A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 5 (Quantum Leap Season 5) [5.2]

(Continued from 5.1)

(TW: false sexual assault allegations, suicide)

BEAM ME UP, TRIP!

Star Light, Star Bright: But first, THE FUCKING ALIENS! Yeah, the tease to this leap is Sam in the woods as lights in the sky illuminate him and he looks up at a UFO. Any further thought that this is just a hook is partly dashed when we see the UFO fly off into the night sky in an instant. Oh my god. Do you all understand what this means? Let me remind you. At the end of my last project, Night Of The Loving Dead, the zombie idol anime's final teaser for a future Season 3 was the sudden appearance of a UFO. This led me into horrible dread for the future heart and soul of my cute zombie idol show, given some other Lore Bomb stuff I had uncovered while writing it. In terror of these unexploded lore bombs, I fled to a place where there were none. I fled here, to Quantum Leap, and now the UFOs have come here. We've come full circle.

Of course, this is yet again a "supernatural vs. skeptic" style of debate between Sam and Al. His leapee, 79-year old Max Stoddard from 1966, is a man obsessed with UFO hunting. Al figures that part of that obsession passed onto Sam, much like how Oswald's Macrocosm got him in the opening. The word Al coins for this process is "psychosynergize", which I really kind of love as a piece of technobabble. Once again we play our dance of ambiguity. Will Quantum Leap confirm that UFOs are real, or is this just the ravings of an old man psychosynergized onto Sam's subconscious? Despite that macrocosm at play, there's still some smaller stories to be told about mending the Stoddard family.

Like, for instance, Max's grandson Tim, who wants to be a musician while his stubborn father wants him to not do that, to either go to community college or work with him. Tim and Max have a good relationship, the pair of them looking out for each other despite grouchy old John Stoddard being a grouch about what they get up to. When things reach a breaking point, Tim wants to run away and play music in New York, which will have him end up dead by heroin overdose according to Ziggy. Sam has to talk him out of that bad ending, with a "drugs are bad" speech where he implores Tim to remember the names of future musicians who will die from drug overdoses. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, et cetera. It's kind of progressive, in a way, that Sam doesn't really object to the fact that the only drug Tim uses now is weed. He's like "oh grass isn't so bad, just don't get into harder shit, remember their names" and that's very mature for 1992, which liked to imply on Saturday morning cartoon airtime that smelling a joint would fry your brain like an egg or whatever.

That's one problem solved, but the other is keeping Max from getting put into a care hospital because his family thinks his UFO ravings are a sign of dementia. It doesn't help that they now hear Grandpa suddenly ranting to himself and saying WELL GEE AL IF I CAN PROVE UFOS EXIST LIKE I INVENTED TIME TRAVEL IT'LL BE A GREAT SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH. It really doesn't help that Max's UFO spotting has attracted the attention of the US government, who want to know what he knows in the interest of security and top secret project stuff. In the second act low point, John and Tim take Max to the hospital, where the government guys proceed to inject sodium penethol into him in order to make him tell the truth... and what our quantum leaper blabs out is everything to do with him being Sam Beckett, from the future, and part of Project Quantum Leap which works on time travel. I can't help but wonder if that will have consequences in this new future for the show. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: I mean, I guess you can headcanon that the massive lore shift in the very next episode is the result of Sam blabbing about time travel being real, but there's no definitive origin story for it. It could just as well be, as others have theorized, the Ziggy handlink left in 1945 by Al in "The Leap Back". Or a combo of both. Or neither. Nothing's canonized regarding it, so take your pick... and if you don't know what I'm talking about, buckle up in advance with my past self.)

This is a wild and sudden leap, though: John and Tim see the government car outside the hospital, realize the guys lied to them, and then bust in to take back Max with a shotgun. There's a brief chase before they're right back in the woods where Max/Sam saw the UFO, and there it is again... and they all see it. Oh, and the "better future" is Max getting beamed up by the aliens and leaving planet Earth. Methinks someone saw the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind as a happy ending. Okay. So add UFOs and aliens to the list of shit that's real in Quantum Leap. This is another good episode, and it's smartly focused more on the interpersonal family drama than the big dumb UFO plot, letting the latter bookend proceedings. More to the point... I feel very different than I did when the UFOs came in Zombie Land Saga. 

I framed my changing hyperinterests in the media I talk about and take in as regeneration, and in that sense I already have. I've seen so much Quantum Leap and adapted with it that I'm not quite the same person who yelled at those UFOs before. I haven't watched the next episode yet, but I've heard... things. Certainly even its tease is one that gives me pause, but I can't tell you about that yet. What I can tell you is that I'm ready to combat the macrocosm with everything I've got. Let the UFOs bring what they will. I've got a handle of the heart and soul of Quantum Leap, and the macrocosm doesn't have enough time to systematically destroy it. Whatever may come after this cannot negate what came before.

Bring it on, then, if you're going to bring it on.

Deliver Us From Evil: I still am not sure what to make of this one. It's somewhere between it being an absolutely gonzo paradigm shift that drips with potential, and a needlessly cruel mockery of Sam Beckett and everything the show represents for the sake of some macrocosmic epic. We may uncover the truth together by looking at it, really prodding at the thing. I'll tell you this much, though. It may swerve hard into left field in the middle as a big twist, but even the opening is quite unlike anything we have seen so far. Don't believe me? Listen to this.

It's 1966 and Sam has leapt into a dutiful dock worker named Jimmy LaMotta who also happens to have an intellectual disability-- NOW WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE!! Yeah. You read that right. We have officially entered the realm of the sequel leap. For a refresher, Jimmy LaMotta showed up in a Season 2 episode titled "Jimmy" which was all about the unfair prejudices people with intellectual disabilities face in day to day life. It also drove me bonkers because of its poorly-aged repeated use of a word beginning with R to describe Jimmy and his condition. Great, do I have to endure another 45 minutes of that? Well, no. The only time the word is said is in Sam's opening monologue, purely as a "things were bad and people used to call him this" deal. 

On the one hand, good, I'd rather not sit down and hear slurs for 45 minutes while I'm trying to watch my time travel show. On the other... well, why are we back here, then? If we're just ignoring Jimmy's condition, is there any point in coming back to this place and this world for a sequel leap beyond reminding me of it? There is. For better or worse, there is. There's some trouble in Jimmy's home life. He lives with his brother Frank, Frank's wife Connie, and their son Corey. Lately, Connie has been a little emotionally distant and not just content to play happy homemaker in 1966. This has caused Frank to drift as well, and to pay particular attention to a woman at his work. Ahh, I see, so Sam's come back to mend the marriage and keep Jimmy on the path to his happy ever after.

The show strings us along and pretends like everything is normal, but there are hints. Like Al babbling about how history is being changed even though Sam hasn't even done anything yet. Despite his best efforts, Frank is going to help the woman from the docks move, and there's a brief segment of Sam trying to play cockblocker extraordinaire to get Frank on the right path himself. It doesn't go very well, and he finds himself back at the house with Connie. Well, if he can't appeal to Frank, then maybe he can get Connie to see that things need to be mended. Yeah, that's par for the course in Quantum Leap, the show usually works on the wife instead of the shitty husband. If anything this episode is a shakeup for trying to get Frank not to be unfaithful first. Sam's not getting through to Connie, and he touches her arm as he passionately appeals to her, and then...

Everything changes. Connie and Sam shift... and there's someone else there wearing Connie's clothes, someone else who is also able to see Sam instead of Jimmy. This is Alia. Alia... is another quantum leaper. She's got everything in Sam's kit. Jumping from life to life across time and space, a Swiss cheese memory... oh, and a sassy hologram named Zoey who only Alia can see and hear, holding a handlink to a supercomputer named Lothos. This is huge. By any measure, this is huge. Not only is this a sequel leap, but it's building a new foundation upon the lore of Quantum Leap. Another quantum leaper. Holy shit. Alia tells Sam that she's here to help Jimmy, to teach him more advanced reading and make him more independent. It's nice and all, but Sam is still concerned about Frank and Connie's marriage. 

What we get here, in miniature, is sort of a reprise of "Temptation Eyes". Alia and Sam are uniquely positioned in the fabric of space and time. Nobody else can see their true selves, other than each other, and so they can each understand the other on a fundamental level. Nobody else in the universe can do what they do, leaping through time and space, and so they can form a romantic and intimate connection. Passion builds and the two move to get romantic and intimate, literally, and it looks like Sam has finally found a kindred spirit, someone he truly can share his heart and soul and true self with. Pity, then, that the other shoe has to drop. I am just going to do a straight shot of telling you what happens up until near the end of the episode, and then we'll circle back and comment on things. There's a lot going on and I can't really interrupt it because it's all intertwined. Buckle up. This is going to get rough.

Right as things get hot and heavy, Frank comes home. Oh shit, he can't see us like this! You're leaped into Connie and I'm leaped into Jimmy! Quick, let's get dressed so he doesn't misunderstand! Alia does not get dressed. Alia wants this to be misunderstood in the most horrific way possible as she proceeds to rip her own nightgown, claw at her own cheek so it bleeds, and then scream bloody murder. AAAAAH FRANK HELP ME!!! YOUR BROTHER JIMMY VIOLENTLY ATTACKED ME IN A SEXUAL ASSAULT ATTEMPT!! I'M SO TERRIFIED AND TRAUMATIZED, FRANK, PLEASE CALL THE DOCTOR AND HAVE YOUR MONSTER OF A BROTHER INSTITUTIONALIZED!!! Frank takes it about as well as you expect, beating up Jimmy despite Sam's protests and locking him in the bedroom before heading out to get the doctor on his wife's insistence, concerned for her wellbeing as the holographic Zoey cackles at his gullibility and idiotic chivalry. Oh, and Lothos has a new projection for Alia's leap. All she has to do to leap out is get Frank's gun and kill Dr. Sam Beckett. As she and Zoey accost Sam at gunpoint, the truth finally comes out. They aren't quite Sam and Al's counterparts. They're Sam and Al's dark mirrors, leaping through time and space and deliberately creating worse futures everywhere they go, for reasons as yet unexplained.

Okay, so. Holy fuck. There's a lot there, but I want to cycle back to the moment Alia reveals her true colors. You know, the part where she weaponizes a false accusation of rape against Sam/Jimmy to sow misunderstanding and dissent. I am very conflicted about this plot point. On the one hand, I am ethically appalled. It takes all the seriousness and grace of "Raped" and maliciously twists it, making an abject mockery of it and Katie McBain by validating the idea that a woman would lie about it to ruin a man's life and reputation. Giving any credence or credibility to the fearmongering idea of "OHHH NOO ALL SHE HAS TO DO IS CRY RAPE AND MY POOR POOR REPUTATION IS RUIIIIINED!!!" really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. 

On the other hand, they are the villains. Alia and Zoey, these two, these evil leapers... on some level it makes sense that they would make a mockery of one of the show's finest moments. That's why we're back in Jimmy's world. Remember back to Season 3's "Shock Therapy", where the narrative collapse of the show caused a version of Jimmy to be institutionalized and putting him through the bad future Sam averted for him in his debut episode. Somehow, that was picked up on. Jimmy LaMotta, for better or worse, is a battleground for the heart and soul of Quantum Leap. In a metaphysical way it makes sense that the evil leapers would finally cross paths with Sam here, battling out their campaign to destroy the LaMotta family. To destroy the heart and soul of Quantum Leap we've worked so hard for. To look at every optimistic and utopic better future we've made, scoff, and work to undo it. 

Again we come back to that "on the one hand" approach. On the one hand, we have a serious ideological challenge to the ethos of the show. The idea of evil leapers going through time and making things worse, breaking up marriages and committing murders and God knows what else... it drips with potential. It calls to mind the hazy dreamlike confrontation with the devil in "The Boogieman", where the satanic Al was pissed off that Sam kept making everything bad good again. Are Alia and Zoey doing the will of the Satanic, a karmic check against Sam's altruism to keep everything balanced? What is their ideology? How did they walk backwards into hell and become okay with making the world a worse place? What sort of terrible things have they done in the name of their mission? I don't know. I don't know, but there's the potential for something interesting.

On the other hand... I cannot just accept a macrocosm so easily. We were perfectly fine with the "antagonist" of the show being the moral rot at the heart of American history. The racism, the sexism, the homophobia... and for poor Jimmy LaMotta, the ableism and prejudice. An ideological antagonist which Sam couldn't root out and defeat on a macrocosmic scale, but was just fine beating out at the microcosmic level in creating better futures and making people realize that such futures were possible. About the last thing Sam needs is some human villains working for their evil evil goals to butt heads against. Still, it's hard to get mad when there's so little show left. Speaking of, how the hell is Sam getting out of this one? The evil leapers have him dead to rights, no morals or anything to stop Alia from killing her good counterpart and destroying the LaMotta family for good.

The answer is... well, a bit of a weird copout. Sam goes into some speech about how the two of them are intertwined, and evil means nothing without good to contrast it, so if you kill the good leaper then you evil leapers will also be destroyed. Look, I vibe with the metaphysical and the alchemical. I'd like to spin something about good and evil being of the same cloth here to explain this. Instead, I don't fucking know what Sam is babbling about here. Whatever it is, it stirs what little good is in Alia's heart and gets her to give up the gun, and she and Zoey scream as special effects distort them and they leap out in a flash of red. WE'LL MEET AGAIN, SPIDER-MAN SAM BECKETT!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!! Oh, and somehow this undoes every bad thing the evil leapers did. Sam and Al leap to two days later and everything is OK with the LaMotta family. Very neat and tidy, and as Al ponders about how they'll no doubt meet the evil leapers again, out Sam goes.

Christ, that was a mouthful. On some level, this is simultaneously a paradigm shift and a dead end. I'm not just talking about this episode, but Season 5 as a whole. It feels like the show is slowly trying to regenerate, doing things it's never done before. A whole huge leap into America's most famous assassin. The leapee running riot in 1999 for a B-plot. Now we have evil leapers out in time and space making the world worse, a pair of evildoers for Sam and Al to encounter in the future as their new archenemies. All of this, in a sequel leap battling for the very heart of Quantum Leap. All of this change and reinvention, and yet I know more of the history than the show does. It only has a handful of episodes left to bask in whatever its new self is before it leaps off into the sunset. When the show returns for its big continuation on September 19th, one wonders what sort of show it will be. For now, I'm not sure what type of show Quantum Leap is trying to become... but it's going to get bolder, as next time is a three-parter. Let's see what that has in store.

Trilogy, Part 1: So, I decided to take a different tact here and write about this trilogy after finishing all of it. It's a fascinating little artifact, a longform story for Quantum Leap that spans about 25 years and is centered entirely on the tangled web of one ordinary girl with an extraordinary and lurid family history. It's another of those stories of a type that Quantum Leap has never told before and thus feels like a bold reinvention for Season 5, especially with one of the end results of Sam's constant intervention in the drama of this girl's life. There's a lot to tackle, so let's dive in.

Immediately we're met with the aftermath of a mysterious murder. It's 1955 in the little town of Pottersville, Lousiana. Sam has leapt into Sheriff Clayton Fuller, and he's just found the body of Bert Aider floating in the swamp. From that incident and the investigation, Sam is immediately caught in a feud between the Aider family and the Fuller family. Bert's widow, Leta Aider, is convinced she knows who the culprit is: the 10 year-old Abigail Fuller, Clayton's young daughter. Leta's own daughter, Violet, disappeared two years prior and Abigail was the last person to see her alive. In addition, the pair had been fighting over a little gold locket. In Lida's mind, Abigail is an ominous child who has destroyed her family with violent bloodlust and she demands justice.

Her reasons for believing this run deeper than that, as there's also an apparent curse on Abigail's maternal bloodline. Her mother, Laura Fuller, used to be a Lanchette, and Laura is in fact the last surviving child of her generation after her mother went mad and committed murder/suicide with all the children and herself, Laura the sole survivor. Laura is currently a catatonic patient in a psychiatric hospital... and yet Sam has caught strange ghostly glimpses of her in Clayton's own home. It's all a very messy web, and there's an immediate danger and a history to be changed: in a day's time, Leta Aider will set fire to the Fuller house and kill both Clayton and Abigail. So, twofold for Sam: try and solve the murder of Bert Aider while also keeping himself and Abigail from burning.

Well, the murder investigation isn't all that conclusive, and in desperation Sam has gone to see Laura Fuller. This will be a running theme throughout the trilogy, Sam visiting her. While he's gone, Leta confronts Abigail at her house, and altercations ensue as Al urges Sam to get back as fast as possible. Abigail hides in a closet as Leta lights a lantern to try and find her, and as Sam enters the house the sound of Leta screaming at someone to get back can be heard before the lantern is dropped and the house is ablaze. Sam manages to break an upstairs window and get Abigail out of there, but in the roaring flames he is distracted by the sight of an apparition of Laura Fuller, before part of the house collapses onto him as he leaps out...

...and right back into Pottersville again. I'll deal with the parameters of the second part in a moment, but I do have to say that I really enjoyed the first part of this trilogy. I said way back in Season 2 that "Good Night, Dear Heart" felt like a Twin Peaks riff. I don't know if this quite has the same level of style, but it's definitely a mystery about the machinations and dark secrets of a small town. It could almost be a Stephen King novel, if the thing were set in Maine or something. The most important thing it does is cast doubt on Abigail Fuller. She seems a sweet kid and you would like her not to have done a murder... but she does have a short fuse on being challenged about it. More to the point, she is capable of violence. Though she swears she didn't kill Violet Aider, she admits to her father of being so mad about Violet taking that little golden locket that she beat the shit out of Violet. When Leta is accosting her, it makes Abigail angrily scream her innocence before bashing Leta over the head with a flower vase. There's a reasonable doubt planted in my mind, as well as in the people of Pottersville. Let's see what they think, 11 years later...

Trilogy, Part 2: And so we continue with the dramatic life, dark secrets, and deep resentments at play in the tangled web of Abigail Fuller. It's 1966 and Abigail is about to get married, Sam having leapt into her fiancée Will Kinkaid right in the middle of them getting hot and heavy the night before the wedding. Put that in your back pocket. Will was a supporting character in Part 1, a kind-hearted kid with a slight stutter. Sam, for whatever reason, really psychosynergizes with Will in this leap. Not only does he gain the speech impediment, but he really falls for Abigail in this one. Quite hard and quite fast, in fact. 

It was at this point of the trilogy, with the ominous talk of bloodline curses and murder, with Laura Fuller appearing before Sam as a ghost, and with Sam now hopelessly stricken for Abigail, that I suspected witchcraft was at work. Why not? If the devil and the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs can be real, why not witches? It turns out that the episode decided to mirror me in being suspect of Abigail's motives and dark secrets. Her wedding day is cut short by the news that another child in Pottersville, Purvis Takins, has gone missing... and Abigail was the last person to see him because she babysat for him the previous night. Once again, like Violet Aider, Abigail is suspected of being a malicious child-killer. 

The good news is that the kid is fine, and will be found the next morning. The bad news is, according to Al, that Leta Aider is going to whip up half the town into a frenzied mob and hang Abigail in the name of vigilante justice. So, that's bad. Very very bad. Sam is doing his best to try and find the Takins boy, trying to get Al to triangulate where he would eventually be found. This leap has been made all the more difficult by the fact that all Pottersville records will be destroyed by a flood in the early 1970s, so Ziggy has no data to go off of and alternative means have to be calculated. 

Predictably, everything goes off the rails and Sam is bashed over the head as the angry mob abduct Abigail into the night to be killed for the sake of justice, despite her protests that she did nothing wrong. Leta Aider is a determined woman, certain that Abigail is a monster, a child-killer, a witch, and that she should be hung on the spot. Ironically the only confirmed killer in this situation is Leta: the fire she set 11 years prior, the one Sam leapt out of in the nick of time? It killed Abigail's father Clayton. Sam didn't make a better future for him, but he saved Abigail once and he will manage to do it again. 

Leta has really gotten this crowd whipped into a rabid rage, as they even conk out the sheriff when he tries to disperse their lynch party. Sam eventually talks reason into the Takins patriarch, who is at least willing to listen beyond WE SHOULD KILL HER NOW BECAUSE WE DON'T LIKE HER, giving him the location of his son. Everything seems defused until Leta refuses to accept this ending, grabbing a shotgun and trying to blow Abigail and Sam away. She misses, but again... the only person we've seen trying to kill people in this story has been Leta. Still, could there be a dark heart of witchcraft at the center of this leap? We'll cut through it all, because as Sam knows he's about to leap he confesses love to Abigail. It's curious, as he's not psychosynergized enough to be stuttering anymore. Still, he does profess his love before he leaps, and we go to the final part of this sordid tale...

Trilogy, Part 3: And so it is that the truth will finally come out. In 1978, Sam has leapt into Larry Stanton, an eldery lawyer and former resident of Pottersville, Louisiana. His help is requested in representing, you guessed it, Abigail Fuller. Abigail is currently on trial for murder once again, and this one's a doozy. Leta Aider, who held a longstanding grudge again Abigail, was found dead in Abigail's own kitchen. Worse yet, Leta's vendetta was stirred back to life after the sad skeleton of her daughter Violet was found at the bottom of an old well, and so too have all the rumors and distrust of Abigail been stirred back to life by that discovery.

Up until this point, we have been marinating in a pretty good and surprisingly rich atmosphere of mystery and intrigue. The final part of the trilogy will put everything to rest, but before we get to the final reveal of who killed Violet and Leta Aider, there's a very big thing which we have to deal with. One of the changes in the 12 years between Parts 2 and 3 of the trilogy is Will Kinkaid, who Abigail did not end up marrying and who eventually moved out west somewhere, doing well in his own life. Their courtship left Abigail with a parting gift of sorts, however, as Sam goes to see Abigail and finds a little girl, about the same age as Abigail was when he first met her in 1955. (She is even played by the same actress who played the young Abigail in Part 1.) Yes, Abigail had a daughter, Samantha Jo Fuller. She's a very bright child, almost a genius, with a photographic memory. Are you getting what I'm putting down here?

Will Kinkaid is not Samantha Jo's father. Dr. Sam Beckett is. What we saw as the teaser/opener of Part 2 was the moment of conception, and Sam's leap in caused some quantum malarkey such that he is the father and not his leapee. Do I need to say it? Once again, Season 5 is building its own radical new foundation for what it assumes is its next incarnation, an incarnation which will never come to pass because there's no such thing as a Season 6 coming. (At least, not for another 30 years, but we are ignoring New Leap for the moment.) Sam's travels through time and space have not just created better futures. They've created another life, a child of his own who embodies his remarkable mental gifts. A child who he has to protect by cutting through the curse of the Lanchette bloodline. Samantha Jo is part Lanchette and thus part of the curse... but she's also part Beckett, and part of the blessing that is his good nature.

So, in the courtroom, both truths are revealed. Who killed Violet Aider, and who killed Leta Aider? It all comes back to Laura Fuller, who Sam has visited in all three parts and eventually manages to get to testify after he discovers that she had the infamous golden locket all along. On that day in 1955, the first person Violet Aider saw after Abigail beat the hell out of her was Laura Fuller, who refused to believe her daughter could do such a thing and who wanted to protect her from Violet claiming she was crazy. There was an altercation, it happened near a well, and... it was all just an unfortunate accident. An accident which Laura Fuller kept secret to protect her daughter. No witchcraft, no dark curse, just a tragedy which she kept in her heart for 25 years in her little room at the hospital. All this time, Abigail was innocent. Not a witch, not a sociopath, just a girl furious at repeated unfair accusations and attempts to fucking kill her in the name of vigilante justice.

As for Leta Aider? In the end, she was the antagonist all along, but not one that could be unpitiable. So sure she was in her determination that Abigail was a monster. When Violet's skeleton was uncovered, this would be the justice she desired at last... only to be denied it, due to statue of limitations. It happened too long ago and Abigail was only a minor, so nothing could be done. So it was that Leta, consumed by hate and despair, came to Abigail's home while she was out and made a mess of her kitchen. So it was that her despair and misery took over her... but also a bit of cunning. The police were called by Leta, from Abigail's home, while Abigail was out. Then Leta took the kitchen knife, and ended her own life. An equal mix of despair at the mess her life became after her family died, and a last attempt at vengeance against her nemesis Abigail, to frame her for Leta's death.

All of this would be speculation... if Samantha Jo had not witnessed the whole thing, able to recall the terrible trauma with her photographic memory. It's Sam who clears Abigail's name in regards to Violet at long last, the ghost of the past. The ghost of the present? That's finally exorcised by his daughter, the girl who breaks the Lanchette curse by creating a better future for her and her mother by telling the truth of what she saw. Again we come back to what I said in Part 2. Abigail was innocent. Three times, though, her innocence was not believed and her life threatened by accusations of what she must have done. Accusations stoked and perpetuated by Leta Aider, determined to her last breath and beyond the grave to see Abigail Fuller dead. That was what was at the heart of this web. Not the curse of a bloodline. The curse of stubborn vendetta.

Abigail will have a better future now... but so will little Samantha Jo. Al knows it. He knows it because history has been changed. In 1999, that glistening neon paradise, there's a 32 year-old tech on Project Quantum Leap. She's there, right now, working to help get her father to leap back home. She doesn't know that Sam is her father, and Sam will not know at the end of this leap... but we know what's been built. Think about what's been built up and changed now, ever since that day long ago when Sam first leapt. He had a dead brother, a flawed advisor, an old flame who could never learn to commit, and a woman dead at the hands of a vindictive Leta Aider. Now look at what we have. Tom Beckett is alive. Al Calavicci has become a slightly better person from advising Sam. Donna Beckett learned to love, and works to bring her husband home. Samantha Jo Fuller is there, right alongside her, embodying not the Lanchette curse but the Beckett Blessing. What a beautiful foundation we've made, and a better future that Sam could hopefully one day return to.

I really liked this trilogy, and even though it has the whiff of serialization it manages to tell an engaging and continuing story that's still a microcosm, albeit one playing out over a quarter century. It's not just the big reveal of Sam's daughter that makes it sing, either. The mystery and intrigue really kept me engaged and guessing, and I wanted to know just what resolution was at the heart of it all. It manages the best of both approaches of Quantum Leap, being both a good story about making an ordinary life better and a big foundational shift that wants to change everything going forward. It's a welcome addition, and one wonders if things are going to keep shifting as we go, having reached about the halfway point of the season thus far. Well, let's find out, huh? 

Promised Land: Something of a trend I've been noticing with Season 5 is that many of the leaps are getting bigger. You have the obvious candidates like Oswald, the confrontation with the evil leapers, and the whole-ass trilogy leap we just did focusing in on 25 years of someone's life. Many of these are macrocosmic, but that last one and this are just expansions of the usual concern of a leap: making a better future. In Abigail's case, it meant making a better future with a few tries. Here, Sam gets to expand the playing field. He does not just make the future better for one family, but a whole town... while also gaining some personal redemption himself.

It's December 1971, and Sam leaps into the middle of a bank heist that his leapee, Willie Walters, is participating in along with his elder brother Neil and his younger brother John. Things quickly become complicated for Sam when he realizes where he is: Once again, he's leapt back to his hometown of Elk Ridge, Indiana. Knowing that is one thing, but it's finding out why the Walters are holding up the local bank and keeping its staff and patrons hostage is something else. The Walters have lost their father, and the bank has foreclosed on their family farm, so in desperation they have decided to hold up the bank and convince its manager, Gus Vernon, to forgive the debt. 

Immediately Sam can't help but sympathize with these guys, being that they're farm boys like himself and even from his hometown. He's not alone in that, as practically the whole town save for two or three players reacts to the news of the Walters boys holding up the bank in protest of Gus's foreclosures with "Good". It's not just the fact that he can understand frustrated farmhands, either: the episode (directed by Bakula himself again, I might add) goes to great lengths to mirror Sam and the Beckett family with Willie and the Walters family. Though he never became a quantum physicist who invented time travel, Willie Walters and Sam do share the same story: they're the "smart" brother of the family, who left the farm to go off and study hard, and didn't get back in time to be there when their father died and the family business suffered.

In the same vein, Neil Walters in this case is mirrored by Tom Beckett. Sam can't help but ask one of the elderly hostages about the Beckett family, and he learns that they're doing well... and one of the Beckett boys has just come back from Vietnam. (Pour one out for Maggie if you got one.) Indeed, the opening of the episode has Neil call Willie "little brother" in exactly the same endearing fashion Tom did to Sam in "The Leap Back". The pair clash over the episode's runtime, Neil being a hothead who still has resentment towards Willie for, as I said, not being there when their father died and the farm ran into trouble. It's both a tense situation and one which awakens latent feelings of guilt and irresponsibility in Sam, and at the climax of the episode when he apologizes to Neil for not being there, it's not just Sam helping the Walters. It's Sam baring his heart and soul, and genuinely remorseful for not being there in the past.

Of course, this is Quantum Leap, a show all about do-overs. Sam isn't just saving the Walters family with his acts in the episode. He's saving his hometown itself, as the reason Gus Vernon is foreclosing the Walters farm and many others is to fund an illicit gaining of land to sell for profit; land which will be used for a big mega mall in the future. Something about the heart of America being ripped apart by the evils of capitalism, and the good hardworking honest farm folk of Elk Ridge seeing right through Gus Vernon's bullshit for the snake he is. Indeed, as Sam escapes the bank to go to Vernon's to get the proof, we'll find out just how bad.

Before that, a lovely scene where Sam is close to Vernon's but notes that the Beckett family farm is a mere 10 miles away... and Al, in a touching moment, says he wouldn't blame Sam if he went there instead. It's tempting, but Sam has learned his lesson from "The Leap Back". He will get some reward later for a job well done, but first getting the proof of Vernon's misdeeds. Which, Vernon catches him in the act of finding and admits to his evil scheme, ready to kill Sam/Willie. Good thing Sam subdues him and brings back the proof. Bad that a wannabe hero broke into the bank and shot John. It'll be okay, though, as Sam convinces them that he has the proof of Vernon's misdeeds and they'll get back the farm, which is where Sam lets his heart out to Neil as said above.

It's a happy-ish ending. The foreclosures will be overturned, and Willie and John get probation. Neil, however, ends up in jail for five years and becomes a wanderer before dying in 1977. Sam objects to this, and Al tells him he can't always make a happy ending. It's a little bit of a bum note, and kind of cynical. What is heartwarming, though, is Sam seeing his father out in the street and moving to greet him. One last gift from the cosmic leaping force. One last moment with his father. Every Christmas is last Christmas, but here's one more as Sam gets to hug John Beckett and wish him Merry Christmas. It's a good note to end on, and a really good episode of the show overall. It's quite lovely that Sam got to heal himself as well as his hometown, and that's as good a note as any to close on and move to the next one.

(Continued in 5.3)