Quantum Leap

[R.CAllen]

The new season is pretty good so far.

 

 

 

The season opener fiddles with the classic format a little. The episode features the new Sam Beckett figure cut off from his hologram but still talking aloud in the hope that he’s still being heard. The episode is interspersed with flashbacks from before he leaped for the first time at the beginning of the series. The episode ends with contact being reestablished and the new Sam Beckett figure talking with the new Gooshie figure about how it’s been three (3) years on their end since they last heard from him. The show doesn’t even do the classic thing where we see who he leaps into for the next episode; the episode’s final shot is his body going all electric-y. All quantum-y.

 

The second episode ends the same way so for a moment there I thought this’d be the new normal. But the third episode ends in the classic fashion — the new Sam Beckett guy leaps into someone new and him and the audience is confronted with Tim Matheson saying “We hit ‘em tonight. Remember : two guards at the rear. One in the head. One in the chest. When we get inside you grab the statue and I will light up that place to make sure there are no survivors. Understood?” — so I guess they just feel free to change it up a little as and when it suits them. Okay! Psyched for next week! Tim Matheson! Otter from Animal House (1978)! John Hoynes on The West Wing (‘99-’06)!

 

I don’t really remember exactly what went down in the first season finale but I thought the season ended on a cliffhanger with someone leaping home!?!?1? Like, I thought the final shot was the ambiguous look on the (bizarre looking! like, badly made up or badly lit or badly surgery’d or something!) face of the new version of Al as she saw a figure come out of the Quantum Leap chamber. I guess they’ve resolved it by having the plan to get the new Sam Beckett figure back not work and so nobody came through!? I don’t know. I could look this up somewhere — I’m sure there must fan discussion of this show online — but I enjoy this show most when I’m the least engaged with the details of it.

[Rogue 3]

Oh excellent to hear it’s started airing in the US - god knows when it will come to the UK!

[Nomaa Jedi Piarra]

I'm enjoying season 2 so far, I had to catch up on Peacock because my DVR recordings didn't transfer to my new cable box when my old one shit the bed 

[R.CAllen]

Three (3) things about the new season.

 

 

1) I do think that new Quantum Leap’s occasional forays into the deeper end of the swimming pool are ... it’s never accomplished with aplomb but it’s nice to see them try. The American story is people being brutalized and/or brutalizing other people. It’s the tweet from twitter. So a show about people going back in time in America is obviously going to bump up against some things. Ziggy says there’s a 100% chance! And it’s not like that can all be ably handled within the limits imposed by medium, audience, and author(s) of a primetime episode of network television but still ... everyone involved on one side of the fence is quite clearly giving it their best shot! Somebody somewhere’s read a magazine article or two. I like it! I can only hope for more of it.

 

2) I never saw any of the episodes with the Evil Leaper. As far as I’m concerned the Evil Leaper may as well be as real as Roxie the Street Shark from Street Sharks (‘94-’97). So I don’t care about no Evil Leapers. And, well, they already kinda did their take on a new Evil Leaper last year. But is this lady ... is this an origin story for a new new Evil Leaper? Is the whole Quantum Leap program itself going to be one big timeloop where the new Doctor Sam Beckett ends up causing for the thing to exist in the first place through this waitress physicist lady!? I don’t know.

 

3) They’re doing a thing now where it’s too painful for both the new Doctor Sam Beckett and the new Al to be with each other as his hologram because she thought he was gone forever in the interim between seasons and got together romantically with someone else. So every week somebody else is going to be filling in as the hologram? Ernie Hudson one episode — they brought back the actress who played Al’s wife again! she has moved on as a widow to now having sexual intercourse with a man who was once briefly her dead husband’s best friend! to paraphrase a former (future?) president : So, lets get this right. Al Calavicci dies after Dr. Sam Beckett radically rewrites the timeline so he can stay married to his wife. Now his wife has a lover (boyfriend)! Oh Al! — and the security guard lady and the new Al’s new boyfriend the next. I like it. I mean, eventually they’ll run out of people. Until then I am enjoying it, yeah.

[R.CAllen]

I’m all caught up.

 

 

Butchie from John From Cincinnati (‘07-’07) as the town magistrate in the Arthur Miller episode. Lou Diamond Phillips in the next one!

 

There’s a scene in the most recent episode (that’s the Lou Diamond Phillips one) where the lady — the lady who’s in her own little Rachel McAdams movie, she’s in The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), she’s in Midnight in Paris (2011), she’s in About Time (2013), she’s in Doctor Strange (2016), my point is she’s the lady who pines for the new Dr. Sam Becket while he Leaps through time in and around her own linear progression — tells the new Dr. Sam Becket that God clearly wants them to bang. She throws herself at him! She tells him that it’s so obvious God wants them to have sex. He lets her down gently and instead of being devastated by this she’s all, like, “That just makes me love you more.” What!? I am once again sliding the beads on the abacus a few notches forward to her ending up as some kind of Evil Leaper.

 

They eventually do seal the deal, though. Although it’s kind of left ambiguous. If it happened, well, it happened during the commercial break. Network television! There’s a moment where the new Dr. Sam Becket earnestly believes that he’s failed to save the person he’s supposed to save. The one that Ziggy predicted with whatever percent accuracy that he had to save in order to make the next Leap. So for the first time he’s faced with the prospect of having to spend the rest of his life trapped where he is. And she’s talking him through it. What he could do. Where he could go. After the act break they’re together still but the new Dr. Sam Becket is suddenly shirtless!? I don’t think it’s reading too much into things to wonder. Are they going to give the new Dr. Sam Becket a child!? An elderly Egyptian child — the episode takes place in 1960s Egypt so the kid would be in his sixties by now. Wait, just because the kid was conceived in Egypt wouldn’t make the kid Egyptian. The kid would just be, like, the child of the CIA agent the new Dr. Sam Becket leapt into and this weird lady he keeps bumping into over and over. (They eventually find out, surprise surprise, that whomever it was they thought was dead is still alive and still needs saving.)

[R.CAllen]

The show was cancelled. So I figured it was time to finish off watching the remaining slate.

 

 

I resumed watching the tenth episode which is where I think I left off. That’s the one with Dan Bakkedahl and a Lebanese Christian transmasc they/them in the 1950s — the show, in either an earnest endeavour to help naïve viewers or a cynical attempt to avoid criticism for quote unquote being harmful, points out that binding with elastics can be dangerous — which sort of sums up the show’s appeal to me. Great character actors and squishy attempts at making big statements! Like, the show has the new Dr. Sam Beckett guy — having leapt into the body of a woman, the transmasc they/them’s sister — take off his cool leather jacket and put it on them and tell the sibling, “You look badass.” It works! The moment works! And then the show grinds to a halt and has the new Dr. Sam Beckett figure explain what the words ‘binary’ and ‘non-binary’ mean.

 

Yeah. I don’t know. Does it all work? Is it all necessary? I feel like the show was so scared of getting quote unquote cancelled that it couldn’t manage to avoid being cancelled actually cancelled for real cancelled no more show.

 

The episode ends with one of those ‘If you or your child are trans and are in need of support call 1-800-DO-NOT-BE-MEAN-TO-US-ONLINE-ABOUT-HOW-WE-FAILED-TO-ACCURATELY-REPRESENT-OR-DEPICT-THE-TRANS-EXPERIENCE-!-WE-DID-OUR-BEST-!-THE-EPISODE-WAS-FOR-THE-KIDS’.

 

The other two episodes before the (series!) finale didn’t quite make an impact. I don’t really remember what goes down in them. James Frain gets to do some more stuff, I suppose. The new Gooshie figure quotes Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) twice in the penultimate one.

 

The finale explicitly references the series finale of the original show. Al Calavicci’s daughter just exposits the last scene of the old show for the audience. Oh, and there’s a big impassioned inspirational speech from the new Dr. Sam Beckett. It’s solid. Comes after he does a big run, too. The whole thing is effective, I thought.

 

The series ends with M83’s ‘Outro’ playing — just like the shortlived sitcom Enlisted (‘14-’14) — and there being two (2) leapers now instead of just one (1). A bold choice! I guess we’ll never find out if they could pull it off or not.