Calamity Lame

Quantum Leap

How The Tess Was Won

Season One, Episode Four

Quantum Leap is TV comfort food.  That’s not to say it isn’t intelligent or important – being set between the 50s and the 80s it plays all the major social reform equality cards, race, sex, disability, sexuality – but it’s about a good through-and-through hero running around helping people out because God (or whoever) wants him to.  You don’t get fluffier than that.  But every now and then it strikes a discordant note.

This week Sam leaps into a shy vet living in Texas ranch country.  He’s not sure if he’s there to save a sick piglet or win the heart of cowgirl Tess.  We like Sam’s determination to rescue the pig.  And we love how it ends, bumping into someone famous in that inimitably Quantum Leap way whilst also sneakily subverting the whole premise of the show.  Genius.

Less successful is the romantic plot beforehand.  It’s unashamedly going for the Calamity Jane story, and Tess is just like Calamity in that she’s tough and dumb, but she hasn’t the charm, humour or romantic spirit of Calamity Jane.  (And not once does she burst into song.)

And here it gets uncomfortable.  Tess doesn’t want to get married, but she has to.  Sam has to prove he’s more man than her.  He consoles her by pointing out that while men are better than women when it comes to physical strength, women are better at having babies.  He’s probably trying to show Tess that being a woman is wonderful and she doesn’t need to want to be a man, but it comes across as incredibly misogynistic and all women are good for is their womb.  He manhandles her a bit, but also manages to be more sensitive and romantic than her, so basically, she’s rubbish both at being a man and at being a woman.

Despite being the antithesis of Sam’s kind of woman (he likes them smart but feminine, or whatever the hell Teri Hatcher was supposed to be) he still randomly falls for her, because Sam always has to fall for the woman by the end of the episode to make it a heartbreak that he’s forced to leave.  And then there’s a neat little twist that you probably aren’t expecting.  Sam doesn’t win the girl.

Trouble is a) Ziggy predicts that Tess is supposed to end up with the man who’s been writing her love letters.  Since when can Ziggy predict random stuff like that?  Ziggy just knows the established timeline and makes logical predictions based on that.  He’s not psychic.  We’re never even told what the established timeline was in the first place.  Did Tess always marry the other guy?  Did she grow old and die alone?  Shouldn’t we and Sam need to know this stuff in order to fix it?  b) Tess marries a guy who is brutish and declares he wants to rope her.  Hoorah, more misogyny.

Dear God, won't someone please think of the children!

And c) Al declares that Sam has a lot working against him and indicates the mirror.  Sam looks and sees a guy wearing glasses.  Gasp – not glasses?!  What exactly the point being made here is, we don’t know.  Men with glasses are not allowed to get married, but thugs who treat women like cattle are all the rage?  Or is it because this poor vet clearly has a pair of glasses GROWING OUT OF HIS FACE, otherwise Sam would be wearing them?  Either way, as a pair of speccies, we don’t think Al – who dresses like a Ken doll who’s bad at paintball – should point fingers.

Speaking of Al, this week Tina has left him, so he’s distracted and leaves Sam in danger to go sort out his personal life.  This is a bit of a running gag throughout the series, but it never feels plausible.  It’s never really clear how important this project is to Al, who tends to wander in and out of it in various states of hangover and sex-exhaustion.  Isn’t Sam’s life constantly at stake?  However, Sam’s sulking makes it well worth it.

So it’s an odd one.  It’s fun, certainly; there are several amusing subplots and the ending’s great.  But it’s also a bit uncomfortable and on the whole, pretty tough to care about.  Yee haa.

The Albert Calavicci Sleazy Files:

• Lucille.  (In the Energising Chamber during the Christmas party.)

A Very Rocky Sister Act

Quantum Leap

The Right Hand Of God

Season One, Episode Three

In most TV shows there are some episodes you love, some episodes you hate, and a whole wodge of stuff in between that summons up little more than a ‘meh’.

The Right Hand Of God is Quantum Leap’s first meh.  Like an episode of The A-Team featuring a plucky family business, an evil gang of hillbillies, a sinister businessman and a montage, this one is strictly by the numbers.

Sam leaps into a boxer, Kid Cody, who’s hoping to raise enough money to build a chapel for some nuns.  Unfortunately, like 75% of all fictional boxers, Cody takes dives.  Sam tries to reverse his fortunes, coaxing a stubborn ex-trainer out of retirement and montage-ing his way to victory.

‘Seen it all before’ is an understatement; this plot’s so old it’s eligible for a bus pass.  There’s very little threat involved, as the shady businessman who orders Cody’s dives hardly seems bothered when Sam crosses him.  It’s quite fun that even after a couple of training montages Sam still has to cheat to win the day, and then has to play by the rules anyway after his opponent gets back up.  (Strictly speaking, he still cheats, with Al offering hologram-themed help.  But we like this, as it means Al gets to offer more than just moral support.)

Cheating.  Or something.

There are some nice touches.  We laughed when God, or whoever is leaping Sam around, deliberately leapt him into the path of a knockout punch for what he did in Star-Crossed.  (Comeuppance at last!)  We like Cody’s girlfriend Dixie’s dream of retiring the stripper business to open a doughnut shop.  And Al’s subplot involving a noisy neighbour is a good source of laughs, although it goes absolutely nowhere. 

Sadly we rolled our eyes when Al boasted of his youthful boxing career; call us picky, but if someone’s going to suddenly come up with a hitherto unmentioned talent just when it’s needed, we’d rather it was the guy with amnesia.  And giving a nun back her faith?  Seriously?  Could you get any sappier?  In an episode about boxers taking dives and disillusioned trainers hoping to find a champ, it’s like a cliché explosion.

But, if there’s one thing this episode teaches us, it’s that even if something is clichéd and dumb, just add Scott Bakula and wham: watchable telly.  That’ll do, for now.

The Albert Calavicci Sleazy Files

• Cheating on Tina with Denise.  (Al's 'biographer', whom he met at a party.)

The Sleazy Professor

Quantum Leap
Star-Crossed
Season One, Episode Two

Star-Crossed is the first regular episode of Quantum Leap, and so we are treated to the first proper use of the delightful themetune (after a rather lift-musicky arrangement in the end credits of Genesis).  We love this themetune.  Unfortunately this week the clips are so few that quite a lot of the title sequence is filled with ghastly eighties-oh-we-mean-futuristic strobe lines, but even this cannot diminish our love for a themetune that means Quantum Leap is on and everything is going to be okay.  Doo, doo-dee-doo-doo, doo, doo, dee-doo!

So it’s a pity this episode isn’t actually that great.  Sam leaps into a sleazy English Lit professor (and Sam hates English Lit).  According to Al and Ziggy he’s here to stop the sleazy professor and his young female student from a shotgun wedding that ruins both their lives.  But Sam’s more interested in another student, Donna, the woman who jilted Sam twelve years in her future.  (Yes, one episode after establishing Sam’s amnesia he remembers tons of stuff about his life with Donna, apart from who jilted who.  That’s Swiss cheese for you, apparently.)

And here’s the problem.  Sam gets headstrong; all he’s interested in is Donna and fixing her problems so she won’t jilt him in the future, which seems awfully out of step with the compassionate guy we met in the previous episode.  He also completely forgets that he is not Sam but a sleazy old guy.  All those scenes of Donna building a relationship with Sam work less well when you remember the creepy old pervert she’s actually looking at.

Sam is completely selfish here.  He’s not that bothered by Donna’s feelings: his plan is to reunite her with her father, thus instantly curing her relationship-ruining fear of abandonment (as Al reminds him, Sam is not a psychiatrist, but then whaddya know, he’s right anyway), but only because it suits him.  And here the episode feels like it’s missing something.  Sam uses time travel for personal gain, we spend the whole thing waiting for some comeuppance, and there isn’t any.  Why set this up as Rule Number One if it doesn’t actually matter?

He isn’t even that bothered by what he’s actually here to do.  He is repeatedly surprised and grossed out that young women are attracted to his host, but not really concerned about it.  (And he does nothing to change it.)  In the end, the sleazy old guy gets no comeuppance either.  He comes off as a benevolent uncle figure in order to take advantage of his impressionable students.  As soon as Sam leaves, he’ll go straight back to his kinky ways.  Great.

The fun bits are Sam’s efforts to get the innocent student and her brute boyfriend back together, and these scenes really are a hoot, but there aren't enough of them and it all gets resolved practically instantly.  (Just saying ‘breathless’ instead of ‘horny’ does the trick.  And just reuniting girls with their long-last dads means bingo, no more runaway brides.  Good thing Sam's got six doctorates, this stuff is hard.)

Al’s half of the episode is very interesting.  The ‘committee’ are angry with Sam for breaking time travel rule one: Don’t change history for your personal gain, and they want to fire Al and close down the project (although what that actually means, what with Sam being lost in time and all, is unclear).  Al’s attempts to thwart them are enjoyable and there’s a brilliant scene in which the entire committee are in the imaging chamber with him, but Sam can’t see or hear them and they can’t see or hear Sam, so we get a game of charades and then Al being hoisted out by invisible beings.  This bit’s in the title sequence, and it looks great.

Despite Sam being a bit annoying this week, Scott Bakula is still amazing.  (Just wait for his puppy look.)  Teri Hatcher on the other hand, who we generally love, has very little to do other than get teary.  She does it well of course, but Donna is hardly the most riveting character to watch, and there’s no evidence of her and Sam’s apparent love, and nowhere in the episode for it to go.  It’s an interesting time travel idea, meeting your intended in the wrong order, but there isn’t any way for the episode to exploit it.  (And after three years of River Song, we don't really want to.)

Overall, we’re not sure that episode two is the place to explore your protagonist’s weaknesses.  How about some actual helping-people-out stories before you start on the personal gain corruption?  Or at least, if you have to do it so early, maybe deal with this problem instead of just throwing it in there for a laugh.  Speaking of which, Star-Crossed also includes the Watergate scandal as a comic footnote.

All things considered, it doesn't really tackle any of its ideas properly, but a bad episode of Quantum Leap is generally still a rollicking 45 minutes.

The Sam Beckett Genius Tally

• Has a doctorate in Ancient Languages, and can read hieroglyphics.

Pilot Episode

Quantum Leap
Genesis
Season One, Episode One

They don’t make ’em like this any more.

Quantum Leap is one of those shows where almost anything can happen every week.  We’ll let the main character, Sam Beckett, explain the premise:

‘Getting a second chance to put things right, to make the world a better place.’

Because shear away the time-travel, and that’s it.  He is a time-traveller, but unlike Doctor Who he’s not contractually obligated to meet monsters everywhere he goes (and really, what are the odds of that?).  Sam bounces around in time solving problems, some huge, some not.  He’s limited by his lifetime, so anywhere between the 50s and the 80s is fine, although rules including this one would wobble in the show’s later years.  And he can never be himself: he trades places with someone new each week, and it’s only us that sees him as he really is.  Besides these restrictions (and the general A-Team/Knight Rider structure of rolling into town and solving somebody’s problems), the writers have at it.  Quantum Leap managed to be at the same time reassuringly easy to follow and refreshingly brand new every week.  We love it.

Sam (Scott Bakula) wakes up in Texas in 1956.  He has amnesia.  The guy in the mirror has a different face, and everyone keeps calling him Tom.  To make matters worse, Tom’s a daring test pilot scheduled to make a record-breaking flight in a few days.  Oh, and there’s a weird guy in a suit and tie that seemingly only Sam/Tom can see.

We love the What The Hell Is Going On-ness of all of this, so it’s a shame there’s a pre-credits scene that gives it away to some extent.  Some time in the future, Al (Dean Stockwell), a snappy-dresser/ladies’ man, finds out that Sam has prematurely entered the Quantum Leap Accelerator.  That chucks quite a bit of the suspense out of the window right away.  How much more exciting and intriguing would this be if the episode opened when Sam woke up?  We wouldn’t know for sure if it was a dream, or if Sam had gone crazy, or what.  (Kind of reminds us of another show about a guy called Sam.)

Also, probably one of the least successful aspects of Quantum Leap is the show’s vision of the future.  Apparently, everything comes with flashing neon lights, people dress like idiots, and did we mention neon?

Predicting the future is virtually impossible, especially on a TV budget, we understand that.  (And we don’t even mind.  Back To The Future Part II had hovercars predicted for 2015.  Four years to go – we can still make it, guys!)  But it is a recurring nuisance that this show, which began in 1989, predicted by the 90s mankind would have time travel sorted and fashion would look like the 80s had hulked out.

Luckily we don’t have to spend any time there.  We are with Sam and it’s Howdy Doody Time on TV.  As all good time travel stories tell us, that means we’re in the 50s.

Sam narrates, or rather, we hear his thoughts, and for once this technique isn’t just there to paper over script holes.  Sam’s as lost as we are, and having him try to figure it out in his head is both succinct (‘We did it!  …  Did what?’)  and funny.  (‘Whoever she is, she’s certainly pregnant.  Very pregnant.’)  His inner monologue also happens to sound like a cute five-year-old, due to a mixture of his amnesiac confusion and fear of what the hell is going on; it all helps cement Dr Sam Beckett as the world’s nicest man, but he's also enormously mysterious.  In just a couple of minutes, we’re ready to watch a series about this guy.

Scott Bakula is super likeable, extremely sweet and very sympathetic.  He’s also convincing as a genius with amnesia.  This is one fairly rounded (if improbable) character right off the bat, with tons of room to grow.  He has emotional depths that’ll bring a tear to the eye, thanks largely to Bakula’s forlorn face; he’s quick-witted, funny and possesses the best withering glare of the decade.  (See beginning of review.)

Al fares less well.  Where Sam has emotional depth, Al has wacky costumes.  Where Sam is instantly endearing, Al is sleazy.  Kids might enjoy him on the level of a funny sidekick, but when they get older and actually understand what the stuff he’s saying means… euw.  Al is clearly written as the opposite of Sam.  While Sam is the wholesome hero, there has to be the grimy naughty one so the audience don’t get bored.  But we don’t find Dr Sam Beckett boring and for us Al is just a little bit too far down the gross path.  Al is here to fill in Sam’s missing memory, but can we really imagine that back in the future, these two could ever have been friends?  And while we can believe Sam is a mega genius farm boy, because we like Scott Bakula and he can’t remember it, Al’s admission that ‘I’m also an ex-astronaut’ just sounds like nonsense.  Two characters pulling talents out of nowhere is possibly pushing it.

Still, the contrast is funny, and it gives Sam something to rage about when Al is either late or otherwise useless.  And, spoiler: Sam rages often.

This is a great pilot.  The premise is colourfully explained, and he leaps twice (thrice if you include the soon-to-be-regular cliffhanger lead-in to next week) in the space of one (feature-length) episode, opening up the possibilities to pretty much anything.  (And when those possibilities include baseball, something neither of us knows or cares anything about, and we like it, we know we’re watching a great show.)

The guest cast walk a fine line between suspecting Tom of winding them up, and thinking he’s genuinely lost it, which gives them all a different way to react that tests the format’s waters, especially when Sam comes up with life-saving medical knowledge from the future.  There’s also the beginning of a few running jokes where Sam A) talks to Al a little too loudly and attracts attention, and B) lets slip about something from the future.  Not to mention the iconic different-face-in-the-mirror shot.

The special effects (though meagre) do the job splendidly.  The episode is also very well directed: the title sequence, which so far consists of the camera racing through the clouds, pivots and pirouettes and ultimately zooms straight into Tom’s bedroom, making it part of the actual story.  How neat is that?  (We wonder if the opening shot of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who took inspiration from it.)

The only thing bugging us is the opening scene, but hey, all you have to do is skip forwards slightly on your DVD.  Problem solved!

The best stories are the ones with something for everyone.  We both love Back To The Future because it uses science fiction as a way into a funny, exciting, romantic story – so, something for everyone.  Quantum Leap is a similar concept, expanded to an entire series.  Sam flies a jet and plays baseball this week, but he also has to stop a pregnant woman going into labour nine weeks prematurely and the climax of the episode is Sam having a touching phone call with his dead father.  And all that in one episode.  Oh boy.  Imagine what he’ll accomplish before he’s done?

(Just for fun, we'll try to keep track of Sam's and Al's various accolades.  So far...)

The Sam Beckett Genius Tally

• Has six doctorates, one in medicine, one in quantum physics.
• Invented the super computer, Ziggy.
• Discovered time travel.
• Dubbed "the next Einstein."

The Albert Calavicci Sleazy Files

• Unwary lady by the side of the road.
• A little Lithuanian girl named Danesa.  (Back at MIT.)
• Tina.
• Martha.  (Met at a playoff after-party.)
• Brenda.  (The cute little redhead in coding.)