Quantum Leap S4 E07–09

4–7 The Wrong Stuff

Wellllll talk about your change of pace, from ultra serious to Sam is a space monkey. Yes really for real. He has leaped into a chimp. It takes a few minutes of Sam getting out of a space rocket simulator and getting led to a medical table until he looks in a mirror, and yup, he’s a chimp. In a diaper.

So the first question here is, language. Sam speaks in whatever language the host does and in their voice? So if he leaps into say, a French person, they’d only hear him in French? Because Sam is speaking English, talking about how he’s not a chimp to the doctor and clearly she doesn’t understand him. I guess that sort of makes sense, otherwise every time he leaped into anyone they’d hear a totally different voice to what they’re used to. But the body. I thought it was Sam’s body but it was coated in some sort of tangible hologram which makes other people see and feel him? So is he in a chimp body or his body? Unclear.

Al warns Sam against writing his name or anything, to get around these weird rules, because it’s more likely to end with Sam getting his brain dissected. Not sure that’s totally true but I guess it is a risk. It’s 1961 and the morals of animal testing, not quite as rigorous. The space program is looking to find one of the chimps to launch into space very soon. Of course the creepy male doctors leer over Sam/Bobo’s lady doctor. The doc drops in a little foreshadowing out of nowhere: don’t forget — chimps can’t swim! OK, I’m sure that won’t be important later, just a totally random observation.

Unsurprisingly Sam is not super stoked to be locked in a cage and fed bananas. Al on the other hand seems to think it’s hilarious, which I guess it sort of is. But hey, maybe make less cracks about organ grinders and monkey sex, Sam is in a goddamn cage here! Al is a big fan of the lady doctor, and seems ready to stick around to stare at her rather than help Sam. Helpful!

We get a bit of decades old stock footage of rockets and the like, before a guy pulls up in one of those no door military jeeps, straight off the set of the A-Team and starts being a jackass to the chimps. Cruelty to animals always = bad guy. Al has no useful info on what Sam is doing in an ‘astro-chimp’ apart from some nonsense numbers from Ziggy about how hey, chimps are close to human DNA. Great!

The doc gives Sam a juice bottle and hey he’s loving it until she tells him it’s mixed with caterpillars and he spits it out because gross! It’s played for comedy but seems likely to just lead to more tests for Sam/Bobo and more complications. Of course, Al used to be an astronaut so he can help Sam with some of the space tests. Not super helpful though, as the spinning chair test keeps getting Sam electric shocked. Sam fucks up all the tests and I’m betting he’s not going to space. The new, meaner male doctor is going to take Sam/Bobo off for some experiments that are going to smash his head in. Not great!

I like how often they say astro-chimps which is not a term I’d ever heard before this episode, but which I think should get its own spinoff show.

The mean janitor guy is back and shooting chimps with tranquilizer darts and generally being a dickhead. They take away the friendly chimp from next door and Al tells Sam, that monkey gon die! Sam needs to get free and start kung-fu fighting! But all he can do is point and gesture to the nice doctor that the other doctor took the monkey away. The two janitors aren’t giving up the details, just that the chimp was needed for ‘research.’ With Sam’s help she works out that they’re bashing in monkey brains over in the other lab. She’s not so into this. But she has no say and so they take Sam/Bobo to do the head bashing test!

Sam is sedated and strapped into a chair where a mallet is about to test the strength of the helmet he has on by bashing 4000 lbs into his skull. I’m no scientist but that much force is going to kill anyone sat in that seat wearing any kind of helmet not made of reinforced concrete/steel. Al manages to wake Sam up and direct him on getting the harness unstrapped just in time!

Sam grabs a gun that happened to be sitting nearby and escapes with his monkey pal, Corey. We now get the pretty great site of Sam crouch running across a military base wearing an oversized pair of tighty whities and holding hands with a chimpanzee. Al finds them a way out, running over some pipe that straddles a river and away to freedom. But lookout for the river because chimps can’t swim remember! Callback!

This is for sure the most ludicrous episode. You have to salute Scott Bakula for his commitment to the bit, wearing only a giant diaper on national TV for an hour. The mean doctor is hot on their tail and he falls off the pipe into the river! Even though it’s a max ten feet swim to either side, Sam worries the guy will drown and jumps into to save him. Sam gets the guy on his back and drags him to safety!

So what the fuck did the lady doctor see when that was happening? A tiny monkey dragging a full sized man behind him? OK, sure. The mean scientist has a new found respect for the chimps and now they’re allowed to do whatever. Al quickly fills us in that the tests get stopped and the chimps live happily ever after.

I was sad that Sam didn’t kung-fu kick anyone as a monkey. We do get to see him kiss the lady monkey before he leaps, so that’s something.

4–8 Dreams

I’m not 100% but I think this might be the one that gave me nightmares when I was a kid. Sam is walking down a silent hallway as a storm rages outside. Seems like he’s a cop because his partner tells him to go down and open the door. He does and there’s a dead woman covered in blood on the floor! Yup, this was the one I was terrified of. I wonder what exactly was scary.

Ominous music! Deep thuds! A dark hallway! A smash cut of a creepy dead woman, eyes open to camera! A couple of spooky kids illuminated by lightning! Sam is wearing some excellent wire framed big glasses. OK yeah this seems scary. Sam and his partner escort the two kids out of the house while looking for the killer of the (presumably) mother of the kids. Sam drops a voice over about never feeling so unprepared for a leap. He says he feels a rage about the killing, a thirst for vengeance. Swiss cheese!

The husband of the slain woman is standing by an open window holding a gun and seems pretty, pretty disturbed, ie talking how he just has a couple of things to do, 1 — talk to his wife and uh, 2 — kill himself. Sam and the other cops secure him before he can pull the trigger.

Al says they had a hell of a time tracking Sam down and his brain is extra scrambled this week. Sam isn’t really paying attention to Al, busy as he is staring at the dead body. Al seems very queasy about the dead body for someone who was in a Vietnamese POW camp amongst other crazy things. Sam’s partner Pam, seems a lot less shook up than Sam over this murder. She doesn’t even bother questioning Sam about how he’s having a full conversation with an invisible man regarding what his purpose here is. Sam does seem very foggy this week, struggling to drive home and disagreeing with Ziggy’s suggestion that he was there to stop the husband killing himself.

In fact, Sam is going to die in two days in that same room! That night Sam is having nightmares about the room, seeing flashes of his only bloody murdered face staring back at him, in flash cuts and black and white, which yes, I can see why this was going to give 10 year old me nightmares. Al appearing next to him in the mirror in the middle of the night, not really helping his state of mind.

Al is talking about the feeling of not being all alone on this leap, like when the devil got all mixed up with Al on that one (interesting, should watch again) leap. Sam thinks a piece of the murderers mind is somehow wedged inside his own mind. There’s some v.scary part with a kid walking down a corridor and about to open a door and another flash of Sam as corpse in black and white! Terrifying!

I like how Pam the cop partner is just totally breezy about this whole thing, more worried about their dinner plans than speaking to these kids and worrying over the murder. Sam speaks with one of the kids who’s catatonic after seeing the murder. Sam goes to see a doctor who’s involved in this, and Sam starts rambling about his own scary dreams which seems kinda mental. Al is encouraging Sam to jimmy the lock and break into the doctors house. They need to go through the Rolodex! Sam is full spazzing out on Al about how he’s going to get killed tomorrow, he’s seen it clear as day and he can’t stop it!

Pam and Sam have a dinner and Pam is like, dude you need to chill the fuck out about this murder, we’ve seen way worse shit, what’s the big deal? Sam is just stumbling around like a schizophrenic loon mumbling about how he’s not a detective, almost drooling about how confused he is. At the doctor’s, Sam is confronted about breaking into his office yesterday. He admits he was looking for a connection between the psychiatrists records and the murder that the guy did right after meeting with the doc. Seems fair to try to connect them, since this doctor is really fucking creepy.

Now we get into Sam’s dreams, with him laid back on the couch imagining the bright door at the end of the hallway. Seems like it’s some sort of buried memory from the guy he leaped into about waiting outside a morgue or something. Al’s new conclusion is that the guy Sam leaped into is the actual murderer!

Sam thinks the only way he can solve the case is by pushing the catatonic murder witness kid back to the night of his mothers murder. Sure, that won’t mess up this kid at all!

This whole episode, although scary, feels a little muddled. The kid produced a drawing of a couple of gloved hands, like that’s supposed to illuminate everything. Sam goes back for more dream regression with the doctor. He’s remembering being a small child and walking around the hospital the grownups took him to. Sam is speaking in a little boy voice and crying that he can’t go inside, but the doctor is like I’m opening the door you have to go inside! Sam doesn’t want to look what’s inside the room! Because it’s a morgue! I knew it! Dead bodies all over the place! And on the main table his dead mommy!

Al is yelling at Sam to snap out of it because the doctor is inside his mind messing it up! It’s not you Sam! It’s the guy you leaped into, Jack Stone! He saw his own mothers autopsy! Snap out of it! The doctor is evil, he’s admitting to being the lover and murderer of the dead woman from the start of the episode! And now he’s going to kill Sam/Jack Stone!

Sam manages to wrest control of his mind away and shoot the doctor and Al was doing his best, yelling and wearing a shiny copper coloured suit and then just like that, Sam slumped on the floor, he leaps out. Abrupt, weird ending! Weird episode! Jack Stone is really going to come back to a broken brain!

4–9 A Single Drop Of Rain

Sam is Billy Beaumont, an olde time rainmaker in 1957 Texas! Well this seems a lot more fun. He seems to be kinda a celebrity around town, which makes sense because it’s his home town he’s returning to. Having achieved fame and fortune in the legitimate world of making it rain, he’s coming home. His little buddy and business partner is helpfully picking up the slack on talking up their abilities and how they’re about to soak this whole dry town. There’s some debate about his chances of bringing rain, the town seems to be split 50/50 rather than 100/0 chance. Sometimes people just want to believe because they’re desperate, no matter what nonsense they’re being told.

But here’s rain makers brother, seemingly very mad at Sam/Billy. Sam of course is his usual negative Nelly self about phony science, saying nope, he won’t make it rain and there’s nothing he can do. His little buddy though, starts spinning his hat and snapping his braces and giving a spiel like a character PT Barnum would be proud of. Ziggy though has calculated no rain is coming for eight months. Which could be a problem.

(Ed. Note: I learned today that Dean Stockwell almost didn’t accept the role of Al because it was just a year after he’d be nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars and thought that TV would be a big step down. Huh. The more you know! Married To The Mob. Never seen it but I’m adding it to my list. I wonder if Al is dressed similarly in that movie.)

The bigger issue than rain though, seems to be that Sam/Billy’s brother’s wife has a huge crush on Sam and is throwing sex vibes hard across the dinner table. Sam brushes her off and gets into a big debate with Al in the yard out back — Al seems to think possibly maybe they can actually make it rain. He thinks if they could get hold of some of the future tech from the Pentagon or the Dept of Agriculture then they could actually do it. Sam is like, nah fuck that, way too much work.

Uh oh, here’s the brother’s wife in the barn trying hard to seduce Sam/Billy and telling Sam how she wants to get away from this shithole town and run away with him and wasn’t it great when they hooked up for those two nights years ago. Nopers! Not great!

At the big rain presentation, Sam tells everyone he won’t take their $250/person to make it rain but he can’t argue them out of it. They won’t hear of it, so Sam finally gets into it and jumps on a platform and starts a hollerin’ about how he’s going to make it rain so hard they’re all going to be washed away to Mexico and need sombreros and everyone better learn to swim and he gon make it rain! Then Al immediately rains on his parade with the news that no rain is coming and no tech is coming from the Pentagon. In fact, the rain isn’t even a part of it, Sam’s mission is to stop his brother’s wife running away with him. Boring Al!

In a pretty moving little scene, the townsfolk start bringing Sam gifts in lieu of the $250 they can’t afford. Chickens and pigs and feed and anything they can spare to try and help him make it rain. I’m not really sure how it works with the payment. Does the rain maker usually demand every single person in town pay cash money in advance? Surely they must all have to pay, because if some farmer didn’t pay and then it rained, he’d still benefit, not like it wouldn’t rain just over his crops. Also why wouldn’t the people in town go with a half now, half after it rains deal?

Sam is ready for the big cloud seeding mixture making performance. It’s pretty funny how he asks the assistant to do it, since he doesn’t know how, but of course the assistant is like, you never made it the same twice. Which allows Sam to realise, ahh, right, it’s all bullshit! But apparently they do have some actual science behind it because they need to make stuff fizz and pop and overflow and actually look good.

Here’s Al to talk sort of assist/sort of talk about how he had sex with some girl with glasses the night before. They’re taking the solution and filling random containers then attaching them to balloons to send them up and burst the clouds or some nonsense. None of this is going to work, but who cares, the town is having a big party picnic and firing cannons and playing outdoor piano and hey at least it’s a good time!

Al is jealous of the food, since in the future they passed the cholesterol control act, which, I guess in QL’s future, Bloomberg became President. Weird times. The party afternoon draws to a close and it’s not pouring rain so half the townsfolk, led by Sam’s brother, are like this is a crock of shit! Liar! But Sam manages to talk them around by saying facts don’t matter, miracles can happen, only I can fix this! Strong words from someone with PhD's in every scientific field.

The little assistant dude is like hey, this shit has to work sometime right! Why not now, who knows, I believe in it! Sam looks up at the heavens and implores whoever is in charge to lend him a hand for once instead of being a dick like normal.

Sam goes to his brother’s house to be like, look wife, stop throwing yourself at me, make an effort with Ralph! And then to his brother he’s like look, why do you hate me dude! Why not make an effort with your wife, take her out for dinner and make love under the moonlight, which, maybe a step too far. Sam is trying to provoke his brother into a fight for some reason, and provoke he does, as brother punches Sam up and over the balcony. They then get into a full on slobberknocker fist fight, Sam pushing and punching Ralph into finally shouting how he loves his wife, he’s always loved her! They reconcile and kiss. But more than that, it’s fucking raining baby!!

The skies open and it’s not just raining, it’s pounding down like these people are going to need Noah’s Ark to survive this. The whole town drives over to the farm and honks horns and dances in the rain. No help from Al or the bogus science stuff, I guess God or whoever took pity on Sam and helped him out. Rainmaker!