A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 2) [Part 4]

(Continued from Part 3)

Here we are, then. The last dance. After this bit of analysis, or summary, or whatever I've been doing for the past couple thousand words ends, it's it. Quantum Leap goes away, possibly for good. It's momentous, but I shouldn't eulogize just yet. I should get to talking about the heart of the horror which is about to confront us. Shockingly, it involves discussing yet another running B-plot. I mean, holy shit. I talked in the intro about missing the trees for the forest, but Jesus. Between the Addison and Ben plot, and the Ben and Hannah plot, and now this? That's so many balls being juggled in the air. Remember when this was a show about going back in time and saving people? The simpler days we had. Somewhere, buried in the inky ichor of what this show has become, that ethos remains. Let us define our enemy, then. The final boss of Quantum Leap, the Dark Heart Of America personified. Let us talk about Gideon Rydge.

That third running B-plot thankfully does not require much set-up. In fact, let me try to do it with some brevity. During the timeskip of three years, and in order to leave a pilot light on should Ben ever return from his quantum leaping, Ian made a secret illicit deal with the mysterious Gideon Rydge for a quantum chip. Since you don't want a tech billionaire knowing that time travel is real (even fucked-up time travel like Project Quantum Leap), the function of the chip was kept secret. Rydge, however, put some backdoor code or something into the chip which would transmit data back to him once the chip activated. So now, during all of this relationship drama and the incidentals of saving people, we have a little B-plot wherein Ian, their partner Rachel who works for Rydge, and Jenn try to solve the problem by themselves and plug the leak. Keeping secrets and not trusting your colleagues is a bad idea, and so by about episode 10 Gideon Rydge has found out about Project Quantum Leap and what it is. The shit hits the fan, and someone has to take the fall... and so Magic resigns from the project, naming Jen as his interim successor. This lasts about one episode before Gideon Rydge storms in with armed soldiers and takes over Project Quantum Leap. A tech billionaire with access to time travel. Very bad. Oh, but it gets worse.

The episode this happens in, As The World Burns, is the aforementioned Towering Inferno riff wherein Ben the firefighter has to save Hannah and her son from their burning apartment complex in Baltimore in the 1970s. We talked last time about Hannah's role in this episode, and how she and her swap code are the hope to get Ben home. Annoyingly, just as the gang have decoded that shit, Gideon Rydge comes in to ruin everything. What I didn't talk about last time was Jeffrey Nally, Hannah's son. Having lost his father to a tragic accident, Jeffrey harbors a fair bit of hate and resentment in his heart. He finds it weird how his mom and this random-ass firefighter are talking like they're old friends, and slowly things get even weirder for him. Like how this firefighter seems to know something his dad used to say about courage being a choice, and uses it to motivate Jeffrey during their thrilling escape. Or the fact that his mom gives this random firefighter a kiss after it's all over, and then said firefighter looks all confused and wonders what he's doing here. Yes, Jeffrey is there and witnesses the leap-out, but there's more. Most of their things were destroyed in the fire, but Jeffrey managed to save just one document, and he reads it at the end of this episode. He reads it, in fact, in tandem with the present where Gideon Rydge takes over... which brings us to the final episode of this season. The final episode of Quantum Leap that there is currently, and might be for good. Welcome to Against Time.

To further the collapse of priorities, the leap is an incidental thing here. It's the 1970s again in California, Ben is a racecar driver, and his racecar driver father is about to suffer a heart attack in like 30 minutes. It's a simple leap, really. Standard. We have gone so far from our remit that the actual leap, the going back in time and putting right what once went wrong, has become the sideshow for the main macrocosmic attraction. Or has it? Let's see, but first we define our antagonist. First Gideon Rydge appears as a hologram, to come face-to-face with Ben and let him know why he's doing this. Maybe you figured it out. I did, on broadcast. As I said, As The World Burns and Against Time aired back-to-back. By the time the latter started up, I had my suspicions. They were confirmed. Gideon Rydge is Jeffrey Nally, all grown up. Over 50 years and with hate in his heart, he became a tech billionaire genius, part of the 1%, and eventually took over Project Quantum Leap. All of time and space is at his disposal now, the threat that the military could never capitalize on fully realized. History as the plaything of the \living embodiment of the Dark Heart Of America. As the arbiter of history, Rydge is a petty little creature who plans to use his mother's swap code to change places with Ben, and then lock him up with a picture of Addison in his cell. All so he can remember, every day, what he failed to save. Why is Rydge doing this?

In his mind, Ben is the man who killed his father. The one thing that Jeffrey saved from that burning building was the letter Ben wrote to Hannah, the Back To The Future thing that warned about Josh Nally's aneurysm. Rydge states to Ben what he believes to be the simple cold truth. You killed my father with this piece of paper. As it so happens, the night Josh Nally died, he found this letter. A letter that Ben signed with love, which Josh rages against. HANNAH HOW DOES A STRANGE MAN NAMED BEN KNOW ABOUT MY BLOOD CLOT AND WHY IS HE SAYING HE LOVES YOU IN THIS LETTER? The assertation that Ben is a time traveler only adds more fuel to the fire, and Josh Nally rushes out of the house on a dark and stormy night to drive away from it all, getting into the car accident that will kill him. We have finally arrived at the very heart of this maelstrom. Love and hate swirling together like matter and antimatter, threatening to explode it all. Gideon Rydge, the living embodiment of the Dark Heart Of America, of hate and anger and capitalism and manifest destiny, a monstrosity which looks upon that which puts right what once went wrong and hisses "YOU MADE ME, AND NOW I SHALL UNMAKE THEE." All the hate and heartbreak we've dealt with this season was exorcised from Ben, and now he stares it dead in the face like Frankenstein looking into the watery eyes of his monster. Dear God in heaven. How do we combat this? How do we defeat the personification of the Dark Heart Of America itself, given flesh?

Don't you know by now, dear reader? You heal it. You put right that which once went wrong.

They even break out the old handlink. Maximum
nostalgia, here at the very end.

The exiled of Project Quantum Leap team up with Magic, who has brought the two Calavicci girls, Beth and Janis, along with him. They're going to use Janis's old makeshift accelerator from the last season to get in touch with Ben and advise him, and that solves part of the problem... but let's focus on why they're helping. Beyond that it's the right thing to do, I mean. There's a touching scene set to Sam's old theme from the original show (I am not immune to propaganda) in which Beth and Janis know their original history. They know that Beth originally never waited for Al, and that Sam in his ascension to a Mirror Image went back and changed the ending for his friend. Janis and her sisters would not exist were it not for Quantum Leap and Sam Beckett, and so of course she's going to help them stop Rydge. Here in the final moments of Quantum Leap (though we didn't know it at the time) it's a perfect invocation of the original ethos of the show. A reminder of why we're doing this, why we're even here. We're here because the human personification of a golden retriever did the right thing 97 times over, without hope and witness and reward. Because it was the right thing to do. Sam may be gone, but one wonders: What would he do in this situation? What would he do if confronted with the Dark Heart Of America given flesh? Gideon Rydge with his riches and his hate? I think he'd do what Ben does here, or something very close.

Because there is a plan for stopping Rydge. The raceway Ben has leapt into is very close to where Hannah and Jeffrey live, here in the past. Ben rushes over there in his racecar, and there's a handcrafted 70's computer made by Jeffrey in his garage. This one piece of tech is the stepping stone to the rise of Gideon Rydge and his empire. Smash it to pieces, and you alter the course of history. You change things so that Rydge cannot come to pass. Ben takes a hammer, and has a think about it. It would be so easy to do, especially since we've already had a material cost to the Dark Heart running rampant. Jenn Chou, head of security. She went back in to do a hack on Rydge, to stall him from activating the swap code. She's discovered, held at gunpoint, and refuses to back down... and so is shot dead for it. Now, we should pause here. Back when Doctor Who's last season ended, I made a big to-do about people who watched UNIT get discount Thanos snapped and immediately cynically went "OH THAT MEANS THIS IS GETTING UNDONE THEREFORE THIS EPISODE HAS NO STAKES ANYMORE BAD TV DOCTOR WHO IS DEAD FOREVER'. On broadcast seeing this, I knew this was getting undone. The characters talked about the ramifications of changing Rydge's history changing their personal history. Rydge, for all his evils, still made the quantum chip. Without it, Ben would not have gotten back and none of this would have happened. Things are going to work out, and sometimes it's okay for TV to do that. The point is not the if, but the how. Here's how Ben wins.

He has a hammer in his hands, considering beating the shit out of this computer. His friend's dead, his other friends are exiles, and this tech asshole is about to make history his own personal playground. This cannot come to pass, and yet Ben hesitates. He hesitates because Jeffrey has named the computer after his father. Ben, dear sweet loveable Ben, sees the tree in the forest. He doesn't see the first stepping stone to creating the loathsome Gideon Rydge. He sees the creation of Jeffrey Nally, a confused and hurt teenage boy who lost his dad and still isn't okay with it. The way forward becomes clear. Don't win with hate. Win with love. Instead of fighting Gideon Rydge, the answer is healing Jeffrey Nally. He finds Jeffrey, and he talks straight with him. He explains everything about himself, about grief and loss and how it can metastasize into cancerous, venomous hate. He explains what he does. He saves people, changes their lives for the better, because it's the right thing to do.  He does more than that. He demonstrates by bringing Jeffrey along with him. There's still an elderly racecar driver with a bad heart to save. How fitting is that? It's healing one literal heart that helps heal Jeffrey's metaphorical heart, as he uses his scientific know-how to help Ben build a makeshift defibrillator. The man is saved, and Jeffrey comes through it all with a little more understanding of who this Ben guy is and why he means so much to his mom... and it is enough. The promise of redemption rejected by Richard Martinez is kept here with Jeffrey Nally. The antagonist of the season is shown that the power of Quantum Leap is a force for good, not bad... and trusts in it to find their own personal healing. Martinez was unable to look past his hate. Gideon Rydge of the year 2026 was unable to as well. Jeffrey Nally, however, was... and that's beautiful.

The day is saved, the timeline restored, what once went wrong put right. Gideon Rydge is now one of Project Quantum Leap's generous backers. Jenn is alive and well. All is right with the world... and we even have the swap code. Ben can come home, but he needs a body to swap with. It's Addison who steps up. Addison, whose relationship with Tom reached amicable dissolution after they both realized she still loved Ben. Addison, who Ben has done so much for. He started this entire endeavor to save her, and so this is her returning the favor and saving him. To return him home. Except... Hannah reminded us of something in her last appearance, at the end of this. Home isn't a place for Ben. It's a person. The swap code sends Addison adrift through space and time, but recall the law of quantum entanglement. Two particles in a shared state. Ben is still here, but so is Addison. They are together again, adrift in the macrocosm of time and space. Quantum Leap ends with them running off into the sunset (well, actually the middle of a warzone) together, and though I was imagining what the structure of a season 3 could look like.. this is it. If this is how it had to end, then it's perfect enough. The two separated lovebirds end up back together. Love wins out over hate. In a way, the new show finally heals the wound left upon itself on the original Quantum Leap's ending. The tragedy of Sam Beckett never coming home, never getting to see Al or Donna or Sammy Jo ever again. Not this Quantum Leap. This Quantum Leap gets to reunite its star-crossed lovers, and end on that note. Beautiful.

That's it, then. Quantum Leap, done and dusted. I will admit, part of me soured on it during the middle part of writing these. I started all this off by claiming I was conflicted about this season, that I both loved and hated it. I love it for the message of positivity, how love conquers over hate. I hate it for accelerating the macrocosm, for sidelining the simple act of making ordinary lives better in favor of its overarching plotline. For missing the trees for the forest. There was a serious part of me that wondered if such hubris, such a departure from the original remit of the show, was its death knell. If Quantum Leap had failed, had let the macrocosm overtake it, and that was why it had to go away. Hell, I fled to it to escape the macrocosm of other shows. I should be infuriated that it has happened again, right? I don't think that was entirely the case. It's still an alright season with its heart in the right place at the end, and I think a lot of why I feel this way about it is how I ended up covering it. Things once again feel kind of bloated, with a lot for me to talk about that isn't just the specifics of a leap or its themes. I got to do that here at the end, with Jeffrey and putting right what went wrong with him, so that was nice. Other than that, it's an okay season of television that ended up not doing well enough to greenlight a third okay season of television. It happens.

So, then, we say goodbye to Quantum Leap. Goodbye to that show which I fled to from the macrocosm of other franchises. Goodbye to the show that mellowed me out, made me appreciate something simpler and better. A show which made me laugh and cry and feel so many wonderful things. Quantum Leap. Dear sweet Quantum Leap. You found me at my very own Jeffrey Nally junction point, didn't you? A bitter weirdo with hate in their heart, raging about the betrayals of utopic media. Frothing at the mouth about the Hollow Pursuits of an anxious mess, about Timeless Children robbed of their mercury and moral initiative, about Uranus and Neptune in retrograde and the Rise and Fall of a space empire at war. You saw all of that, and you healed the hate in my heart. You showed me that things could be better, and helped quell that mess in my mind. Ypu put me right just as I was about to go wrong. For that, I thank you dearly. I give you these words from my healed soul out of love and adoration for you, as you sail off into that great unknown. A part of you will always stay with me, as I hope a part of me will always stay with you. Sam. Ben. All the rest. May you always have an angel by your side. 

Happy leaping.