Quantum Leap S2 E10–12

2–10 Catch A Falling Star

This one initially feels a little derivative of the recent one where Sam had to play a concert pianist. Here he appears seconds before he has to go on stage as Don Quixote. But he’s saved just in time when the main guy gets there — Sam was just the stand-in! Phew. Al is here fast, he loves the theater apparently, did some summer stock in his youth. It got him out of the orphanage somehow? A real renaissance man, his life might be even more interesting than Sam’s.

It’s 1979 and Sam is the understudy to Don Quixote, which is a fun, because the episode aired in 1989. So the world, not really that different. Fortunately Al tells Sam that the only CD they ever played when making project QL (how long a time period is that??) was the soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, so somehow Sam should know all the words if he does have to tread the boards. Both Sam and Al are in awe/love with the drunk leading man, who is giving a not so subtle performance as a MAAAN of the THEAAATRE and also a big drunk. In three days he’s going to fall off stage and that will be the end of his career, Sam must stop that. Which leads to the conclusion that God believes that the life of this actor in regional theater in Syracuse is a huge wrong that needs to be right via the miracle of time travel. Sure.

The sets for this episode, the stage (an actual set, aha) are fun and the backstage camaraderie all great. Turns out Sam knows the piano player, she was his piano teacher as a 15 year old who he was madly in love with! But she is in love with the guy Sam leaps into. So it’s pretty sweet (and a shade creepy) that he now gets to hookup with his great childhood love/lust. She’s also going to understudy Dulcinea in this play. They’re both understudies! Fortunate! I wonder if that will factor in?! Not so fortunate, another actress in the show is already hooking up with Sam. Uh-Oh! Sam doesn’t want this, he wants to creepily bang his childhood piano teacher.

As Sam stumbles through a rehearsal, (unclear why they have a rehearsal scheduled for a play that’s already running) Al appears to help out, bearing a copy of the script. Ha, good one Al. Sam reads, but as Al notes, he has a photographic memory and so can immediately memorize all the lines. Huzzah! Al is pretty sure (accurately) that Sam is fully (and weirdly) in love with the piano teacher and wants Sam to quit being weird and move forwards, in every sense. The drunk main actor dude shows up and relieves Sam from rehearsal, allowing Sam to retreat to the wings and be more creepy.

Sam has some legit frustrations with his QL life though, complaining he can’t ever live his own life, and yeah, it’s got to be pretty exhausting and kinda suck, this kind of time travel. I wonder, when does he ever sleep? Or eat? Does he need to? Do they need to feed his body back in the future? We still have no idea about any of that works. Anyway. Sam wants to stay here! Be with the piano teacher and make a life! It’s a nice little reversal where for once Al is the voice of reason. Sam can’t stay for myriad reasons, not the least of which they don’t even discuss. Whatever God is in charge of leaping him around could do so at any moment, so it’s not like he can just relax and start a new 1979 life.

It looks like Sam is going to say fuck it and let the old guy fall and his career be over and he won’t leap! He even says break a leg as he steps onto the stage! But as he swings ready to drop Sam runs out and saves him, somehow catching a fully grown man falling from a decent height, like he’s small dog. The photographic memory comes in handy as Sam then steps onto the stage and smashes a performance of Man of La Mancha out of the park. Nice!

He looks awesome doing it, the wig and beard work perfectly. It’s a pretty long performance, as in several minutes of the episode. I feel like Scott Bakula really prepped for this and they wanted to showcase it. As Don Quixote dies he tells Piano Teacher he loves her and then must, while singing The Impossible Dream, leap. It’s sort of moving but also, not so much being that this was his love as a 15 year old boy. It’s just a teenage crush, not real love right? But overall a super fun episode with the solid parallel of Sam as a real life Don Quixote.

Sam leaps off into some creepy Exorcist style meeting with a nun (?)

2–11 A Portrait For Troian

In the spooky, thunder & lightning lit graveyard, Sam and a lady read off some sort of machine that ‘proves’ her husband is talking to them, despite how he’s been dead for three years. Oh Boy!

It’s 1971 and for some reason (Wiki tells me) the protagonists are played by series creator Donald P. Bellisario and his wife Deborah Pratt and her character is named after their daughter. You make your own TV show, I guess, so what, be super self indulgent.

Back to the show, Deb’s brother is not so stoked about this whole deal, calling Sam a quack. Which seems fair, as he’s some sort of ghost hunter. Brother thinks ghost hunting Sam is just there to make a quick buck and maybe get a book deal out of his dealings with this rich, eccentric family. He wants Sam out of there! The housekeeper, a haughty older lady, tells Sam strangers are not welcome here, and hmm, does she mean ghost hunters or Sam as time traveler, or maybe even Al, who just popped in?

Ziggy — the science & logic led computer— has told Al this is a very “strange” house and isn’t ruling out ghosts. Late at night some ghostly voices float through the house and draw Mrs Bellisario over to a painting which she had apparently thrown in the lake. But now it’s back! And is anyone not assuming that the crazy angry brother is behind this whole thing? Sam tries to help her with some logical advice and questions but she’s not super interested in that, she’s more about ghosts and ghouls.

Al is back in his Bugsy Malone red pants and hat outfit and he’s all aboard the ghost idea. Sam says the ghost equipment is actually pretty good, it picks up brain waves. And because of that, it caught Sam leaping in the previous night, although there’s no explanation for the other weird lines on the machine, which Al is like duh 100% that’s a ghost dude!

The brother shows up and he can hear Al which is weird. Although he thinks it’s just more trickery from ghost hunter Sam. Sam and Al work on the ghost machines and explore who is setting up all these weird ghostly event or is it maybe reallllll? No, it’s not. They find a battery powered recorder in the crypt which is playing a sound only heard by people who can hear high frequencies, like the sister! And there’s a bunch of them all around the house, even on the dock. Someone rigged them up to gaslight the sister! And of course, it’s the brother! He just straight comes out and says it. The she adds that she needs to kill herself because he owes money in Vegas, and needs control of the family fortune. Fortunately Al’s voice can be heard by the brother, so he uses that to attempt to compel the dude to give up. The brother seems to believe it’s the sisters dead husband actually haunting him. Nice one Al.

Unfortunately the brother isn’t too bothered by Al’s voice, and just proceeds to his plan of killing his sister. Which is a pretty weak plan, just push her in the lake? I mean can’t she swim? The dock is maybe ten feet from land, even if she couldn’t swim she could probably splash back to land. He hasn’t weighted her down or anything. Just as the brother goes to push her in some corpse (?) floats to the surface, but brother doesn’t even care about this and shoves her in. Sam appears and saves her and throws the brother in.

The brother has disappeared in the end, maybe dragged down by sisters dead ex-husband Julian. There were a couple of other bodies in the lake too. The detective coolly remarks. The bodies are 100 years old but they were down at the bottom preserved and the recent earthquake shook them all free. Sure! That checks out!

One of the bodies that was over a 100 years old is the creepy housekeeper! The one who didn’t like Sam and said visitors weren’t welcome! What!?? And then just in case we didn’t get that she was fully 100% a legit ghost, we see her at the window and then she dissolves. Yup, she was a ghost.

Time travel again messes up the leap, since after seeing the ghost it seems like Sam leaps back in to the hot rod teenager, which, spoiler, he does not.

2–12 Animal Frat

Subtle name, not sure what they’re going for with this episode. We’re straight into a reenactment of Animal House, with ‘ Louie Louie’ blasting, guys downing kegs of beer and a 60’s looking frat house. A guy runs up offering Sam / Wild Thing some lobsters and is told to put them in the deans mailbox. College hi-jinks!

Sam is shocked that a fraternity guy called Wild Thing has a messy room. Sam never joined a frat in college, surprising nobody. In his bed are two, let’s call them co-eds. These two attractive girls, who are not drunk or under any drug influences, want to have sex, which, for reasons unknown, causes Sam to sprint away. I guess he’s maybe 40 and they’re 20 so perhaps he’s got a moral issue with it? Although he’s hooked up with a million other women over various leaps. Maybe he just hates three-ways? Sometimes I feel like a remake of this show on HBO where the main guy has Al’s sensibilities and the hologram is the moral hero, might be more interesting.

Next morning Sam is complaining to Al that frats are gross and he wants to graduate and leap away from here, stat. He’s definitely not helping launch water balloons at the anti-war protestors like the rest of the frat. In part because Sam’s mission seems to be to help the attractive anti-war protestor lady do some anti-war stuff and not get blown up in some protest. The organizer dude in the sort of Ferris Bueller costume (black beret & animal print vest) doesn’t believe Sam / Wild Thing is genuine in his anti-war sentiments.

In class, the frat guys blow up gloves to make fart noises and make fun of the war lady speaking, because college baby! Since Sam needs to stop her getting blown up, he bets the frat guys he can get her to the winter formal dance or whatever, which if she goes, means she won’t get blown up that night. So Sam stands up and gives an eloquent speech about listening to the South Vietnamese, I think to impress her but it seems like big mansplaining to anyone else. Sam maybe doesn’t help his cause by running into a pledge who Wild Thing has forced to walk around campus in his tidy whitey’s and a sailor hat. Fraternity life!

She agrees to come to the luau at the frat for some reason. Meanwhile the pledge has stolen the basketball from the dean and now the dog is chasing him. Pledge life! Sam, who remains a huge enemy of fun and frivolity hates how this is all so sophomoric. I mean. They’re literally college sophomores? So yes? Relax, bro. Al says as much to him, that he’s a super nerd genius who never had any fun and maybe he should just chill out. Fair point Al.

Another brother is attempting some sort of prank where he says there’s a bomb in the chemistry building. Good one!? As Sam past a couple of other brothers, he casually solves some science question and they’re all like Willlld thingggg I think I loooove you, let’s all copy off you. Of course Sam is like NO WAY MAN that’s CHEATING! Outrageous! Fortunately for Sam they’re not like wow OK dickhead, fuck you. Instead they go back to impersonating Animal House scenes, albeit not on purpose since that movie wouldn’t be out for many years. Al helps Sam get involved in some pranks, even though Sam appears to abhor the concept of fun. They drop a bunch of cherry bombs in the toilets of the women’s dorms. HA! College!

I mean, all this seems like good clean fun to me. At least their pranks aren’t the regular frat pranks of gang rape or putting burning crosses on the lawns of the black houses or something. The anti-war girl is just as much against fun as Sam. She hates beer and parties because she wants to change the world! And you can’t ever do both, have a beer and also have a good life! She rants on about the ruling classes and she would really have been more at home in college in 2022 than 1967.

The anti-war dude makes Sam mad saying he doesn’t care about stopping Vietnam when Sam lost a brother there! This righteous anger persuade anti-war woman to come to the luau with Sam, which can’t end well. She tells him, great news, we got this awesome idea from you blowing up the toilets, to blow up the chemistry lab (??) because this will for sure stop the war in Vietnam. Sam’s calls to security go unheeded because of all their previous bomb in the lab pranks.

Worse news, because Sam won’t let the brothers cheat off him, they sent Scooter the pledge into the lab to steal the exams. Sam runs off to stop him. Just as he runs off, the kid emerges from around the corner. Uh Oh! Sam gon die! In the lab Sam immediately locates the bomb and with Al’s help, sets to disarming it, cutting wires and saving the day. Phew! But double oh no, there’s two bombs! That anti-war guy really really wants to blow shit up. With seconds to go, Sam and the frat brothers launch the bomb out the window and hey they really payed for the music in this one, WILD THING!

Sam realizes what the anti-war girl really wants — her parents to notice her! Of course! She couldn’t really be driven by real world issues. She admits it, this whole thing, is just for attention. Weird undermining of her agency, and the anti war cause, but OK, sure. Before Sam can leap he has to initiate a pledge, which he, of course, complains about.

Al says he has to leap into the pool, because when the real Wild Thing did it, he broke his neck. So what exactly was the mission here? Was the anti war thing, nothing it was all about Wild Thing not getting disabled? I feel like Ziggy really knows nothing. Sam leaps into the pool and they all chant Wild Thing and it seems like maybe, maybe he even enjoyed it a tiny bit.