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. 

A Quantum Microcosm, Shared In The Entanglement Of Synchronicity (New Quantum Leap Season 2) [Part 3]

(Continued from Part 2)

We avoided it, for a time, but we can avoid it no longer. Into the swirling maelstrom of macrocosm we go. Into the churning choppy waters of Arc Stuff. It's big and grandiose, but here on its edges before the dark waters we will still find something simple and human to guide us. All of this, all of what is to come, was started with one small act of kindness. These harsh waves began with but a ripple in the water of time. Think back to what we learned long ago, when Sam Beckett faced his Mirror Image: the lives a quantum leaper touches do themselves touch other lives. Every leap, when you think about it, is a massive rewrite of interpersonal macrocosmic history. Each one makes the world a better place, putting right what once went wrong. These changes are never usually shown, only implied by the hologram reading out a lovely little summation at about minute 40 of each episode. New Quantum Leap Season 2 plays different. It will show the full scope of one such change; how it makes one person's life just a little better, albeit not without some hardships and adversity. That's just life, though, and the macrocosmic ramifications will come home to roost later. For now, let's see the change. Let's see what Ben did.

In order to understand, we have to go back to Closure Encounters. The Roswellian conspiracy leap which flirts with the idea that UFOs are real before revealing it was all just top secret military stuff. What I neglected to mention was one particular person Ben meets on this leap. He strikes a rapport with a young waitress named Hannah Carson. Do remember that at this time Ben is still reeling from having just been told he's lost Addison because it was three years and she didn't wait for him. Hannah, then, is just the sort of friend he needs on such a leap. She's sweet, charming, and also knows a little about physics herself. Hannah is a brief side character on this leap, but she is a nice enough young lady. So it is that, before leaping away, Ben writes down some info about a Princeton physics program for women that will start up in the future. A sweet gesture. Something to help Hannah get out of dead-end Arizona, to go and live her dreams of being a scientist. A kindness as Ben is hurting. This one kindness is the foundation for the entire arc. Everything that happens from here on happens as a result of this (or has already happened as a result of this, depending on how much predestination we believe in, but put a pin in that), and we get to see it very soon.

Which takes us nicely back into Secret History, the treasure hunt for Einstein's fusion generator formula which also has copious amounts of Nazis getting punched, losing swordfights, and getting arrested. Fittingly, there was a secret history here which I was evading last time, and here it is. Ben is assisted in this leap by none other than a slightly older Hannah Carson. Furthermore, Ben actually tells Hannah that he is a time traveler from the future in this second meeting. Again, we need to sit back and focus on the significance of all this. Ben even muses at the end of the episode that leaping doesn't work like this: he meets people, works hard to improve their lives and make a difference, and then never sees them again as he leaps off to the next problem to solve. The pool of people who have met a quantum leaper more than once is quite small: you can't count them on one hand, but you can count them on two. Add to that the number of people who know that the person in front of them is a quantum leaper from the future? That's like, three people from the old show (two of whom are Evil Leapers) and Richard Martinez. A significant thing has happened here. Ben Song and Hannah Carson have become quantum entangled, ensnared in a web of fate and predestination that will tug at their heartstrings. Again, at the end of the episode, Ben straight up kisses Hannah. He's hurting from his breakup and there's a clear sense of rebound and struggling to heal his heart, but here he is making a connection again with someone else, entangled across this woman's timeline. What will come of that? Many things.

Notably, right after this is the witch trials episode, in which Ben fully heals from the hate in his heart. This second meeting with Hannah is clearly an inspiration for that, and finding a real and tangible human connection is what helps him get over that misery. The power of the microcosm yet again. 'Twas love, everyone... and yet, the macrocosm looms. It seems dainty and innocent enough now, but last time was a struggle to talk about things that weren't the arc. Having exhausted that, everything else is major. Hannah Carson, the whip-smart curly dimpled physicist who Ben had a meetcute with, is going to keep popping up. Literally right after this, the next episode is their third meeting. Nomad is a Cold War-era spy thriller set in Egypt, in which Ben has to help an Egyptian superspy codenamed Nomad to make it out of the world of espionage and intel alive. Hannah is also here, and also helping. Fittingly, Ben is also a nomad given the whole leaping through time thing, and Hannah gets to muse that maybe a place isn't Ben's home, but a person. Could it be Hannah? We luxuriate a bit on the second act low point when it seems like Nomad has been captured by the East and is surely dead, the leap a failure... but would it be so bad if Ben got to spend the rest of his life with Hannah in the past? The leap is a success, but the fact that the very failure of the series parameter can be met with a "Well, look on the bright side" says volumes. I do enjoy Ben and Addison's relationship here, though: they both care for the other very much, even if they're not in love right now, and just want what's best for their respective ex-partner. Fittingly, now that Ben has learned this skill, he and Hannah are about to have a relationship much the same.

The very next episode, Off The Cuff. is also a Hannah leap, though in its defense there was a Christmas break between episodes here. It's also the final Hannah leap before the two-part finale, so the macrocosm is growing. Hannah's involvement is a twist this time, as initially this is just a leap involving Ben as a bounty hunter trying to get a guy into custody while being stalked by hired goons trying to kill the bounty. I feel like Quantum Leap really likes the idea of bounty hunters as a leap concept. The old show did it at least twice in my memory, maybe even three times, and Season 1 of the new show had that one with the bounty hunters who got married at the end. I guess hilarity ensues when you're handcuffed to your enemy for an episode. Anyway, the bounty is named Kevin Nally, and halfway into the episode he has the bright idea of hiding out from the hired goons (and getting medical treatment for Ben who's been a little banged up from the escapades) at his brother's farmhouse. This gets us to met Josh Nally, a doctor who treats Ben's wounds. We also meet Josh's family, including his son Jeffrey and his wife Hannah. OH SHIT MIC DROP THERE SHE IS. Yeah, so since Ben has been jumping across her timeline by massive gaps of years and years, Hannah has settled down with a nice young man and started a family. Showing how much he's grown, though, Ben isn't saddened by this. The pair still have that connection, that spark between them. To make a long story short, the day is saved and science is used to drive off the goons trying to kill Kevin, but Addison has a bit of bad news just before Ben leaps: Josh Nally will die of an aneurysm in 18 months. Before Ben can warn her, he leaps.

Okay, so bummer there. The next two episodes we've discussed already (the treasure hunting one and the one with the pesticide company getting exposed), but there is some minor Hannah arc stuff which happens. In the first, Ben reacts to being unable to warn Hannah about Josh's impending death with a clever idea: he pulls a Back To The Future and writes a letter to Hannah, to be delivered to her in 18 years, warning her to have her husband checked out for that health condition in order to save his life. It's a wonderful idea, but it doesn't work: as is relayed next episode, Josh Nally still died. The aneurysm was treated successfully, but soon after he was killed in a car accident. What a shame. Ben tried, but the assumption here is that Josh Nally's death was just an unavoidable accident, or maybe even a fixed point sort of thing that has to happen. The latter is a little gruesome to think about, considering what comes up next, but we can't confront that yet. Speaking of not confronting things, there's only one Hannah episode left. We'll really jam with its ramifications next time, but to give a quick summary of As The World Burns to set the stage: The apartment complex in Baltimore which Hannah and Jeffrey moved to after Josh's death catches fire, and Ben has leapt into a firefighter in order to save a whole bunch of people from the blaze. There's one very important thing which pays off here, and now we have to face a different macrocosm: We have to talk about the back at the project plot, and the swap code.

A magic spell to heal the lonely heart.

Right at the midseason break, Tom Westfall reveals this top secret piece of super-code that the government has in archive which could theoretically do a quantum leap swap: that is, Ben could trade places with someone in the present and return home to everyone. It is, however, a very advanced code, and Ian struggles with decoding it for quite some time. During the fire, Hannah gets trapped by some debris and Ben has to rush off to save Jeffrey from the flames. At that moment, Hannah codes in dust, revealing that not only was she the super-genius behind the code, but that she has the missing piece needed to complete it. Let us stop here and revel for a minute. All of this, this expanse lasting about three decades of Hannah Carson-Nally's life, culminates here. Ben was not thinking of his own personal gain when he gave Hannah the tip to go to Princeton all those years ago. He was just making one life a little better. Business as usual for a quantum leaper. The sheer scope and consequence of that one decision rippled, and is still rippling. All of this, all that has happened and will happen. Swordfighting Nazis for Einstein's formula, thrilling chases to escape Soviet agents in Cairo, barricading a farmhouse against gangsters hellbent on invading it and killing you, and escaping a towering inferno while trying to save as many people as you can. All of that, because Ben was kind to a random waitress once. Now look at what the rippling has unearthed: the swap code, cultivated in the mind of a genius for half a lifetime, to get Ben back to his home. This is the power of Quantum Leap. No, wait. That's not quite right. It is that, yes, but it's more. This is the power of love.

But, as love beats in the heart, so does hate. Ben's one act of kindness changed the trajectory of Hannah's life. It brought them together, and it brought Ben his salvation. Salvation from the anguish of his breakup, and the possibility of returning to his home. There are darker consequences, though. Ben did his best, and he did it all in the name of love... but ripples can uncover dark things within the waves. As Ben and Hannah's hearts beat for love, the dark heart of America beats for hate and misery and imperialism and all those other horrible things we talked about. Ben's actions have given that dark heart a good and strong defibrillation, and now it's awake. It's awake, and we have to deal with our season's antagonist. A certain irony has not escaped me. I started this off by accusing this series of losing the trees for the forest. Some thousand words in, all I've really done is tell you all the arc shit that's happened. I feel as if I've let you all down again, and for that I apologize. I can only hope you've been liking the words, but even I feel as if the macrocosm has weighed down on us. We're in the eye of the storm, in the middle of the black hole here now.

The end of Quantum Leap approaches. The end of love, of life, of putting right what once went wrong. One last desperate battle with the dark heart of America. Let's go.

(Continued in Part 4)

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

(Continued from Part 1)

Well, actually, I can only tell you half that story. There is a massive series of swirling macrocosms at the heart of New Quantum Leap Season 2, and the full tale of Ben and Addison's loss and healing is caught in that maelstrom. More to the point, most of the episodes are caught up in that particular arc as well. To take things in all at once would dilute the focus I am going for, so I find myself furtively turning the rudders to try and cut against this grandiose current. I can't avoid it forever, but if I can avoid it for around 2000 more words then all the better. Mercifully, there are still some standalone leaps to talk about, and even some of the ones tied into the arc have elements to them that can still be discussed here. Consider this segment one last dance with the original remit of Quantum Leap: putting a leaper up against the dark heart of American history itself, looking that darkness right in the eye and defying it. Making the world a better place, one ordinary life at a time. It will not satisfy the macrocosm's hunger, but it will sate it just long enough for us to prepare. 

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?

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.

The Frezno's Raving Rants Tenth Anniversary Retrospective

Welcome, friends and lovelies, to the festivities. If I've timed things correctly it is August 16th, 2023. Ten years ago today, this blog was created out of the spark of an idea. Ten years. Think of it. A child born when I first crafted those words is now old enough to be in the fifth grade. Ten years. A not-insignificant fraction of a human life. Ten goddamn years. Over that time, this blog has shifted in its mission statement and what it has talked about. To wit, I myself have also shifted and changed in those ten years. I often speak of my internal landscape, and this space represents a decade-long road map of it. Our party, then, is a metatextual retracing of my steps. We're going to go over a brief history of Frezno's Raving Rants. What inspired the posts, what led me to do and say the things I did back then, and what led me to the me I am today.

Whether you've been a constant companion on this trip, or you've somehow just stumbled upon this party, you are welcome to accompany me on this adventure down my metaphorical memory lane. It's alright. I've done this introspective song and dance before. I've never done it quite so thoroughly down my own timeline, but it's a party and one can be indulgent. Take my hand, if you so please, and come along with me. Let us celebrate and discover what made this blog tick, and how it grew and changed as I so did. Let the Frezno festivities... begin.

A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History (Epilogue)

(Continued from 5.4)

We have done it, you and I. We have navigated our way through quantum microcosm and made it all the way through the journey. I spent my summer vacation pinballing through time and space, and what wonders we saw! What wonders, and what horrors. I'll get earnest and heartfelt about what the show meant to me and how it resonated with me, but I want to talk about what could have come next for Quantum Leap. Obviously there's a whole new series of Quantum Leap out there, with two episodes having aired as I write this... but what I'm talking about is how the final episode could have ended. Evidence of this alternate ending surfaced a few years back, so they at least had an idea hook for moving on with Season 6. What would they have done?

Basically Al would have become the quantum leaper, and the major goal would be the search for Sam. There's something really sweet and moving to me about that. Not only does it show a deep level of camaraderie and loyalty in Al's heart for Sam, but it shows the fundamental truth of Sam's making the world a slightly better place: he made Al a better person. Not just that being with Beth for years would make him less of a womanizer, but even just being his guide on this journey has enlightened Al enough that now he can take the leap to do good too. All those times Sam changed Al's mind on something, all the times Al learned better from watching Sam's altruism (We'll even count "Running For Honor" here, mad as I am that they took Al that far to make him better), all those times and more. I wonder how the late great Dean Stockwell would have played this new Al, and what sort of things he'd have faced. Would he have gone back to the everyday microcosm, or would he be set loose in the new wild macrocosmic foundations Season 5 built? We'll never know, but I do know this: Al changed for the better on this journey, and so did I.

Al the bartender, or God or Time or Fate or whatever Bruce McGill was, asked Sam why he started time travelling in the first place in order to get a simple and decisive answer for the ethos of the show. In the same way, let's get a simple question to cut to the heart of the matter. Frezno Inferno, blogger friend of yours and mine, why did you decide to watch this old time travel show from the 90's in the first place? I wrote it all down at the start of this, but let's get back to it in short. I had grown tired of the long-running sci-fi stuff I was into becoming utterly macrocosmic and going up their own asses, forgetting the human for the sake of their own references. I let all that venom out all at once, showing the psychic wounds of my internal self before retreating into a quantum leap accelerator of my own for this. This show, a show I hoped would have no big continuity, no needless references, just a series of period pieces about helping ordinary people with real-world concerns.

Oh, I got that alright. I got that in spades. In a way, I wasn't ready for just how real Quantum Leap could get. That mission statement of real-world concerns mixed with the less politically correct era of the 1990s to make a show that you could not get away with today. I know there's a new Quantum Leap out now, but I cannot imagine it doing some of the shit this old show did. Racists, rapists, reprehensible people... it showed them all and did not flinch from putting their evil on display. Sam and his mission were to shine a spotlight on the best of humanity, and to do that he had to battle the worst of humanity. The people who say slurs maliciously, who commit injustice against minorities, who flaunt getting away with sexual assault... we battled them all, and got to show them a thing or two. Quantum Leap was unflinching in what it could do, and the new show can only be defanged in comparison because that's just how time works. There's no way in hell it would have people openly say the slur words, like N's or F's or R's. That's just how material social progress works, but at the end of it all I have to admire that unflinching realism just a bit, even if I don't like hearing those words. 

Point is, Quantum Leap in its realism was miles away from what the other sci-fi shows had to do with just allegory, given changing times. When I talked about "The Color Of Truth" I compared it to Doctor Who's "Rosa", and how the former did shit the latter could never dream of doing because it was Doctor Who and not that kind of show. If ever you need a case for throwing the sci-fi/fantasy blinders off your eyes and looking at the real world, this is it. Quantum Leap was my gateway drug, and though I still enjoy those sci-fi shows I did get what I wanted out of this. I got those real stories about the real world in a way that mattered, uncomfortable as they might have been. For that I can't thank Quantum Leap enough. Some of those stories were rocky and shook my faith, but we ended out well when all was said and done. Better than that, in fact. I mentioned above how Al would have grown and changed from all of this. Now let me tell you how I have changed, even just a bit, from this journey.

To put it simply, breaking out of that sci-fi framework and expanding my horizons has helped me mellow out. Look back at the intro to this project and you can see the malfeasance lurking within myself that I was trying to exorcise. A screaming shouty demon with opinions on sci-fi and a deep hurting sense of betrayal. Going through Quantum Leap has helped me quell that demon, just a little. You can see the difference if you go even further back. Let's compare the final seasons of two shows I've covered here, both with Scott Bakula: Enterprise, and Quantum Leap. Both of these last go-arounds alter things substantially, building their own frameworks and foundations and feeling like new iterations of their shows altogether. When it came to the former, I was enraged by what I was seeing. Betrayed, even. The show I loved went away and in its place a bunch of Star Trek nerds were gleefully setting up their status quo. As TOS nerds often are, they fumbled about under the misguided belief that the continuity was the most important thing, and the even more misguided belief that the way to "solve" it was to throw more random Captain Kirk-era references at it. I hated it, and in 2019 I let that venom be known. Enterprise BETRAAAAYED US.

By any measure, the me of 2019 would have went off at Quantum Leap's latter half. I'm sorry to single out "Running For Honor" again, but it's only to show what my past self would have done to it. They'd have eviscerated it, and it would fuel that malfeasance within me further. It would be a betrayal, a black mark on the show that mortally wounded it. If that wasn't bad enough, what would Season 5 have done to me? The celebrity leaps, the gimmick stuff... hell, the goddamn evil leaper story arc! By the end of that shit it's so not about what's going on in the microcosmic world that the story has to deus ex machina a resolution for that in a minute because it spent all its time pissing about with its own lore! The me of 2019 would have lost their goddamn mind, bamboozled again just like with Doctor Who under Chris Chibnall. Faith was had in Quantum Leap, and Quantum Leap blew it for the sake of cheap drama and lore, betraying me yet again and giving me no solace or respite from the hate in my heart.

Good thing I'm not the me of 2019 anymore, huh? I've regenerated. As recent as a year ago, when Doctor Who was airing Flux, I was on this mean streak. Somehow or another, Quantum Leap gave me perspective and got me to relax. I hadn't even realized I'd changed like that until a friend of mine pointed out that I had a tendency of throwing babies out with bathwater when these shows did bullshit I didn't like, and urging that I not do that with Quantum Leap over "Running For Honor". I had no intention of binning all of Quantum Leap because of that episode, and it was realizing that which made me realize "oh shit, I've changed for the better!". You can see it in my approach with Season 5, too; rather than treat its macrocosmic creepings as something going against the spirit of the show, I rolled with it as a bit of experimentation, a new iteration of the show building its own foundation. I knew it was the last season anyway so I rode it out. I won't lie, by about Marilyn Monroe I was getting fatigued with this iteration of the show. I might have gotten madder if there was a Season 6 in this style, but there wasn't. 

That's what this show gave me, and what I gave myself. Its metaphorical Sam Beckett leaped into my internal landscape, as its Al calculated the odds that he was here to quell the venom and betrayal in there and teach me how to mellow out and enjoy things again. It's fine to be critical, and it's fine to call shit out. I have done that here, I feel, and I made no concessions over calling out stuff I did not like when I saw it. Crucially, it's what you do after that matters. What do I do after Quantum Leap? I use what I learned, and move on to other things. I leap on, like Sam did. Before I do, a final fond farewell to this time travel show which kept my summer interesting. I'll say it like this, so you know the impact you've made to me. Quantum Leap... you did not betray me. We did not always see eye to eye, but you did not betray me and I hold no grudge to you in my internal landscape. You showed me there's a better way, and for that I thank you.

And now I move onward. I know what the next show I'd like to cover will be, but we're in the midst of fall and fall is a busy time for me. Don't expect a big big thing on the blog until 2023. In the meantime... Well, it's odd. You are reading this in the midst of my Halloween marathon, due to how the timing worked. As I write this, though, it's not even October. It is Sept. 30th, 2022. Today I have to watch the first piece of media for the Halloween marathon, and it is Ghostbusters Afterlife. You already know what I thought, as those words will have come out first. If I may send a hope to my future self, it will be that you took what you learned from Quantum Leap and used it in analyzing that movie. It is a movie which acts against everything you believe in, taking a concept with infinite possibility and constraining it to be about itself with the same four signifiers to remind people of the original movie. Tackle that darkness with the same dignity, grace, and unflinching mellow that Sam and Al bestowed upon you. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: The real test is going to be a week from now, when  I have to write about the final Chibnall/Whittaker era Doctor Who story. I am going into it with complete apathy rather than dread, so we'll see how that factors in.)

Good luck, my friend. Best of love to all of you at home. And to Sam and Al, the time travellers making the world a better place... Whenever I think of you, in this wild internal landscape they call Frezno Inferno, a smile will cross my face. With warm serenity, I will be excited to recall your travels, and a simple little phrase of jubilance will pass through my thoughts, in honor of you... and it's the only way I know how to end this journey fittingly. It is, simply...

Oh boy.

May 24th - October 17th, 2022

A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 5 (Quantum Leap Season 5) [5.4]

(Continued from 5.3)

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.

Happy birthday, Mr. Beckett...

It's 1960 and Sam is a man named Dennis, chauffer to the iconic and legendary Marilyn Monroe. Immediately, of course, Sam wants to prevent the tragic overdose which led to Marilyn's untimely death. Al, while agreeing with this, is in heaven because Marilyn Monroe is one of the Legendary Hot Women Of All Time. I got a real chuckle out of him shouting at Sam to HURRY UP COME QUICK IT'S MARILYN... only for Sam to find her swimming in her pool in the nude. Jokes aside, one of the inciting incidents of this episode is Marilyn hiring on a self-professed "biggest fan" named Barbara as her new assistant. She seems on the level at first, buuuut...

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.

As we learn from flashback via Sam reading Henry's journal, Henry, Roy, and Lucas all went to Vietnam together along with a fourth high school pal, John Burke. John was killed in Vietnam after Lucas refused a direct order from him to go kill an old Vietnamese man in a hut. John went to do it himself, at which point the hut blew up and John died. Lucas is both wracked with guilt and also determined to arrest Henry and Roy if they ever show up in town again. Shit, this isn't a Bigfoot story. This is Quantum Leap doing First Blood. It's a story about how shitty the veterans of Vietnam had it, and one which Al is naturally sympathetic to.

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?

The Leap Between The States: So yeah. Quantum Leap breaks the rules to do an episode set in 1862 in Virginia, during the American Civil War. One might say this is flagrant transgression and would need a damn good reason, but here's a little secret. The reason doesn't matter as long as the story is good. It could be pulsars from Pluto affecting the quantum gravitations of leaping, if they made the end result good. Thankfully they're a little more thematic than that. Sam has performed a genetic leap up his own family tree and has hopped into his own great-grandfather, Union Captain John Beckett. Okay, what sort of story are we going to tell about Sam's lineage?

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?

But, on the other foot, this is not just the boomer nostalgia show. This is still Quantum Leap, and Sam is going to fight his hardest to make things better for this one girl. Be it a literal fistfight with her jealous and uptight fiancée who looks down on Elvis like he's a peon, or in working to get her an audition, Sam is fighting for the future of Sue Anne. In doing so, he nearly destroys Elvis from the historical record, bringing him down to the ordinary world. This is played as a disaster, but now that Elvis has been dragged down into the world of the microcosm, he's on Sam's playing field and Sam can help him too, by seeking out the talent agents himself and insisting upon playing his song. When that doesn't quite impress, he takes to the diner they're eating at and stages an entire impromptu performance there, a great bit of fun that impresses them and gets the King back up to his throne.

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.

Al the bartender knows more than he's letting on. Like why, for instance, Sam can look in the mirror and see his own face for the first time in four years. He's a cryptic and coy, but telling sort of spiritual guide, answering Sam's questions but often pushing the question back to Sam to allow Sam introspection and thought on the purpose of his quantum leap journey so far. Out with it, then. The big implication is that this bartender is the force which initially pinballed Sam through time and space to right past wrongs. This bartender is God. Or Time. Or Fate. Or whatever the hell you ascribe the journey to so far. The final episode of this show... is Sam in a bar talking to God for 45 minutes. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: And here's where we pay off the Season 2 invocation in the last intrusion. One of this bartender's many cryptic lines to Sam is simply "Who knows what Don Quixote can accomplish?". Since writing about "To Catch A Falling Star" and admitting I knew jack about Don Quixote and Man Of La Mancha, I got some feedback on that post explaining the significance of Don Quixote to Quantum Leap; that the former's a story about "doing what you believe in no matter the odds and no matter what other people say". That's very Quantum Leap, and an especially fitting sentiment to keep in mind during the inquisitive introspection of this final episode, as well as Sam's decision and destiny at the end.)

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...

TO BE CONCLUDED...

A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History: Part 5 (Quantum Leap Season 5) [5.3]

(Continued from 5.2)

(TW: sexual assault attempts, animal death)

A Tale Of Two Sweeties: Oh, god. To use some modern parlance, this episode was cringe. I don't mean that as an insult, as it's designed that way. You are supposed to wince and cringe and be somewhat uncomfortable watching this one, but not in an overtly triggering way like any of the unflinching looks at serious subject matter like... take your pick out of Season 4, you're bound to hit one. Even with its wince factor, there's still enough actual tension here to keep you invested in places. It's 1958 and Sam has leapt into Marty Elroy, a real piece of work. Marty is an absolute scumbag of a human being, a bad gambler who owes a lot of money to a lot of bad people, and who has many other flaws. The biggest, and the tension inherent in the episode, is that he is a bigamist. He has two wives and two families, one in New York and one in Florida, and neither knows about the other. Marty Elroy seems to have shit all figured out, until his New York family come down to Florida to surprise him. Oh boy. SHENANIGANS ENSUE!!!

On the advice of Al, Sam has to try and juggle having two families without either of them learning about the other. Watching Scott Bakula playing the earnest and kind-hearted Sam Beckett trying and failing and flailing to play this real piece of work of a man is some sort of comedy. A special highlight has to go to Sam taking both families to the movies at once, shuffling back and forth between seats. Dear God in heaven, did he leap into Marty Elroy or Jack Tripper? The episode's smart and plays at both wives going to find Marty at the same time, which leads you to think this is where Sam will be caught. Nope! Phew, glad we avoided that! Oh hey, it's some guys threatening to break Marty's thumbs if they don't pay them 2000 dollars in 24 hours. There's the tension!

Which Sam defuses, once they pick him up a day later after more flailing around trying to keep each wife from catching on, with a last-minute bet against a terrible horse named Lead Balloon with 40 to 1 odds. In a shocking coincidental twist, the horse wins the race and Marty's debts are paid off with no thumbs broken. Al is helping in his own way while this is happening, as the youngest daughter of Marty's New York family is going to run away. She's young enough that she can see Al, and so Al has a heart to heart with her and tells her how lucky she is to have a mother to take care of her, as Al grew up an orphan. Out of nowhere in this farce is this genuinely really sweet moment between Al and this kid. It's nice and welcome.

As is the resolution. All episode, Al has been urging Sam that he has to pick a wife and stick with her, dumping the other one... but that Ziggy's odds were split right down the middle so which wife to choose couldn't be advised. Sam has it all figured out, though, as he's invited his wife to dinner. Both of them. At once. So, we finally get the pin pulled out, and Sam reveals the truth of how scummy Marty Elroy was to have two families at once behind the other's back. In doing so, he manages to break the deadlock and create a better future... because both wives leave Marty on the spot. They'll remarry and get better lives, and even loveless Marty here apparently cleans up his act in the future, so that's a job well done-- OH GOD THE END TWIST BEFORE SAM LEAPS IS THIS FUCKER HAD A THIRD WIFE!

I mean, it's a big dumb comedy episode meant to make you wince and cringe at how awkward it is and how much more awkward it would be if Sam gets caught having two wives. On that level, I can't exactly be mad at it. It's not going to be my favorite or anything, but it has its moments. Mostly the Al stuff with the kid, or how genuinely subversive it is for Sam to finally go "You know what, fuck this pretense, I'm shattering it, make a better future out of that". Marty Elroy sucks, that's kind of the point, and now we're done with it and we can move on to hopefully better things. 

Liberation: I moved on to better things, alright, like another vacation in between episodes. While I was there, other big shifts happened! I am writing about Liberation on the morning of September 23rd, and thus this is the first Quantum Leap writeup to be done in a world where the new show exists. I haven't seen a frame of it and am saving it for when I finish... do we call it Classic Leap now? Like Doctor Who? Well, whatever it is, we get to talk about this episode of it... and I'm walking into a bit of a minefield. Ah well. If I bravely faced talking about all the other heavy shit, surely I can handle taking this on. Welcome to the Quantum Leap episode about second-wave feminism.

In 1968, Sam leaps into Margaret Sanders, a housewife currently at a women's liberation rally along with her daughter Suzanne. The leader of the rally, Diana, is making very sensible points about equality while a bunch of drunk letterjackets from across the street yell Very Insightful Rebuttals about going back into the kitchen. Then the cops come and arrest the women. Oh, good. It's in jail that we meet the chief of police, Don Tipton, who also decides to be a little mean to the uppity leader of the feminists. This doesn't sit well with Sam, who shoves the guy back and tells him to go to hell... but Margaret and Suzanne are soon bailed out by their patriarch, George Sanders. George also has connections with Tipton, as Tipton's son works for George and is up for a big promotion, so there's just a whiff of "oh well I'll look the other way just this once" about it. Hmm. 

From here the leap splits into a dual balancing act of sorts. On the one hand, you have George Sanders, who will leave his wife due to this sudden change where she's suddenly a big scary feminist and not his happy little housewife any more. As such, Sam has to be careful not to poke that sleeping old bear any more than he already has. On the other hand, one of Diana's feminist rallies is going to get violent, involve a struggle with Chief Tipton for his gun, and end up getting people shot. So, Sam has to prevent tragedy from occurring at the feminist rally... but if he goes to the feminist rally he's disobeying the orders of the head of the Sanders household and George will leave Margaret. Tricky.

Now, one of these plotlines gives me some pause, and the other has at least an okay resolution. In the end, it all comes back to the idea of the system and the status quo. George, Tipton, Tipton's son, and even those letterjacket assholes are all nice and comfy with the way things are in 1968. The men are the breadwinners and go-getters, and the women are happy homemakers who cook pot roasts and do what the men say. It's just The Way Things Are, and it's a happy little coincidence that The Way Things Are has them on the high ground of privilege. All this outlandish talk about feminism and equality? That's not The Way Things Are! That's something different entirely! That's terrifying! 

You can really see it in an early scene where Sam suggests that George promote one of his outstanding lady employees instead of Tipton's son, and George thinks it's a great idea... because he'll save money on wages. Sam is appalled that George would pay a woman less for the same job, but George is just confused. Paying a woman less than a man? That's just The Way Things Are, Margaret! Wh-- WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CHANGE THE WAY THINGS ARE? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? WHAT'S GOTTEN INTO YOU? To George, changing the policy to pay a woman the same as a man is so utterly out there as to offend him at the suggestion. Build on that mentality all the way up, and you have how the men in this one react to the idea of feminism. Even Al is a little weird about things, but the episode does take care not to shove him over the line a la "Running For Honor": yes, he's devil's advocate in this one so Sam has someone to argue about the virtues of feminism with, but he also mentions that Tina ended up siding against him on the issue. So there's that.

Then we come to Diana. Lord, okay. Why don't we just talk about that climax? It's where I bristle a bit. Over the episode, Sam has tried to get her on the path of nonviolent protest, like Ghandi or MLK Jr., so that she doesn't go guns blazing on her rallies and ending up killing people. For the sake of drama, this approach does not work, and we're still going to get a climax with a gun. We also learn from Diana that she was an abuse victim, and so lashing out against a police officer like Tipton using unnecessary force against her is kind of a trauma response. Anyway, here she is in a boy's club, struggling with Tipton as Suzanne pulls his gun from his holster and Diana grabs it, just in time for Sam to come in and talk her down...

And, hmm. The way Sam talks Diana down is... something. It makes sense from his perspective, of course, but that doesn't mean I have to love it. The basic argument is urging Diana to fight the system of oppression from within the system itself. They're occupying a gentleman's club, so Sam asks if she tried to join it officially. No, they'd never accept a woman's application. Why? It's in the bylaws. Then change the bylaws. You can't, it's in the Constitution. Then change the Constitution! Sam's talkdown is that Diana shouldn't rebel against the system, but to use the system to change the system. That gets her to calm down enough to drop the gun, and Al informs Sam that after a bit of jail time, Diana will do just that and work on constitutional law.

I get that this is the path Sam would take. I really do. On the other hand, there's a bit of a smell here that I have to waft out. The idea of the system being this innocuous tool used by good and bad players alike, one that can be used for good as well as evil? It's a lovely idea, and maybe at one time it was true. I can't speak for 1968 or 1993, but all I can do is look at it from a modern lens. I am uncomfortably reminded of the political benchmarks of Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who, namely "Kerblam!" and "Orphan 55". The idea that the system can't be at fault, just the actors within it. The idea that you can do good work within that system and make better things happen by working within the framework of that system. At one time that might have been true. Women in America did change the laws and the systems for the better to get more equality, and it was an admirable fight and they should be applauded for it.

Hey, what's that in sight of our modern lens? Oh, just the system with a bunch of deep-rooted bad actors ripping away a bunch of reproductive rights. Just a bunch of old Republican fucks entrenched in the system for life turning what they believe into their policy, material social progress be damned. Just a bunch of people that you can't oust from the system, even if you are good and play within its framework. So, from a modern lens, this resolution doesn't quite work for me. I can't blame the show for not looking 30 years into the future and seeing Roe v. Wade being overturned. What I can wince at it for is that same mentality which was present in "Animal Frat": the idea that we future people know how this fight for social justice ended, so all you people in the middle of it should just relax and stop being so radical because everything is going to work out. Yeesh.

At least the resolution of George and Margaret is something nice. Yeah, you can't fuck with the system, but you know what you can do? Make one old guy realize that change and progress isn't the scary boogieman he makes it out to be. Instead of mourning the loss of his happy homemaker, he can get to know the woman she's changed into and love her for who she is. You know, keep up those vows he made at a church altar. That's very Quantum Leap, and I at least appreciate that... and, see? It was a side character who held outdated views who learned to be better, who we also never have to see again! That's how you do shit like that, I'm looking at you again, "Running For Honor"! Liberation is... a bit of a mess, albeit one that has its heart in the right place. Though I compared its climax to Chibnall-era Doctor Who, the fact remains that I'd throw this one on over any of his era in a heartbeat. Speaking of, instead of throwing on one of his episodes, let's throw on another Quantum Leap episode.

Dr. Ruth: Season 5 continues to be this radical thing that throws anything and everything at the Quantum Leap formula to see what sticks. In this case, we have an honest to God celebrity leap. Granted we did leap into Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was more infamous than famous, and also was portrayed... shall we say unflattering. This, on the other hand, is Quantum Leap getting an actual contemporary celebrity onto the show and having Sam leap into them to do his usual Quantum Leap thing. The celebrity in question, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a famous sex therapist who opens the floor for all sorts of frank discussions on the topic. On paper this sounds like a dreadful gimmick, a bit of stunt casting to bolster ratings that flies right into the jaws of macrocosm and gets away from what this show's heart and soul is. That's not the case at all. In fact, this is one of the highlights of Season 5 so far.

Really, you could rewrite this episode to be about any anonymous sex therapist with a platform, and it would still work. The fact that it's Dr. Ruth, one the audience and characters recognize, is just a little bonus treat. This episode's got a little bit of everything for everyone. It's wickedly funny, it's charmingly sweet, and terrifyingly real about a serious subject. It does this while managing to keep these tones from bleeding into each other. The comedy bits don't leak into the mature subject matter to spoil the affair and make a dissonant atonal mess. The show does a little of everything Quantum Leap does well, and does it extremely well. I'm amazed. The fucking Dr. Ruth episode of Quantum Leap is a high-water mark. Let's talk about those tones a bit, then.

The comedy beats come from Sam, and it's the familiar setup of "Oh boy I have to act like I know what I'm talking about with this leapee's field of interest!". Except Dr. Ruth's field of interest is answering unfiltered questions about sex and sexuality in a mature and healthy manner. Meanwhile, Sam in this episode is written as a shy flustered mess when it comes to the topic. It's not quite prudish, more that Sam is a wholesome farm boy who stammers and sputters when he hears people ask about multiple orgasms or premature ejaculation. What is a little weird, though, are the brief moments where Sam psychosynergizes with Dr. Ruth. Yes, this leads him to be more confident and give out better advice, but... Well, if you've never heard Dr. Ruth speak before, she has a German accent. Scott Bakula replicates this whenever Sam psychosynergizes, SO AT SOME POINTS IN ZE EPISODE HE VILL START TO TALK LIKE ZIS UND IT IS QUITE A SILLY COMEDY ACCENT! It's a little silly, but again, it only happens in the parts of the show that are meant to be silly. Not in the serious parts. Let's ramp up and talk about some more serious stuff.

This is another leap where two problems have to be fixed at once, and immediately one can be seen. Two of the workers on Dr. Ruth's radio show, Doug and Debbie, are having relationship trouble. It's once again another hot and cold romance portrayed on the show, but it's less frustrating when Sam is on the outside of it playing matchmaker. You get good advice from Sam's perspective, and then also good advice from Dr. Ruth's perspective whenever Sam psychosynergizes, which keeps on almost working before one of them puts their foot in their mouth and offends the other one, leading to them arguing again. Sam's eventual solution is to make them hash out their relationship on the air, which he sort of does on the fly? Just "OKAY LISTENERS NOW WE'RE GOING TO HEAR DOUG AND DEBBIE'S ARGUMENT ON THE SHOW, GO GUYS!". Weird, but it works and the two end up together.

While this is happening, we also have the crossover of a lifetime occurring. Getting Dr. Ruth onto Quantum Leap calls for something that's both obvious and brimming with potential: Dr. Ruth interacting with Al in 1999. I mean, come on. A famous sex therapist discussing sex and sexuality with a major "horny on main" personality like Al? It sounds amazing, and indeed it does happen. I mean, they weren't going to get Dr. Ruth on the show just to see her mouth "oh boy" into a mirror, now were you? These scenes are actually pretty good, though. Dr. Ruth manages to psychoanalyze Al pretty well, citing his multiple divorces as stemming from abandonment issues. There's a wild bit where Dean Stockwell says practically every synonym for breasts instead of the word breasts, proving something about his flippancy. At the end of it all, he really opens up about how it's difficult for him to say he loves anyone because of how he loved his first love, Beth. To which Dr. Ruth replies that there are different ways of loving someone that don't have to compare to how you loved someone else, and a little trick gets Al to be able to admit he loves his current girlfriend Tina. That's genuinely really sweet and moving, and a little resonant to me. I myself have a little difficulty saying love, so that hit me in the right spot.

Ah, but now we get to the serious stuff. One of Sam's first calls he has to take on Dr. Ruth's show is from Annie, a woman asking for advice on how to stop her boss from flirting with her and not taking no for an answer. Though Sam can't give her much help before she has to hang up the phone, he does meet Annie at a book signing and talks to her a bit... before she flees. As the camera is lingering on a man in a long coat staring at the book signing, we can only conclude that she's fleeing her boss who is stalking her. Sam can't get back to her in time again, but things seem serious. They only get worse as Annie calls Dr. Ruth again, worried about hearing noises outside her apartment before suddenly dropping the phone. Sam rushes to her apartment and finds Annie passed out after a gas leak... which he suggests that maybe Annie lit the stove before she heard those noises and forgot, flooding the place with gas. Except, Annie can't find the match in her trash can...

Great, so now we're literally gaslighting Annie. Sam eventually convinces Annie to quit her job, helping her clear out her desk only to come face to face with her ex-boss, Jonathan. Sam and Jonathan have a chat after Jonathan recognizes Dr. Ruth, claiming that actually Annie is the sexual harasser and not him. It couldn't be me, I'm just a normal man! I'm just an innocent man, I have a wife, it's that woman, she's crazy! Yeah. Uh huh. Sure. You can't trick me with the uncertainty game, Quantum Leap, 'round these parts we believe women. And we're right to, because Jonathan is indeed an entitled monster who thinks Annie is just playing hard to get, and he wants her, and so he is going to have her. We get to see, in shockingly real detail, the kind of shit that Katie McBain struggled with at the hands of Kevin Wentworth. Let us not beat around the bush. Jonathan breaks into Annie's apartment with full intent to rape her, and the two struggle for an uncomfortably long time while Sam tries to get there.

The second Sam bursts through that door, Jonathan shifts into victim mode and starts crying OH THANK GOD, DR. RUTH, THIS CRAZED WOMAN WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER, LOOK AT THESE WOUNDS SHE GAVE ME WHILE I TRIED TO DEFEND MYSELF, I AM THE VICTIM HERE! This fucker. This fucker. I will repeat to Jonathan what I told Kevin Wentworth in "Raped". You're not here with the eldery Dr. Ruth Westheimer, an old lady you can beat the shit out of to make your escape consequence-free. You're stuck here with Scott Bakula. So another rapist gets roundhouse kicked into next week, with the added indignity of the fact that Jonathan will now live with, among other heinous crimes, the fact that Dr. Ruth kicked his fucking ass. 

And that's the Dr. Ruth show. A little bit of everything, and all of it done well. Like I said, on paper this had the potential to be disastrous. As it played out, it kind of worked. It worked because it was well-made first and a celebrity episode second. It's not exactly the kind of thing you can get away with every week on this show, but it's very likely a one-off given we only have a handful left. As a little treat, it manages not to be too macrocosmic. It even gives us the leap out from Dr. Ruth's perspective in the waiting room, just to be cute and do another thing the show's never done before. I really liked this one, what's next-- A VAMPIRE WHAT THE FUCK??

Blood Moon: It is once again time for spooky supernatural shit to intersect with Quantum Leap. This time it's vampires. As haunting and gothic as the aesthetic of the episode is, and as wild as the human story of the show is, I have to be honest. This one let me down a little, and it's because it's in Season 5. Season 5, which has already been daring and strange and willing to experiment and test the limits of what Quantum Leap can be, is playing this supernatural story about vampires exactly the same as any other supernatural episode of the show.  The formula hasn't changed, and in fact I'll just tell you it now: Al is spooked out of his wits and convinced that Sam has leapt into some situation that proves the supernatural force in question is real. Sam, the skeptical scientist, tells Al that he's being a big superstitious baby and that there's a logical explanation for everything that's happening. The mysterious events of the episode play with that ambiguous tension, never committing one way or the other until the climax which reveals that things did have a logical explanation all along. Sam solves the crisis and saves the day, and just before he leaps out there's a last-minute bombshell that reveals oh shit, the supernatural thing was real all along!

"A Portrait For Troian" in Season 2 did it with ghosts. "Ghost Ship" in Season 4 did it with the Bermuda Triangle. "Blood Moon" does it with vampires, and never deviates from the formula in any gonzo envelope-pushing way. The Dr. Ruth leap ended with showing a man who bared his fangs to the camera, and Sam indeed wakes up in a coffin in a spooky castle during a lightning storm. He's Lord Nigel Corrington, in his London castle in 1975, along with his beautiful wife Alexandra and his hired help Horace. Soon the castle has company, Victor Drake and his companion Claudia, and it becomes apparent that some sort of ceremony is to take place tonight, during the height of a blood moon.

Again, that tension comes from wondering whether or not Carrington and Drake are vampires, as the blood moon ritual goes back to the early days of vampiric legend. Certainly Drake and Claudia are ominous enough to make it a possibility as one watches. They're not, though. They're play actors who put on fangs, but are deluded enough to want to kill Alexandra (and Sam, too, when he tries calling shit off) and drink their blood in order to absorb their souls and power and grow stronger themselves. Indeed, in one of the crueler moments this show's offered, they kill Alexandra's dog offscreen. Uncalled for, absolutely. You vampire LARPers are already going to kill Alexandra for her blood, and you're not really vampires so you're not hungry... so why do away with the dog? Nasty.

In the end, that gets at something interesting, a truth obscured behind all the spooky vampire myth. Eccentric aristocracy which drains the lifeblood out of other people to secure its own power? Vampire, or deluded nobleman? Drake is the former, utterly crazed and power-mad enough to kill and play this sick little Dracula game. Quantum Leap is getting at the truth behind the vampire myth, and taking it down a peg. Indeed, it's ultimately a lightning bolt which takes out Drake as he holds his ceremonial dagger high on the castle ramparts. An act of God, I guess. So vampires aren't real, and they're just sadistic rich people playing at blood rituals because they can. Oh, except Sam doesn't have a reflection at the end. OOOH CARRINGTON WAS A REAL VAMPIRE OOOOOOH! It's a fine spooky episode and even has a neat bit of subtext to say about the rich. I just wish it had done more to break out of the usual supernatural story framework of the show. It's become a bit old hat, especially with the brave steps Season 5 has taken. Speaking of brave steps...

Return Of The Evil Leaper: They're baaaack. I knew this was coming from the episode titles, of course. Something so monumental as evil counterparts of Sam and Al had to come back at least once. Indeed, the show makes no bones about it. It opens with "Evil Leaper I: Reprise", a quick primer from "Deliver Us From Evil" on who Alia and Zoey are and what they tried to do in that episode. This retroactively makes that episode the first of a trilogy about the evil leapers, as the next one's also tied up with them. I haven't seen it yet, but that's a job for right after I finish watching this.

In 1956 Sam has leapt into Arnold Watkins, a college student with a very strange hero complex. There's a fraternity of dudebros who initiate their pledges by playing chicken with their cars, and Arnold does not like this. As such, he works to stop such dangerous behavior by dressing up as a costumed superhero called the Midnight Marauder. If I don't have a picture up of Scott Bakula in this very silly getup, imagine Future Boy from "Future Boy" crossed with the Flash. The fraternity leader (played by a little baby Neil Patrick Harris, hey this isn't the Doctor Who 60th anniversary!) is not pleased by this comic book dork trying to ruin their shit, and wants to plot to stop him somehow.

Oh yeah, and his girlfriend Dawn isn't Dawn, but ALIA THE EVIL LEAPER OH MY GODDDDDD!!! The show sort of has its cake and eats it here, as Sam shakes hands with Dawn and the leap disguise falters... but only for us. Now we know that Dawn is Alia, and she'll be played by Alia for the rest of the episode, but Sam and Al don't know that. Alia seems to be plotting a scheme where she pretends to like Arnold only to humiliate him at the homecoming dance, creating a worse future. Pretty small-scale for an evil leaper, but they can't all be big ones on the dark side too I guess. Alia's holographic advisor Zoey sees Arnold talking to himself, mentioning an Al, and already knows what's going on... and so Alia escalates things, pretending to break up with her boyfriend and implying she's leaving him for Arnold, so that both Sam and Arnold will get in trouble. This is when Sam finds out that Dawn is Alia, and things get... interesting. Alia claims that after her failed leap to ruin the LaMotta family, Project Evil Leap or whatever we want to call it tortured her for her failure? She also seems to agree to a plan from Sam to save her and get her out of there, Sam figuring that if they leap together then maybe that will free Alia from the clutches of Project Evil Leap. Alia agrees, but I am still quite suspicious of her and not sure if she can be trusted.

Lest you think there's nothing ordinary and microcosmic happening in this show, it is. In 1999 Al is talking with Arnold, and eventually thanks to analysis he figures out why Arnold is running around saving people in a cape. As it turns out, Arnold lost his parents to a wild gunman when he was 7 years old, unable to save them and thus harboring the guilt as he tries to do selfless and risky acts of heroism in atonement. This kid is basically Batman, and Al is psychoanalyzing him and telling him that it wasn't his fault and that it's okay to just live his life without risking it as some sort of penance for surviving. It's heartfelt, it's moving, it's human, and I really like it.

As for Sam and Alia, they play chicken with Neil Patrick Harris except one of his goons cut Arnold's brakes, so the pair have to bail. As Sam hops onto her, the pair begin to leap, red evil leap energy being overtaken and merging with Sam's blue good leap energy... and the pair now find themselves prisoners in a women's prison, the guards sadistic and eager to wring a confession out of them for a murder. I have no idea where things will go from here for Sam and Alia. I'd like to hope for some redemption for Alia, but if it doesn't come and she was playing Sam all along, then I won't write off the whole show or anything. It'll be disappointing, but I'll roll with it. This part had some good stuff, namely Al and Arnold in 1999, but I admit I am intrigued by what else this encounter with Project Evil Leap has in store for us. Let's find out!

Revenge Of The Evil Leaper: Well, it certainly concluded things with Alia and Project Evil Leap. It was messy in a few places, but it did manage to do that. The main danger with this sort of macrocosmic lore is that it subsumes the ordinary stories that Quantum Leap is known for; the kind of stuff I came to the show to see. The everyday goings-on of the women's prison in 1987 (hey, the furthest into the future we've ever leaped, practically on the doorstep of the series premiere!) melt to be little more than a battleground for the time travellers in this story. That being said, there is a good alchemical connection that ties the microcosmic story of this prison with the macrocosm of fighting against Project Evil Leap.

Sam and Alia have leapt into two prisoners; Sam is a convicted murderer named Liz Tate, and Alia a drug possessor named Angel Jensen. The pair are in trouble for the murder of another inmate, Carol Benning, and the mean prison guards take delight in roughing the pair around for any hint of insolence. Left alone in a janitor's closet, Sam manages to sever any link that Zoey could use to trace Alia by putting Alia under hypnosis and using the psychosynergic imprint of Angel Jensen in her head to make Alia believe she is Angel, thus making her impossible to pin down by Project Evil Leap's future computers.

Unfortunately for the pair, Zoey is here, doing an evil leap herself into the warden of the prison. It may seem wild for the hologram to willingly quantum leap themselves, given that from what we've seen a quantum leap is sentencing yourself to pinball through time and space forever at the whims of a higher power. Zoey seems to think there's a 48-hour window where Project Evil Leap can pull her back out and back to her own time. She's also got a very camp and evil British hologram of her own who's literally named Thames. Zoey has leaped here for one purpose: she is the titular evil leaper, seeking revenge on Alia for betraying Project Evil Leap and ready to kill her as soon as she finds her.

For now, though, Zoey doesn't know that Angel and Liz are the leapers she's looking for, and so she plays along as the warden in asking about the death of Carol Benning. Sam manages to convince her to let him go back to the prison block to ask questions and investigate. Now here's where the show could have tied itself in more to the microcosm of Sam doing a good deed and discovering the truth. We don't get that, and the resolution to this murder mystery will be... a thing. There's all of one scene of Sam talking to an inmate about what she saw before we get right back into the machinations of Zoey and Project Evil Leap, as well as Sam and Alia's escape attempt.

There is very little revealed about Project Evil Leap here. Lothos apparently has some sort of grand plan which Zoey has been working for years to make a reality, by ruining ordinary lives? I kind of like that it doesn't go crazy with lore. Maybe it would have in Season 6 of the show, but there is no Season 6 so this is almost certainly all we're going to get. More to the point, we have Alia as Angel locked in solitary confinement and traumatized out of her goddamn mind because Angel is claustrophobic. The one prison guard in this place who isn't a bully, Vivian, takes Sam down to see her and then things escalate enough for Vivian to take Alia out of there while Sam replaces her in the cell with another unconscious guard who tried to stop them.

Zoey confronts Sam, and the pair end up touching and the jig gets revealed. Cue the climactic prison escape, with Vivian helping Sam and Alia to get out as Zoey and her guards scour the place for them, Zoey determined to make Alia suffer. It's here we get the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm. Vivian's reason for doing this is that she wants to start doing good in the world, which seems to resonate with Alia. As we hit the climax, the pair of Sam and Alia are cornered by Zoey, ready to finally get her revenge and blow Sam away. Alia pushes him out of the way of the shotgun blast...

...and leaps, in a cascade of blue light. That's what all this was about. I mistrusted Alia in the last episode, wondering if she was really legit. It turns out that she was. She wanted to break free of her evil ways, and be a person who does good things. Like Vivian, stuck in a sadistic system of prison brutality, who decided today was the day to do a good deed. Oh, and who's that sitting at the head of this sadistic system? Why, it's Zoey. This was a story about Alia's redemption, about breaking out of Project Evil Leap and becoming better. I've no idea where she leapt to, but one hopes she's free. Too bad Zoey is about to shoot Sam... but he shoots first. I'm not sure if Zoey is killed here because she leaps out and the warden is fine, but either way, she's gone.

And then we wrap up that intriguing murder mystery with some deus ex machina. I'm usually not one to complain about a sprinkling of magic dust from the "Plot Convenience Fairy". That's not the type of media critic I am. With this, though, I can't help but balk at how neat and tidy it is. In the final minute of the episode, Al via Ziggy just explains the entire murder mystery plot. How the warden got Carol Benning pregnant, forced her to have a makeshift abortion, and how it went wrong and Carol bled to death. Oh, and the particularly sadistic prison guard in this episode was in on it. Yes, it's bringing corrupt misdeeds to light and showing that this prison complex is as noxious as Project Evil Leap, but it goes to show how the macrocosm time travel story crowded out any room for intrigue and it all had to be wrapped up in a neat bow, and fast, once Zoey was out of here.

Regardless, it is a good episode of the show. I like that it did come on the side of giving Alia some redemption and freedom from her evil project, and comeuppance for Zoey. Maybe she's dead, maybe she's not, but Project Evil Leap is still out there. Thames is still alive in the future, at least. One wonders what the deal with them and Lothos would have been. Ah well. Ending aside, I do like that it tied the microcosm and macrocosm together, and I enjoyed myself. Now let's settle down for a nice ordinary story about-- MARILYN MONROE??

(Continued in 5.4)