Goodbye Norma Jean: I'm divided on this one. It does have some good little moments of humility and a nice comparison to make with Sam's leaping, but on the other hand... it's about the death of Marilyn Monroe. A real famous person who died far too young, a tragedy... and one that's too big for Quantum Leap to change. Let's just defuse that tension now. Sam does not alter history massively such that Marilyn lives to old age. Like the ending to "Lee Harvey Oswald", the show is forced to play that trick of putting Quantum Leap's status quo in a slightly worse position, such that Sam changing the future for the better results in our historical status quo. I could almost stop there, but that wouldn't be proper, now would it? Let's see what's in here.
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| Happy birthday, Mr. Beckett... |
Well, here's where we get our first "slightly worse history made better" approach, as Sam and Barbara accompany Marilyn to a glamorous beach party. She's alone for five minutes with a guy when she has a bad reaction to a drug and starts ODing then and there. The episode's implication is that in Quantum Leap's original timeline, this is where Marilyn Monroe died. Sam does CPR and manages to save her life, though, so that's a slightly better future made. It's also around here where we reveal that Barbara is lying about who she is, and is actually an aspiring actress herself who is trying to sabotage Marilyn's career and jumpstart her own. In one of those trite second act misunderstanding moments, Marilyn doesn't believe Sam's accusations and fires him.
Well, she should have, because Barbara gets her nice and drunk the next morning and then goes off to stand in for Marilyn at her next big movie audition, reading along with Clark Gable of all people while Sam, despite being fired, still tries to get Marilyn up and running again for her big audition. There was a nice tender moment between them earlier, before the mistrust, where Marilyn lamented that she wasn't really Marilyn, and that Marilyn is an artifice, a show business alter ego that isn't the real her. There's a lot about acting and performativity that can parallel with the idea of Sam and his quantum leaping there, and it's genuinely nice. (INTRUSTION FROM THE FUTURE: This will come up in the finale again, so let me just remind you of all that Don Quixote stuff from back in Season 2's "Catch A Falling Star" about artifice and acting and performativity. Just something to keep in your back pocket before we end things here.)
Well, Sam does get Marilyn to her audition, and this is the other thing that he gets to "change". The audition is for a film which will be retitled thanks to a remark Sam made to try and cheer up Marilyn: The Misfits, Marilyn's last before she ODs in 1962, as she sadly did in real life. In the end, it's a nice little episode, though interacting with major famous history that can't be changed for the better without imagining the worse and saying that our status quo is better? I don't know how I feel about that approach for the show. Thankfully I don't have to think about the limits of it for too much longer, because we've got another gonzo supernatural one on the docket.
The Beast Within: Ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, vampires. All of these got the same basic framework of a Quantum Leap episode about them, which I have detailed more than a few times as they've come up. This episode takes the same approach and applies it to Bigfoot. You would think that would make me upset again, as I spent half of "Blood Moon" groaning at how repetitive this framework is getting. This episode doesn't exactly fix it, so much as it grafts an engaging episode of the show that could stand on its own onto the supernatural one.
It's 1972 and Sam is Henry Adams, a Vietnam vet voluntarily living up in the mountains of Washington State with another war buddy named Roy. Roy suffered a head wound in the war and now has violent seizures, which Sam needs to get Roy medication for to save his life. Henry also has a big fur coat, and as Sam leaps in Henry is trying to steal pills for Roy from the house of a young boy named Daniel Burke, who's obsessed with Bigfoot and is convinced the big thing hanging out of his bedroom window is said cryptid. Daniel's mother Karen and his stepfather, town sheriff Lucas, do not believe him. Lucas, however, knows Henry well.
Things get more complex as Daniel sneaks out of his house at night to go Bigfoot hunting, finding Henry and Roy in the morning and hanging out with them. Sam decides he has to risk a confrontation with Lucas to get Roy his pills, and this ends up getting him arrested by the blinkered sheriff. Daniel and Roy, meanwhile, go Bigfoot hunting and this now will end with Daniel falling into a crevice and dying while Roy dies from a seizure. Sam manages to appeal to Karen to let him out of jail, and the pair make it up the mountain (despite Karen running her truck off the dirt road offscreen) to try and save Daniel. Lucas is there to hold up his shotgun, but he relents. He gets to try and confess to Karen the truth about John's death, but she knew all along and still wanted to marry him. That's enough to make John be decent, and they save Daniel and get Roy his pills and all seems to be well.
Except hey... when they get back to Karen's truck, it's been moved back onto the road. That's weird, but helpful! Everyone but Sam heads off in it, and before Sam leaps you know what's coming. YES THAT'S RIGHT, BIGFOOT WAS REAL! BIGFOOT WAS REAL AND SAM AND AL SEE HIM OH MY GOD LET'S LEAP! Now see, this is how you do a supernatural episode. Graft a normal episode of the show onto it and use Quantum Leap's supernatural framework as an accent, not the whole show. I really like the story they choose to tell here, about disenfranchised Vietnam veterans and their guilt and grief. It's a good episode, which also happens to have the gonzo ending of Bigfoot. Speaking of gonzo... Well, the next one isn't exactly gonzo, but it is significant. Quantum Leap is breaking its "within Sam's own lifetime" rules, as... a little treat?
How it came to be, and sort of predestining it together. Sam leapt into the middle of a battle, and it is chaotic and hellish. Not quite so much as Vietnam, but there's cannons and muskets and Sam actually gets shot in the arm and has to hide from Confederates. He eventually is given refuge in a barn but the owner of the place, Olivia Covington, is loyal to the Confederacy and thus takes the northern Sam prisoner. Olivia Covington will also Sam's great-grandmother, so now Sam has to play matchmaker and get them together. In addition to the usual hot and cold budding romance, we're also playing it against the period backdrop of the USA ripped in two. It's a neat enough gimmick for Season 5, I guess. What else was going on with that war at the time?
Oh right, they were fighting over whether or not black people had rights. It's left somewhat ambiguous in the show, but Olivia's farm here is one of the stops for runaway slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad, and her one remaining bit of... let's call him "hired help", Isaac, is a part of it. Sam wants to help Isaac and the runaways any way he can, and he also tells them how great it will be in the future when the fight for stuff like freeing the slaves and equal rights for black people will be won. Please put a pin in the fact that he tells Isaac civil rights will be won in the future, it will come up at the end.
Oh yeah, and we need an antagonist for this shit, so how about some Confederate racists? Yeah, old Southern racists in their grey uniforms suck. Sam bluffs them earlier by pretending to be Olivia's cousin and putting on a fake-ass Southern drawl, but later they come back and are about to raid the barn, so Sam has to pretend to have captured Isaac and the other runaways in order to defuse the situation, banking on them letting their guard down later so he can stage an escape. Having to play buddy-buddy with the racists of history is never fun, c.f. "Justice", but at least in the climax of the show Sam gets to punch these racists and escape along with Olivia and the runaway slaves. So that's good! John Beckett and Olivia will get together, and they'll continue the Beckett family line such that Sam will be born. Even better!
Then one last little surprise, a good old-fashioned "Sam Beckett Done A History", where Isaac, free at last, decides to give himself a surname and chooses... King. To which Al helpfully tells Sam the family line of, particularly noting a very famous King a few generations down the line. Yeah, Sam helped to free Martin Luther King's ancestor. And told this guy all about civil rights and stuff. Look, I have been nicer than usual to the creeping macrocosm of Season 5. I've been genuinely intrigued by how unique things feel compared to before. This? I don't know. I can remember way way back in Season 1, with "The Color Of Truth" where I liked the restraint of not making Sam the secret inspiration of civil rights, and just one guy doing good. On some level it feels like the show forgot that lesson. On the other hand, you could say he's repeating the lessons and morals of MLK back to the latter's ancestor, creating a predestination paradox where that inspires itself. I don't know. It's a unique leap, but it didn't hook me that much... and the macrocosm isn't about to abate any time soon.
Memphis Melody: Well, the penultimate episode definitely is marinating in macrocosm. In 1954 Sam has leapt into an aspiring singer, a dude you may have heard of called Elvis Presley. This is one of those good old "balance" leaps, where Sam has to make one thing right while making sure another thing doesn't collapse on the other side. In this case, he wants to help a girl named Sue Anne also follow her dream of a singing career... but the balance is uneven. On the one hand, the microcosm that is Sue Anne and her anxieties and insecurities which Sam needs to help her with. On the other, the massive macrocosm that is making sure Elvis's career jumpstarts exactly as it "should" in original history.
I really don't know. Like, at some points, it seems that the biggest disaster isn't that one girl will end up in a bad marriage, but this famous guy won't get to release all his songs like we know in the real world. In a way, I'm not talking about the episode anymore, but what it represents. This is the second to last one. After this, Quantum Leap goes away in 45 minutes. So, in some mad sense, this is Quantum Leap going back to its roots in a macrocosmic sense. As a child of the 80's I have enjoyed my time with Quantum Leap, more or less. It also cannot be denied that much of Quantum Leap is basically boomer aesthetic nostalgia. Burgers, rock and roll, 50's cars, letterjackets, that whole aesthetic. What's more emblematic of that than hopping into the king of rock and roll?
It's a little short, but that's all I want to say about this one. Another bit of stunt leaping for the radical Season 5, and one focused on a big celebrity. Between Marilyn and Elvis, the show seems to be toeing the line of macrocosm a lot... but toe no more. It's time to confront it, once and for all. The radical Season 5 has to end now, and Quantum Leap itself is going to go with it. The end is just on the horizon. Won't you join me one more time, for the finale of it all?
Mirror Image: And so we've reached the end of things. In 45 minutes, Quantum Leap goes away (for 30 years) and thus has to wrap itself up. For me, it does it in perfect bittersweet fashion. This finale is everything I wanted from a Quantum Leap ending, that I didn't know I wanted until I laid eyes on it. I have to approach things a little different. As Sam does in this episode, I must admit my one regret during this journey. We'll talk about his, but mine is that I somewhat failed again. I tried to promise myself not to turn these writeups into mini plot summaries. I failed in that regard, and I can see it on the page as you can. I can't go back and change it like Sam does, but I can do it right one last time here. I can just share the feel of this final story, and what I took from it.
Last week (as of writing this up finally on Sept. 29th) I was on vacation in a place very special to me. I go there every year, and I always bring a piece of my current media obsession with me to share with the place. A piece of media which means a lot to me, broadcast within the four walls of those place. A place so steeped in personal meaning and resonance for me, only added to by sharing this beautiful thing. For 2022, Quantum Leap was the only pick, and I uncovered a gem on my Internet journeys: the original 1989 TV broadcast of "Genesis", with all of its vintage commercials intact. All of that is to say that, before I reached Quantum Leap's end, I looked back at its beginning. A phrase coined itself in my mind as I rediscovered where I'd started this journey, back in late May. The first episode has an ethereal ethos, a hazy dream only further amplified by the VHS fuzz and lower quality of its airdate, a little bit of 1989 trapped in my tablet screen.
"Mirror Image" full circles the whole thing, reflects back on itself and gets right back to March 1989 in a lot of ways. Throughout the Season 5 writeup I have been marveling at the new foundation this show has been building. This was a bold regeneration of Quantum Leap, going places the old show would never dream. There were wild experiments, multi-episode story arcs, expansions upon the lore, celebrity cameos and famous leaps... I want to preface this all by saying that I do not hate what Season 5 tried to do. It would be easy for me to connect its shakeups to another Scott Bakula show, Season 4 of Enterprise, and be really unfair and talk about Quantum Leap going up its own ass and betraying me. I won't do that, and it would be a flimsy foundation. Still, we must admire that foundation Season 5 of Quantum Leap built one last time.
"Mirror Image" makes us fall right through it and back into the ethereal ethos. This is not a Season 5 episode, despite airing in it. It even opens with the old theme again, and not the bombastic Season 5 one. Talking about the actual episode is odd, because while it does follow the path of a narrative, it's more a philosophical introspection on what Quantum Leap is and was. For setting's sake, it is August 8th, 1953 in Pennsylvania. In Elk Ridge, Indiana, a little baby Sam Beckett has just been born. In more than one way, then, we've gone back to the beginning. The beginning of Quantum Leap, and the beginning of Sam's life. Most of the episode takes place inside one bar, and with Sam's chats with its bartender and various patrons.
We must discuss the bartender later, but amongst the various patrons are people and names Sam remembers. An old bearded guy named Gooshie. Frank and Jimmy LaMotta. Mo "Captain Galaxy" Stein. They are the people Sam and the viewer remember, but they're not quite them. (Annoyingly with invoking Jimmy, we get one last use of that word...) The editing in the episode feels disjointed and off as well, cutting away from what should be big things to get us back into the bar, known as... Al's Place. The bartender is not Dean Stockwell, but he is another instance of the show going back to its roots. He's played by Bruce McGill, an actor who actually was in "Genesis" as a guy named Weird Ernie. I forget if I talked about Weird Ernie or not all that time ago, let me check. I did not, because I was trying to be concise. You don't need to know who Weird Ernie was, just that he was there.
It would have been really bold to go full Evangelion series ending and just have the show be reflection and introspection, but there's some other stuff to break up the plot. Like the not-quite-Jimmy and Frank duo getting caught in a collapse at the local mine, and Sam trying to help while an old disabled miner who's been grumpy the whole show also manipulates things to make sure the miners are saved. This guy's around for a good half the episode, another strange and ethereal character which makes you wonder his motivation. Any attempt to figure him out vanishes when, as the day is saved for these two, he leaps and vanishes.
At this point explanation also vanishes away in a sea of ambiguity. It's never clear exactly what's going on here in this place, and one could come up with half a dozen explanations. Is this Earth? Purgatory? A quantum zero dimension? I don't know, and I like the not knowing. What I do know, though, is Sam's introspection. Here in Al's Place, wherever or whenever that may be, Sam Beckett shares one of his biggest regrets to the bartender. It was Beth. Beth, the one true love of Al who thought him dead in Vietnam and moved on. The heartbreaking leap back to her time, where Al tried so hard to fix history only to let go and share one last dance. Sam could have done it. He could have changed things, but he didn't... and that he regrets.
We'll come back to that, but there's deeper introspection and a whopper of a reveal from that bartender. It may have been God or Time or Fate which started Sam on this quantum leap... but then he asks the simple question to Sam, one so simple it's a wonder it has never been asked before. Sam, why did you want to time travel in the first place? The answer is simple and to the point. To make the world a better place. Of course it was... and well, hasn't that been what Sam has been doing all this time? Improving not just the lives of the people he directly influences, but the lives they touch, and the lives those people touch, and so forth. That had nothing to do with God. That was all Dr. Sam Beckett, time traveller and altruist. The one controlling these leaps and Sam's destiny all along... was Sam.
And so, Sam eventually accepts that. We get one last scene with him and Al Calavicci, which ends a bit abruptly for a final episode (but I'll talk more on that in the coda) and isn't quite the final goodbye I wanted for these two. Still, Sam will more than make up for it. He's a force of good, putting right what once went wrong in the universe, and so he decides to put the biggest right wrong and fix his deepest regret. It's April 1970 in San Diego, California, and Beth Calavicci is dancing with herself. A strange man appears in her home, promising he means her no harm and is a friend of her husband's, before telling her that Al is alive in Vietnam. As Beth tears up, we zoom in on that old photo of Al, get a leap effect and then...
Cut to black, and three little title cards meant to end the series. Beth and Al remained married for 39 years, a loving family made, a right put wrong. They had four daughters, those daughters touched other lives... ripples of positivity in this crazy mess of a world. Al, for all his fumbles and faults I've lambasted him for over this journey, deserved this happy ending. Well, I say happy, but it gets bittersweet with its final title card. I knew it going into this show, and I expected I would be okay with it in the end and I am. If you don't know, well, you followed along 97 episodes of a Quantum Leap blog-along. You don't give a shit about spoilers now.
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.
There are ways to take that statement which I'll save for the coda. For now... that is the end of Season 5. That is the end of Quantum Leap. I absolutely loved this finale, even if it was not really a finale to Season 5 if that makes any sense. At the last second, we flinched away from the macrocosm for introspective microcosm. This is a thoughtful and ethereal story where Sam learns things and truths about himself, reflects on his journey so far, and moves on to the next stage by doing one last good thing for his best friend. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, and an absolutely fitting finale in my eyes. Thank you, Quantum Leap.
Before we get to that coda, let's sum up Season 5 then. It was... strange. I use the metaphor of Doctor Who here, because that's a big long-running show that often reinvents itself, not just in lead actor but in aesthetic and style and ethos. Season 5 feels like a regeneration for Quantum Leap, albeit one that only lasts for one season. It's a bombastic and grandiose show, for better or worse. The better comes when its experimental nature and willingness to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks actually works out. Stuff like the Oswald two-parter, or "Killin' Time", or the multi-part stories. On the other hand, macrocosm and lore are dangerously close to a show going up its own ass; to becoming a show about itself rather than the concerns of the material world. The evil leaper trilogy best shows the danger of this approach, three stories which just use the real world as a battleground for pretend time travellers. It must also be said that late into the season, the invigoration I felt was starting to fatigue me. I don't know if I would have been fond of a Quantum Leap Season 6 that kept going in this style. Still, since it was the last season and all, I was good and rolled with the punches and wasn't too offended. It took some risks and shakeups, and not all of them worked but I kind of admire the attempt.
Now, one last dance. One last dance like Beth Calavicci shared in April 1970, before things were made right. One last summation of what Quantum Leap meant to me, before I leap away from it...
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