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

Well, how about that? You came back to hear some more about the new Quantum Leap. Or you came here fresh and are all confused now. I don't know, I just take this conversational tone to get my foot in door. Whatever the case, last time we discussed the first season of New Quantum Leap. To make a long story (which you hopefully read or will read) short, it radically reinvented the structure of the show, adding in B plots and season arcs and mystery boxes to be opened with gasps and oohs and ahhs. I thought it was pretty good, and not without its merits. It did good enough to get a second season, and that is what I'll be talking about here for an amount of words. Notably, though, this is it. Somewhere along the line, Quantum Leap failed with its second season and it did not get renewed for a third. For the first time since I began this journey in 2022, I know a world where there is no new Quantum Leap on the horizon. It's unfortunate, but I am okay with it. I have made my peace, and we will discuss the thirteen episodes we got... but what went wrong?

Well, for one thing, the 2023 Writer's Guild Of America strike. Now, we have to step back and put that statement into context. In no uncertain terms, this must be stated: The strike was a good and necessary thing. Writers' rights are incredibly important, and I am not trying to state that them doing so "killed" Quantum Leap. If anyone needs blaming, it's the executives and other rich fucks who desperately pushed for AI and whatnot who kept the strike going for so damn long. More to the point, however, is the season we got after the dust settled. These words have taken a while for me to even start, and it's because I'm so conflicted on what Season 2 is. It is what it is, and part of me loves it for that while another hates it. It is a grand and epic tale which spans the broad scope of American history, all of it focused on one strong theme. On the other hand, the macrocosm is more threatening here than it ever was before. To spin a metaphor, it's losing the trees for the forest, getting so caught up in its own majesty that it threatens to forget where it came from. It threatens to forget to be a time travel show about helping ordinary people, about following your moral code, about putting right what once went wrong. It is a grand paradox, a show which deserves to thrive while also being a macrocosm which dragged the show down into the depths with it. It's fitting I feel this way, because that's exactly the theme Season 2 runs with. Whereas the first season played on themes of trust and being distrusted, Season 2 is about love and loss, hate and bitterness, and the ways of the human heart itself. Let's journey through here together, for one last batch of leaps. Maybe I'll sort out my own confused heart when it comes to this show as we do.

When we began last time, I called the first few leaps standard. Business as usual, not rocking the boat, regular old leaps to ease the newcomers back into the concept. I don't know if it entirely worked, but Season 2 goes in the opposite direction. This Took Too Long does something Quantum Leap has never tried before: it is a leap which plays out without the advice of a hologram. Ben is stuck as part of a ragtag group of disgraced soldiers who crash land in Soviet Russia during the Cold War, Addison never shows up, and he just has to use context and his own gut to work through the leap on his own. It's still a strong leap on its own, but the unease over why Ben is still leaping and the curiosity over why none of the team is showing up to help him hang over the proceedings. Being about disgraced soldiers on a covert mission, it does serve as the perfect bridge between seasons. Martinez wasn't disgraced so much as he was expendable, and the group Ben has to get out of Russia fit that latter category. During it all we get Ben flashing back to 2018 and him helping to set up the project, so we get some interactions with him and the rest of the group. There's a lot at play here and much foreshadowing, like Magic discussing Sam's loss and how it was hard on the ones he loved. These are the people Ben leaped to save last time, and he did indeed save them. There's a heavy cost to be paid for that, however, and we learn it at the end of this episode. Ian shows up as a hologram to deliver the shocking news. For Ben, it has been the blink of an eye since the Martinez incident. For everyone at home? It has been three years.

So it is, then, in tandem with the next three leaps, we get the story of Ben's poignant loss. In the span of those three years, Addison has mourned Ben, buried him, and moved on. The dream is dead. Ben gave up everything and flung himself into the void to save the woman he loved, and lost her because of it. At the end of the second leap (a leap about keeping people alive during a bank robbery that does fall back into the standard "just fine" mode, if only for a moment) Addison shows up in hologram form, and the heartbreak on Raymond Lee's face is palpable. "Oh. You thought I was gone." he simply states, before his leap out. Addison has had time to mourn the loss of love, to grieve in her own way, to howl back at an ungrateful universe for taking her man from her before moving on and finding love elsewhere. She has found it in the form of one Tom Westfall (who I am convinced is a namesake reference to that snow globe kid who nerds like to think imagined the majority of mainstream US dramatic television) and we will discuss him later, but for Ben this loss is fresh and raw. Addison got over her hurt. Ben has to get over his, and he does not handle it with as much grace and tact as you might expect. Over the next two episodes, he's angry about this. He gets more reckless and stubborn in the leaps, taking unneeded risks and making poor decisions to the consternation of Addison who is just trying to keep this man alive and not stranded in the past. Things will boil over soon enough, but as we said, we can't lose the trees for the forest. There are still leaps happening here, and they're good leaps that deserve discussion.

Closure Encounters is an odd duck, in that it feels a lot like the Exorcist riff we had in Season 1. There aren't ghosts this time, but there are hints of UFOs and other mysterious alien things. Like the Exorcist riff, it plays with the idea that it will make aliens real in the world of New Quantum Leap before giving a completely rational explanation: it was all top-secret US military things. Lest we forget the dark heart of America beating in our eardrums, it should be noted that their attempts to cover up their activities with a tranquilizing drug put one innocent girl into a coma and has another blamed for the accident and facing criminal charges. Ordinary lives ruined to protect the US and her secrets. Again, it's here where Ben gets more reckless with his own safety, leading to a blowup where he yells at Addison. Nobody made her bury him, and the eternal love they built together only took three years of doubt to shatter. Ben is hurt and lashing out in that hurt, and it's not okay. He will be okay, and it will get a little worse before it gets better, but unknown to all the seeds of his redemptive healing have been planted in this one episode. We will circle back to it, so consider a pin put in here. 

All of this comes to a head in The Lonely Hearts Club, which sees Ben trying to protect an old and heartbroken actor (whom, in a further twist of the knife, was a favorite of Ben and Addison's to watch when they were together) from taking his own life. A bit of good old-fashioned mirroring is on play for this one, as Neal Russell is basically just Ben at this point. His ex-wife is getting married, and Neal is convinced that she's the one for him and that a series of grand romantic gestures will win her back. Ben, being just as wounded and heartbroken himself, goes along with all of this despite Addison's insistence that he is acting irrationally and not focusing on the leap. The entire episode is unified in the theme of the acrimony of a relationship, with Ian getting into a bit of a tiff with their partner Rachel over some plot stuff. Addison gets her turn to snap back at Ben and tell him off for his bad behavior. She may be with Tom now, but that doesn't mean that it didn't hurt when Ben was seemingly lost to time. In fact, she tried flinging herself into the accelerator when it seemed the project would be shut down, in a last desperate effort to reconnect herself with the man she loved. She buried him, she gave his eulogy, she mourned him... and yes, she found a way to heal her broken heart in the tender embrace of another man. 

In a way, Addison and Tom were made for each other. Tom lost his former wife to cancer, and despite the fact that the ship of New Quantum Leap is being broken up here, I don't resent Tom. They were both two lonely souls who lost the people who meant the most to them, and in that respect they have a deep and innate understanding of the other's hurt. They are each able to help heal the other from that hurt, and grow stronger because of it. Tom even gets a poignant speech in this episode about Quantum Leap, the project, being powered by sacrifice. Both Sam and Ben leapt to make the world a better place, and both Sam and Ben lost the ones they loved most. They gave up everything to fix the world, and Ben is coming to that realization now. As Neal realizes that the love of his life is gone, and that he has to accept that loss with dignity and grace, Ben realizes it too. Neal gets to reunite with an estranged daughter, but Ben has to begin his own process of healing. With his own dignity and grace, he splits things with Addison and asks her not to be his holographic help any more. 

Ben Song has suffered hurt and loss over these four episodes. Now, like any good story on this blog, it's time to show how he heals from that pain.

(Continued in Part 2)