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.

He would have succeeded, were it not for the final survivor of Project Quantum Leap: an aged and lonely Ian Wright. They plot out a course to counteract Martinez and his goals, and manage to leap back to 2022 to tell Ben about it and set his whole leaping into motion, Ben's ultimate goal also being the project in 2018 and leaping into his past self to protect his friends and the woman he loves from Martinez and his mission. There's a lot going on in the finale with this reveal and setup: the day of this final showdown also happens to be the date of past Ben and Addison's first date, and Ben threatens to butterfly effect their entire relationship away by acting like Kyle fucking Reese trying to save the future. Worse yet, Martinez's leapee is Magic, and so he is able to sow mistrust in the project team from 2018 and make them lock up Ben. The power of trust comes back, however, as Ben's friends from 2023 are able to each come help him in hologram form, and show the 2018 versions of themselves that Ben can indeed be trusted. An absolutely beautiful and touching set of payoffs to the building theme of the season.

I won't have a chance to talk about this before I launch into my big headcanon for the Martinez plotline, so let's talk about the resolution to the finale which solves all the pesky paradoxes and timeline fuckery Ben causes in trying to stop Martinez. It's the technobabble equivalent of a reset button, but like an RTD Doctor Who finale it's equal parts charming and barmy. 2051's Ian has Ben memorize a complex piece of supercode, and it is the key to everything. It is entered "simultaneously" through time by all three Ians we have seen, 2018 and 2023 and 2051 all combining their efforts over the timelines. The metaphor used for this, however, is charmingly bonkers: 2018 Ian is currently dealing with a breakup while playing Dark Souls, using plenty of talk about how it's a hard as fuck video game and coming to the realization that they need to co-op with their other selves in order to enter a quantum cheat code to reset Ben back to the beginning of the 2018 leap. It's so "how do you do, fellow kids" that it circles back around to charming. Trust and believing in one's self and what you will become, in the metaphor of hard game beating. The law of entanglement, three Ians sharing a state and connecting across time. I vibe with it.

With all that squared, let's talk about Richard Martinez. Longtime readers of the blog may be aware that I am quite fond of a very similar plotline, that being the Silence arc which played out over Matt Smith's run on Doctor Who. It's easy to see the similarities: both involve foes from the future blaming a war in their present on our protagonists' future selves, and travelling back in time to eliminate them before they do the thing that sparks that war. There are differences, however, and chief among them are those antagonists. The Silence could oh so easily have been written as sympathetic antagonists, only doing what they believed was right in the name of the greater good. Instead they're written as amoral bastards who enjoy causing pain and misery to Doctor Who and his friends. Richard Martinez is not an amoral bastard. He really is just a patriotic soldier doing what he believes is his duty. He is not an evil leaper like those very strange people from the final season of the old show. He is an antagonistic leaper, and there is a difference.

In a way, Martinez is a perfect representation of the concept of the dark heart of America which Quantum Leap often confronts. He is a driven patriot, ready and willing to do anything for America. If a superior officer tells him to jump, he will ask how high. The fact of the matter is, I don't buy that something Project Quantum Leap did or will do brings about nuclear oblivion. We'll never know since this doesn't come up again and the series was cancelled, but I don't believe it. It could have been the US itself, it could have been a foreign country, it could have been anything that lit that powder keg. That's not the point. The point is that blaming Project Quantum Leap for it is the US military complex telling on itself. There's a line somewhere in the series when the team is trying to theorize who could be behind Martinez being a leaper, and Ian remarks that it could be a private tech contractor before shuddering at the thought of someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg having access to time travel. And this was 2022, remember. It is a scary thought, some reckless asshole having the power of time travel and fucking up the timeline for their own selfish ends. Just one small problem. Hey. Come in real close. Lean in. I'm gonna tell you a secret.

Quantum Leap is a top secret US military project. The only thing, the one and only thing stopping the military complex from making a shambles of time and space in the name of US imperialism? Of winning every war, every battle, before it was ever fought, and killing or erasing the enemy from existence? It's the fact that Project Quantum Leap, in practice, sends you adrift in time and space with no chance of returning home and completely fucks up your memory while doing it. That's the dark secret at the heart of this beloved series. If this shit worked, it would be an imperialist disaster. Hell, this is the closest it has come to working all series. The 2051 accelerator both manages to allow Ian to leap to 2022 and return back to 2051 (unless the Ian Ben meets in the finale is a pre-leaping version of that Ian, but TEMPORAL HEADACHE) and also gives Martinez a clear end goal and a fairly intact memory. We don't know how many leaps he has to do before reaching his goal of 2018, but the number of times Ben interacts with him before that final convergence is three. From even the first, back in Salvation, Martinez knows enough about who he is and what his mission is to successfully threaten Ben at the end of the Salvation leap.

Point is, this is the closest to functional we get for the quantum accelerator, and what is the plan of action that Martinez is drafted into? What, with the unlimited power of time travel at their fingertips, are the decisions his superiors choose? Research more into what caused the nuclear war? Attempt to change history by dissuading world leaders, or doing something more microcosmic in its goal of fostering peace? No. They're soldiers. They jump straight to "These people caused the war. They are the enemy, Martinez, your orders are to kill them." That's the military mind for you. That's their idea of putting right what once went wrong: wiping what went wrong off the map. Hell, Martinez's ultimate solution is straight up just blowing up the quantum accelerator, which will not only kill everyone at the project but everyone in a several mile radius. Casualties of war.

From all this, then, comes a curious headcanon for me. We know that Martinez, like Ben, is on a set path of leaps to eventually make it to 2018. We do not know exactly how many, but as I said we know that he and Ben cross paths three times over the course of the series before their squareoff in 2018. Ben and Janis calculated his leap map out carefully to make these intersections, and it was a combination of Swiss cheese memory, Janis not trusting the team, and the team not trusting her which led to Ben not realizing who his enemy was or what he was up to until it was basically too late. On some level this is to be expected, though. It's common in media like this for someone to make the choice to not kill their adversary and sort out the consequence of them seemingly winning later. It's classic trolley problem shit. A million shows have done it. No, in watching these episodes again I came up with a more interesting theory. It's not as prevalent in the new series, but classic Quantum Leap always had that underpinning of some higher power guiding the leaps. God, Time, Fate, or whatever. Maybe even the concept of Sam Beckett's virtue, if you take that theory of mine I started off with as gospel. What if something like that was present in "deciding" the key leaps Martinez needed to hit his end point? What if the universe was trying to teach this determined soldier a lesson? Let's look at the leaps from his point of view, to see.

We don't really see what, if anything, Martinez had to do in Salvation to leap. As stated, though, Martinez is not an evil leaper. His other two leaps have him specifically working to do good in the past, as Ben does, so his leaps are not ones where he has to cause problems. The team theorize that Martinez could have been an evil leaper sent there to help the gunslingers sabotage the town, but I don't buy it. You could argue for Martinez being a grey leaper, helping fix some problems and helping cause others, but I don't think that's the case. Martinez probably helps with defending Salvation somehow, only realizing after the day is saved that the elderly gunslinger Diego De La Cruz is talking to a hologram, and then confronting Ben with a threat before leaping. There isn't another run-in with Martinez for quite some time in the series, and the next two are episodes I have yet to discuss.

SOS is set on a Navy ship in Chinese waters in 1989, and there's a lot going on here. Ben is an operations officer, and the executive officer is one Alexander Augustine, Addison's estranged father, which leads to a lot of obvious drama and pathos for her. There's a crisis involving an SOS signal and the paranoid captain delaying rescue of the submarine in danger, and in the original history Commander Augustine took the fall for his captain. Ben's leap is thus about saving the submarine while also convincing the XO and captain to do so, and Addison's father's willingness to sacrifice his own reputation to uphold his captain's says something about the military's willingness to sacrifice good men, given that the future military literally sent Martinez on a one-way trip. His involvement is a twist, Ben dealing with a communications officer exclusively over the radio in resolving the crisis and only meeting him in person at the end, where UH OH IT WAS MARTINEZ ALL ALONG. Think on this, though. Addison was originally supposed to be the leaper. Was she the leaper in Martinez's timeline? The one the military blames on causing nuclear war? If so, the quantum accelerator has sent the man sworn to kill her into a leap where he has to save her father's career. If there is a force guiding his leaps, it's clearly trying to tell him something about not just his militaristic mind, but about the person he's trying to kill.

The third and final intersection leap, Ben Interrupted, is set in a mental hospital, where Ben's leapee is a PI trying to break out his client's sister. It seems like a business as usual leap until midway into the episode when we see Martinez leap into one of the orderlies and have a real "oh shit" moment. A lot happens in this leap, and Janis is insistent that this is Ben's last chance to stop Martinez. The implication here is that Ben mirrors Martinez in one key way: his desperate mission to save Addison's life leads to a choice between this leap being successful or stopping Martinez. Janis is insistent he do the latter, but doing that will strand Ben in the past. He has become just like Martinez, a man with a mission and no hope of ever getting back. This is not the way forward, obviously, and Ben and Martinez need to work together to escape the institution with the innocent woman. From Martinez's perspective, the success of his leap requires him to bury the hatchet and work with the very people he leapt to kill; to trust them. The arc of his leap is showing him that these are not just enemies of the distant past to be killed for the greater good. They are good people, trying to do the right thing; in fact, the same right thing he is trying to do in this specific leap. It is a chance for introspection and personal growth. Martinez even gets to talk to Addison, one soldier talking to another in terms they understand. There is an opportunity here for Martinez to learn something, to gain some empathy, to reconsider his mission.

Unfortunately he does not, and instead stabs Ben in the neck with a scalpel once he and the woman are in the clear. He thanks Ben for his help, but still considers him a threat to the mission. Ben survives, barely, and has some real trust issues of his own in the penultimate leap. Martinez does not learn and grow from this, and continues resolute in his mission to 2018. In the end, he and Ben tussle in the out of control accelerator, being sent back into their leapee's bodies at each point they intersected and breaking out into a fight each time, before finding themselves back at Salvation. Martinez has Ben at gunpoint, gloating about how the moral arc of history and the will of the accelerator, of God, Time, Fate, or whatever, has put Ben in a position where Martinez can kill him and win... only for Martinez to get shot in the back by Salvation's saloon girl, dying in the past. Tragic, disappointing, and really kind of cynical from my perspective. You know how I feel about empathy, redemption, and forgiveness over here. The fact that Martinez's patriotism blinded him to the truth the universe was trying to tell him, and that it could not in the end put right what he thought wrong about Project Quantum Leap, properly disappoints me. I could get angrier about that, but I won't bother. The show gave me what I wanted in Season 2, from my memory.

So then. New Quantum Leap. What did I want from it? Nothing big, nothing so macrocosmic as dragging old Scott Bakula back in to fix the ending of the old show. I just wanted that ethos to come back 30 years later. The idea of being a better person, of making a difference in the world. I got that. Let Them Play alone almost justifies by itself this show coming back, but there are some wonderful episodes over these 18. The rest hit a baseline "okay", which might be a little disappointing for some but I was satisfied. The one thing that might hold it back is the mystery box format, as it could be argued that it contrives and frustrates expectations, holding back the reveals for no reason beyond it not being time to do the reveals yet. I would argue back that the notion of the characters learning to trust each other and that trust building until the time is right to open the mysteries by having them have enough good faith to reveal what they know works as a broader theme, but to each their own. Season 2 does a much better job at handling a long-running storyline than just an overarching mystery, so things clearly improve. That's a story for next time.

For now, wow. For one shining moment there in 2022/2023, Quantum Leap was back. It was back confronting the dark heart of America, of crime and betrayal, of transphobia and mistrust, of imperialism and grim practicality. It confronted all of these head-on with unflinching optimism, and that's what I come to this particular flavor of time travel show for. It's what I fled the other stuff for, what mellowed me out. As I finished that old series and truly found my inner zen and what mattered to me, I got to immediately jump ahead and watch it evolve with the times, and do it successfully. That's the mark of something great, and if you have any fondness for old Quantum Leap, give it a shot. Some of the finer points of the lore around leaping and the "rules" don't always match, but I'm sure you can handle those bumps to get some good stories about a good guy making the world a better place, and his friends back home watching and learning how to make themselves better because of what he does.

That's the spirit of Sam Beckett for you, and let's let it guide us onward, to Season 2...