us out of the macrocosmic hell, out of the belly of the beast. At least, I think so. I'm going to watch the next one after this and I don't expect it to be a big event. In the end, it was all about making a microcosm out of a macrocosm. Turning a conspiracy theory into the story of one wirey fucked-up guy with a gun in Dallas. Turning a story about the immutability of history into one where you can save someone, just as long as you make Quantum Leap's history worse to begin with. Even so, I have a bad bad feeling. Saving Jackie Kennedy is good, but it also kind of proves the narrative collapse of "Honeymoon Express" right. You can change history, in a mad way. One wonders if that wound will be able to heal as we go on. Regardless, it's certainly a big bombastic episode of the show. Quantum Leap flirts with the worst invocation of its inverses, and manages to somehow escape. In what shape it escapes it, I don't know yet. Come along with me, and we'll find out together.
Leaping Of The Shrew: Well, the good news is that we have escaped back into a world of microcosm after that hellish endeavor. Quantum Leap is very deliberate about this, doing almost a "bottle episode" in which the only players are Sam, Al, and the special guest star. Said special guest star is Brooke Shields, everybody! Hooray! Except not really hooray, because I bounced off of this episode pretty hard. It's trying to be a whirlwind romance of hot and cold, enemies to lovers, but it plays the enemies beat a little too hard for me to be sold on the romantic aspect. The main stumbling block is Brooke Shields' character, but let's set the scene.
It's 1956 in the Aegean Sea, and I mean literally as Sam has leapt into the middle of the ocean right as a nearby ship explodes. He's leapt into a sailor from said ship who worked in the engine room, and said ship was a luxury yacht owned by rich people. The only other visible survivor is Vanessa Foster, a rich heiress who was out here on a cruise to get married and is now stuck on a raft with Sam. Enjoy the next 40 minutes alternating between them at each other's throats and being romantic. I didn't, not really. Vanessa is just too deluded about her status to act with any tact in the situation. You can imagine the performance in your head, the stereotypical spoiled rich socialite who somehow still thinks that Daddy's money has any fucking bearing on her currently being adrift in a fucking raft after a shipwreck.
So you get special guest star Brooke Shields playing a woman who ends up shipwrecked and having to live on a deserted island. Oh yeah, Quantum Leap knew what it was doing. If you don't, I'll spell it out: there was a movie from around 1980 called The Blue Lagoon, about shipwrecked people on a deserted island, starring... Brooke Shields. That movie ended tragically, but the episode won't because Quantum Leap is about making a better future. Lord knows we need that after the hell we just escaped. Things come to a head when Vanessa's deluded lack of awareness of the situation leaves her to use all of the hairspray bottle which Sam was hoping to use as a makeshift flare to get the attention of any passing ship, and he unloads on her and calls her all the shit I've been calling her, a deluded spoiled princess and this and that.
Oh, by the way, these two are secretly crazy for each other. There's a little bit of depth given to Vanessa, where she's not truly happy as a very rich person who gets everything she could ask for because she doesn't have any true love or real friends. She also apparently liked Nikos at first sight, and went down to the engine room as an excuse to see more of him... which, the fact that she was a smoker and in the engine room is what made their yacht blow up to begin with. Dark. Most everyone else survived, but Vanessa and Sam are stuck on this island... but what if that was the point of the leap?
Yeah, Vanessa wasn't just being a rich ditz with no self-awareness. She used up the hairspray because she didn't want to go back to her unsatisfying life. In the original timeline, Nikos would have got them back to civilization with his skills as a sailor. Sam was leaped in because he's a shit sailor and would have gotten them lost, such that Nikos and Vanessa could have a happier and more fulfilling life living as castaway lovers in their island paradise. Uhhh. Okay? I don't have much writeup here because, again, all of this bounced off on me hard. Vanessa just came off way too strong and rich and petulant for me to really like her, even though I'm happy Sam made some sort of better future for her. I appreciate the lower-stakes leap and the unique nature of it having just three people, but it isn't about to climb up there to be one of my favorite episodes. Unlike these two, I'm getting off of this island.
Nowhere To Run: I want to start this one off by taking you back to Season 2, and the episode "Blind Faith". That one had Sam leap into a blind pianist, and Sam could still see even though the leapee couldn't and he thus had to play at being blind for the episode to not raise suspicion. That made me wonder, hypothetically, what would happen if Sam leapt into someone who didn't have all their limbs. How would that work, what with Scott Bakula having all of his limbs? I think the show heard me because it gave me a definitive canon answer to this casual speculation. Hmmm. It's usually a scary sign when a show starts answering fan speculation, but let's ignore the warning signs and talk about what is quite a moving episode.
It's 1968 and Sam is Ron Miller, a soldier who lost both of his legs to a landmine in Vietnam (uncomfortable memories of Maggie Dawson from Season 3's opener are coming back to me) and is now at a veteran's hospital back in the US for the next stage of his recovery. It's one of those leaps where Sam has to try and balance two things at once for the sake of a better future all around. On the one hand is his current roommate, Billy. Billy is paralyzed from the neck down, drives his girlfriend away in the first scene we meet him, and will be found dead in the hospital pool in two days' time having ended it all. So, Sam has to try and show him that life is worth living despite being paralyzed.
On the other hand, Ron Miller has a wife, and Al's peek into the future shows that one of Ron's kids is going to save a lot of lives in the Gulf War, so for the sake of saving many people in the future Sam has to ensure that Ron reconciles with his wife. Now, there's something interesting here beyond the wife plot. This is the first time since Season 3's opener that Vietnam has really been invoked... and it's been directly tied in with the Gulf War, the most recent armed conflict the US has gotten involved in. There's something there, I think, in invoking the Vietnam war after the end of the last. It's a tangible link, considering that the new Quantum Leap (six days away as of writing) has already teased a leap into 1991 and Operation Desert Storm. Interesting!
 |
| Pretend this caption is a fitting Friends quote. |
Things come to a head, then, when Ron's wife basically admits that she found another man while he was away in the war, and now that he's wounded it's all too much for her and she has to leave him. When Sam asks if having his legs would have made a difference, she tearfully admits she doesn't know. So that's bad. Worse is that Kiki has given Billy an electric wheelchair to cheer him up, but that this will also give him the means to go to the pool and do what he is going to do. Sam has to stop him, but first there's an asshole orderly who likes to swing his big dick around and be IN CHARGE OF THIS WARD. Sam responds by walking out of the chair. This is the big answer to the question, as the guy sees a double amputee sort of floating towards him before Sam punches him out. I bet when the people who worked on this episode saw Forrest Gump, and saw how well that movie was able to CGI out Gary Sinise's legs, they were a little jealous.
The climax of this episode is a bit strange. After trying to talk Billy out of plunging into the pool, Sam... kind of lets him. Both Al and I are yelling at the man in shock, going WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING? Sam's logic here is that if he just prevents Billy's attempt, he'll still be depressed enough to attempt again. By letting Billy attempt and almost succeed before saving him at the last moment, he thinks that it will make Billy realize that dying sucks and that he wants to live. This works in the show, but I just kind of have to wiggle my red flag a little at that logic. It just feels a bit callous, but I don't know. What I do know is that the problem of Ron Miller's kids is solved by the fact that he'll end up with Kiki, whose brother isn't MIA any more and is coming home. Hooray.
A few eyebrow raises aside, it's a good episode. There's a really poignant scene between Al and Billy, where Al tells him that one day they'll build a memorial for all the poor souls who died in Vietnam. One vet to another, trying to tell him that things are better in the future and this wasn't all for nothing. It will almost certainly be our last dance with Vietnam, and if I'm wrong then let an Intrusion From The Future come up where my future self laughs at me. You gone back to the future, me? Good. I'm going on to the next episode.
Killin' Time: I think, in hindsight, we were only delaying the inevitable. We escaped... let's call it Oswald's Macrocosm, just to sprinkle a little of that 10 year-old Nintendo Project entry back into this thing. We escaped it, and got two nice little stories that were simpler... but this episode feels like it represents a paradigm shift for Quantum Leap. It is not a paradigm shift that will last all that long, given that we'll be 16 episodes from the end after it, but its energy could ripple forward to the new Quantum Leap. Who knows? Regardless, this is a new way to tell a story and it at least intrigues in some ways.
In 1958 Sam leaps into Leon Stiles, a murderer and fugitive who is currently holing up in the home of a young mother and her daughter, the pair of them his hostages as the house is surrounded by police. Leon Stiles is not a very nice man, but Sam is. Without context, it seems like this situation should be over in about two seconds. Our good-hearted doctor will apologize, untie his captives, and give himself up. The problem with that is that one of Stiles' victims in his killing spree was the daughter of the sheriff, and the sheriff is now determined to get vigilante justice and kill Stiles to avenge his daughter. So, you know, building a better future isn't easy when you face death by cop.
The pressure this adds to Sam's hostage situation is enormous. Not only will he get killed by a vengeful sheriff if he doesn't make a better future, but if this brazen idiot in 1999 wearing his face should happen to get killed by a cop, then that's it for Sam. He'll be unable to leap back. The only way forward is to get Stiles back into the waiting room, and while Al is in hot pursuit Sam gets to have Gooshie as his leap guide. To help try to ease the tensions a bit, Sam tells his hostages the truth. He tells them about being a time traveler, and though they're skeptical at first he's able to prove it in a neat little scene. The mother is an aspiring med student, and Leon Stiles is supposed to be an illiterate delinquent... yet the man in front of her can answer any question out of the textbook correctly. As a further show of good faith, once Gooshie tells him that the daughter will get killed in the sheriff's vendetta crossfire, Sam lets her go and creates a better future. He should be leaping, but...
In 1999, Leon Stiles has found his next victim. He has a particular fondness for sex workers, and so he heads into the city and finds one, quickly baffled by all the future technology at her place before Al shows up to try and stop him, getting him to look in the mirror and see that his face is Scott Bakula. He doesn't take kindly to that and shoots Al. It's okay though, because he had a bulletproof vest on. Stiles sort of solves things by himself, realizing that he actually has time travelled 40 years into the future and going back to Project Quantum Leap to threaten Gooshie to send him back to 1958. Al is right on his heels and shoots him with a tranquilizer to stop that threat... but what about Sam?
The clock has struck midnight in 1958, which means that the sheriff and his men are busting in to save the hostage and "apprehend" Stiles... but she actually shields Stiles from the sheriff pointing a gun at him, insisting that he not ruin his career and the memory of his daughter for the sake of revenge. You got the criminal into custody, that's good enough. Thankfully, that was the last piece of the puzzle, and Sam can get out of here. It's quite the episode, this one, and such a simple idea. We've given the leapees agency before, like Katie McBain in "Raped", but to have one active in 1999 beyond some chats with Al is something else entirely. It really does feel like, for better or worse, they were trying to shake up Quantum Leap to give it a breath of fresh life and innovation. We shall have to see how they continue to do that.
No comments:
Post a Comment