Frezno's Comics Challenge: July 2024 (Pluto)

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Well, it will end when Sean runs out of comics for me to cover for it, but I just really wanted to make that specific Emerson Lake And Palmer reference to get my foot in the door of talking about this. For the second time in a row and the third time overall, we're in the wide world of black and white comics. Once again it's a manga, but it was a doozy. Naoki Urasawa's (or really, Urasawa X Tezuka if we're being technical) Pluto is the longest thing I've had to cover by far here. 65 serialized chapters of manga. If I had more time, I could spin this into a really long deep dive coverage of all its themes and foibles the way I do with Quantum Leap and other things (Season 2's next, incidentally). As I had a bit of a whirlwind for the first half of July 2024, however, that led me on a bit of a time crunch. I think it's going to make the piece better. Some of that good old-fashioned brevity which makes the Twin Peaks posts I did last year sing. Let's do a little of that and talk about Pluto.

A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 1) [Part 4]

(Continued from Part 3)

We have already made much about how the first season of New Quantum Leap runs on the theme of trust. To that point, then, the antagonistic thematic force of such a series can only be mistrust, which is exactly what we uncover when the full scope of the mysterious mystery is revealed to us. Breaking linearity once and for all, let's talk about what is learned when the answers are before us. 30 years into the future, in the year 2051, the world has ended thanks to global thermonuclear war. The remnants of the United States military blame Project Quantum Leap for the apocalypse, assuming that somewhere somehow they must have broken time and created this horrible timeline where everyone is dead. In a last ditch effort to use the power of quantum leaping to put right what once went wrong, a loyal soldier and patriot named Richard Martinez is sent leaping through time and space. His leaps take him to at least three other moments in time where a wrong must be corrected, and his ultimate goal is Project Quantum Leap itself, in the year 2018, where he will put the needs of the many over the needs of the few and destroy the quantum leap accelerator himself there. With no illusions as to his own ability to get back, Martinez is like many soldiers before him in making the ultimate sacrifice and making the hard choice to lose some lives in order to do what he thinks is right.

A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 1) [Part 3]

(Continued from Part 2)

Following a slow start, new Quantum Leap really got the ball rolling before its midseason break. The back half of the season is even stronger, featuring not just more great episodes but some truly transcendental ones. Part of what helps them is the fact that more of the mysteries of the season are being uncovered, and we get to see how the characters react to them. Even episodes that I did consider "just okay" on initial watch have some strong heft to them when reconsidered for this. The first episode back from the break, Fellow Travellers, is one such show. I remembered it being a fine episode about Ben being a bodyguard for a famous singer in the 70's trying to prevent her death, but there are some neat things under the hood. For one, now that I'm sitting here thinking about it there's the haunting reminder of Caitlin Davies from Miami Vice. For another, and more pertinent to what's actually in the show as opposed to just the landmarks of my internal landscape, is that mirroring again. The singer's anger over not being told how her life was in danger is mirrored by Addison's fury over Ben's leaping through time and space to "protect her" from a nebulous something instead of talking to her like a normal adult. Both women want the agency, power, and knowledge needed to protect themselves instead of having Ben do it for them. 

As for the other "just okay" episodes, Paging Dr. Song is a medical drama which takes great focus in how the for-profit nature of the American healthcare system will prioritize said profit over saving lives. Two episodes later has Family Style, a leap about helping an Indian family successfully keep their restaurant afloat. It has some poignancy to it, with Ben seeing his own late mother in the matriarch of the leapee's family, and he gets a nice heartfelt conversation with her at the end where he tells her everything he wishes he could say to his dear departed mother. It also has a shitty landlord getting her comeuppance, so it's based. As I said, these leaps are just fine. They do have added gravitas and drama, as did even the opening leaps of the series. There hasn't been a truly bad leap yet, and there are some vile ones I can think of in the history of the old show which I will likely never watch again. The new Quantum Leap is hitting a good baseline of quality, but is that enough? Is it better to be baseline consistent, or fluctuate wildly between crap and peak television drama? It's really more of a rhetorical question, but let's focus on some peak episodes of the show for me. Let's talk about some of the highest highs that new Quantum Leap will ever reach.

A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 1) [Part 2]

(Continued from Part 1)

So let's talk about narrative structure and Quantum Leap. In the old show, things were much more focused on Sam's solo perspective as the leaper. We were thrust into the worlds and the leaps from his eyes, feeling his confusion, only knowing as much as he knows because again yadda yadda Swiss cheese. You can count on one hand the amount of glimpses we get into the present day of classic Quantum Leap, and I'm not counting the waiting room focus that Season 5 liked to do. Point is, the foremost concern of the original series is the leap. We are back in the past, something bad is about to happen, let's watch Scott Bakula make things right for 45 minutes. It's a lovely little formula for early 90's television. Would it have worked unaltered for the 2020s? I've no idea, but the folks behind New Quantum Leap did not try. They instead used the evolutions in narrative storytelling over the 30 years since this show went off the air to... well, evolve the show.

A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 1) [Part 1]

Somehow, in some way, there's a certain connecting tissue between me, the summer season, and this show. Two summers ago I famously went on a great big rant about how all the tentpole franchises I love had let me down by going up their own asses, and ended by flinging myself into the world of Quantum Leap. Since then, at least one of those ships (the blue box one) appears to have righted itself, mostly. Quantum Leap, as I chronicled two years ago, became a love for me. It was rough around the edges and had its missteps, but I never felt truly betrayed by it. I loved it and what it stood for, but there was always something looming overhead as I got into it. Even back then, as I first became acquainted with Dr. Sam Beckett, the Quantum Leap revival was waiting in the wings. I was somewhere in the weeds of Dr. Beckett's final season of adventures when the new show dropped at long last, and so I had the unique experience of jumping right into the new from freshly finishing the old.