Quantum Leap S4 E10–12
4–10 Unchained
Out of the rain and into a dusty dry jail truck that the guy he’s chained to just leaped off! Did they really ever dress prisoners in black and white stripes and chain them to each other or is that just on TV and in cartoons? I guess they must have. It’s not clear if Sam is a white guy, but he’s chained to a black guy and they’re running away from jail dogs pursuing them.
Sam is like, hey why don’t we just give ourselves up? Good one doofus, that really sounds like what an escaped prisoner would say. They purposely get sprayed by a skunk to help them hide and then Sam drags his buddy into some sort of sewer tunnel, which causes the dude to freak out. He doesn’t like small spaces! But it works and they buy a bit of space from their pursuers.
Al shows up to let Sam know, him and his buddy are criminals, which, no shit Al. But yeah, nothing too bad, just knocked over a jewellery store or two and only because they were very poor and had hard lives etc. Black guy says he didn’t even do that, he was wrongly accused when he never stole anything. He does indeed seem like a good guy, who’s being punished because, America. They find an axe and bust out of their chains, so that’s a good start to getting away. Ziggy agrees, there’s a 96% chance they’re innocent and the guy who did the robberies got away with it. But that guy is going to do it again tonight so they could get Sam’s buddy off if they could prove the other guy is doing it.
Not good news though, in about five minutes (so accurate with the time of death) black guy is going to run out of the barn they’re hiding in and get shot dead by the mean sheriff! Al heads outside and lures the dogs away, giving Sam and pal a breather, but they can’t do much to escape, so they hide in an abandoned car right nearby. Despite how terrible a plan this is, it’s going just fine and would have worked apart from the big guy can’t bear being in the small space and busts out, leading to both of them being recaptured by the sweaty, good ole boy in charge.
Bad news for Sam’s pal, he should have stayed hiding because now he’s getting thrown in literally, the hole. Some sort of small, deep pit with bars over it that he’s dumped in. Sam meanwhile is forced to lug a bunch of heavy barrels around while getting called ‘boy’ nonstop, as is par for a 50’s southern sheriff. As Sam works himself near to death, Al is as casual as ever, making small talk as his buddy struggles through the mud. Anyway, Al does have some useful info. The real jewellery robber is in town, and even came by the prison camp earlier. They could prove his buddy’s innocence! Before that can happen though, Sam is chucked in the pit too!
The next morning the robber shows up for some weird reason, mainly so Sam and Buddy can make accusations and be listened to by their jailers. Not a huge surprise, they don’t believe Sam. After one night in the pit, Sam is done with this shit. He tells Al, forget about proving their innocence, find a way to help them escape. Buddy heard Sam talking to Al last night, and right away believes (or plays along to give himself hope) that Al is real, an imaginary guy who can help them escape to some beautiful world of redwood forests and start a new life. Of course the sheriff is in league with the guy who’s actually doing the robberies. Sheriff is worried this all might lead back to him so he wisely executes the robber guy. He does a pretty terrible job of covering it up though; the very next morning they find the body and Sam’s buddy is pretty cut up about how he can now never prove his innocence.
The sheriff gives them a couple of options — pit or fight. Instead of going back in the pit, buddy chooses option two — a fight to the death against his best buddy Sam! Which for some reason has to take place with them both thigh deep in a swamp. I guess because then drowning is an easy option to win the fight? All the other prisoners seems weirdly stoked about watching two men fight to the death, but I guess it beats the regular day of hammering rocks or whatever. During the fight Sam manages to communicate to his buddy that they’re both going to get killed, whoever wins the fight. Buddy buys into it and Sam grabs a water moccasin and chucks it at the guard, buying the two of them time to escape, again.
They make decent ground away from everyone and then when it gets dark, manage to blow up the truck that brought everyone down to this part of town. Al does his dog distracting again, and just like at the start, it seems like Sam and Buddy are going to get away clean. But oh no, here’s that crooked sheriff waiting for them! But they lunge at him, he falls off the bridge and Al is like “well, he smashed his head in, he dead.” Uh, fuck. That’s pretty intense.
Al then brings up Google Maps and directs them to the state line, which weirdly, in these days (??) is like ‘OK well you’re home free now, you’re not a criminal in this state, good luck to you!’
Sam’s buddy runs off over the hill to freedom and anonymity. But Al says, worry not, a man fitting his description does appear living a happy life, working amongst the redwoods in Washington State. And Sam’s guy gets away too! A nice little coda, Buddy reappears on the hill and shouts, “Thanks Al!” Nice little bit of recognition for the Admiral there.
4–11 The Play’s The Thing
Sam is in a bed in some pretty sweet red silk sheets alongside an older lady. It’s 1969 and I think we’re going to be seeing Sam refusing a whole lot of sex on this leap. Before he can turn anything down, into the room come the lady’s son and wife and well, this is awkward. They’re surprising the lady for her 50th birthday and surprise, she’s banging Sam’s young stud. The 30 year old son is not so stoked with this situation but Sam tries to play it off by being super nice. Hey the son’s wife is pregnant, happy families!
The son and wife think that old lady should move back to Cleveland from this New York City cesspit and give up on her dreams of a singing career and attending peace marches and the like. The son is grilling Sam on his career as an actor and what he did at school and who he voted for in the last election. Sam immediately starts babbling about Nixon and McGovern and it’s 1969, shut up fool!
Sam heads to his Hamlet rehearsal and finally Al shows up. He doesn’t have much to add apart from trying to peak up the skirt of a young actress involved in the play, saying Sam needs to discard the old woman fast. Sam though is kinda into the older lady vibe. Sam is worried the older woman (Jane) is going to die soon, as that’s how these leaps usually go. Al drops some comedy gold saying, it’s much worse than that. She’s going to head home alone and live the rest of her life in Cleveland!
Al believes that Sam is really there to stop the guy he leaped into dropping out of the play and ending up as realtor. Sam isn’t so sure, he thinks he’s there to push Jane into a singing career. Al disagrees, ranting on with some mumbo jumbo to do with his ex wife failing at roller derby and extrapolating from this you should never follow your dreams or something? Disregarding the part of his life where his best friend dreamed about making a difference to other people’s lives by making a FUCKING TIME MACHINE and is now a legit time traveler who does that every goddam day.
I think Sam might actually be in love with Jane. Usually he’s all worried about seducing and or kissing anyone but here he’s all “I love you eyes your hair ohh Jane!” and making out with her nonstop. At the nightclub where Sam is trying to get Jane into the music scene, Sam has an excellent Al type outfit on, or maybe like he’s about to start singing Dick in a Box — a white shiny roll neck and a thick gold chain and dark glasses even though it’s a nightclub. Sam gets into it pretty hardcore with this old guy who’s hitting on Jane and going on about how awesome the Vietnam war is going to be. Apparently this was the big plan by the son, have this older guy rubbish her life choices and where she lives and then old guy that old guy would ask Jane to marry him and they’d move back to Cleveland. Solid plan.
The show really paid for plenty of music in this episode. Old guy is complaining about how he can’t dance to White Rabbit and I mean, yeah man, for starters you’re wearing a suit and tie with the top button done up in a nightclub and flopping your arms around like you’re having a small stroke.
Sam tries to break it to son and wife that Jane has an incredible voice and he’s genuinely got her best interests at heart. Let her try singing! The son though is just brutal; she’s nothing special, forget this whole nonsense. We then get into one of those classic QL bets where Sam is like, OK if I can prove she’s a good singer, then you’ll shut up and fuck off back to Cleveland without her? They accept. Sure, that’s a sound way to decide the future of the mother you’re so concerned about, a nightclub bet.
Alas it crashes and burns, when Jane can’t sing in the nightclub. She’s too scared! The son really wants her to fail and give up on her dreams and be a defeated old lady, so he’s stoked about his mother’s public humiliation. Jane leaves with old guy who is also smug about her dreams being crushed. Al is also onboard with this telling Sam, yup, good, she failed, go back to rehearsing Hamlet, we don’t have time to be nice to anyone else. Everyone now gangs up on Sam being a loser actor, how he’s broke, destroying Jane’s life, how Sam’s just a bozo who should kill himself basically. They all agree to come and hate watch Hamlet which Jesus Christ, is on tomorrow night! Sam has been to one rehearsal, but doesn’t seem too worried. Yeah, Hamlet, that’s a pretty chill, easy thing to learn and perform in 24 hours.
Sam takes an afternoon to learn how to be a good actor, which just possibly, may not be enough. I guess his photographic memory is going to give him the lines but I think you need a little more than just line recall to be a good Hamlet. Old guy and son are not so secretly chuckling about how shit the theater is and how bad this is going be. The director then drops the wildest shit ever on the cast. Tonight is the first night. And it will also be the last night unless they do something crazy and uh, do the whole performance nude? The fuck dude? Everyone but Sam is like, hell yeah lets get naked! And on goes the show, which Al truly seems to believes is going to lead to a giant acting breakthrough for Sam’s guy. Naked Hamlet. Performed by Sam rather than the actor he jumped into. Yup.
It’s quite the view for the old guy and son who are doing their best not to lose their minds that they can see naked people. I love how on TV, straight guys can’t even look at another naked dude without getting uncomfortable. Like if they even glance a dick, uh oh, they’re now gay and have to do gay sex forever! After the show son and old guy are like TERRIBLE BOO they were naked OMG!!! AWFUL! KILL YOURSELF! Weirdly it seems like Sam actually gave a great performance which, of all the things he’s done leaping, actually one of the most impressive (and least plausible.)
Al is not as supportive, telling Sam it was like a car wreck and the only way he got through it was by staring at Ophelia tits the whole time. After the show Ophelia is hugging Sam and their towels fall off just as Jane and family come around the corner. Of course they don’t pause for even a second to get the context, they all just run off like Sam was actually banging her over the makeup table and not innocently hugging her with the door wide open.
Before Sam can chase after them, an agent shows up and asks Sam if he wants to be a model for Boxer Boy, which hey, underwear model, sounds good. Al says hey great, it will set the young guy up for life. Too bad for young guy Sam is immediately like uh, fuck this nah pass. Unless! You hire ole Jane to sing the jingle for Boxer Boy! The agent, insanely, is like, OK sure, let me see her sing and if she’s good, it’s a deal. That would be a thing that would happen.
Son makes a final plea for Jane to give up on her life and come back to Cleveland a broken woman. Sam is chasing after them to try and get her the one last shot. He catches Jane just in time and she’s like, well I tried to make it as a singer, remember that one time I didn’t sing in the nightclub? So yeah, may as well give up forever. The old guy who seems to have taken full ownership of Jane now (having first met her 24 hours ago) is like, too late loser we’re out of here and punches Sam in the face!
Sam tells her the offer though, and she sings and Sam gets to be Boxer Boy! And they can live together happily! Hopefully this was also the dream of the guy Sam leaped into because he’s going to be leaping back into a very serious lifelong commitment here!
This time at the nightclub (officially the only place it’s possible to prove yourself as singer) Jane kills it, crooning out “For Once In My Life.”
Boxer Boy scout, who inexplicably was scouting underwear models at a performance of Hamlet that was not scheduled to be naked, loves it! He immediately accepts the deal and signs them both. Phew! Al rains on the parade a little saying well Joe gets rich but Jane never amounts to much of a career, just a couple of other commercials. He does say that she’s super happy in that life though, happiness being apparently something Ziggy can 100% measure no problem.
4–12 Running For Honor
Sam is not ready for the relay race he’s dropped into and smashes into the guy and drops the baton. Not ideal! It’s 1964 and it’s two days before the biggest meet of the year! Sam is some sort of star college middle distance runner. It’s a military school because he’s got that white Officer and a Gentleman outfit on, along with all his buddies. And he’s not just any cadet, the guy in charge tells Sam, good news, you’re the valedictorian (and also dating the guy’s daughter apparently) which seems pretty great! This leap will be smoooooth sailing!
Al tells him it’s a naval college and this reminds Al of his own school days. He knows all about how things go down in these military places. Al explains a few things about how Sam is a big man on campus (BMOC) because he’s such a good runner, but Al offers no explanation for why he’s come to work at Project QL wearing an oversized peach coloured suit. Sam yells at Al what every viewer thinks every week. Why does Al always show up late and yet still not have any good info! For once in his goddamn life, could he be there earlier or with good intel? Damn! Ziggy sucks! A chagrined Al heads off into the light door to find out something useful.
Sam is off to meet someone in a bar for a date and uh oh, turns out it’s a dude! Sam is gay. Possibly? He doesn’t seem to pick up on that though. The other guy tells him that another guy they know was jumped and beaten up by some mysterious secret gang who are clearly anti-gay called ‘The Chain.’
Sam goes to a later meeting that the other guy suggested and gets jumped by a bunch of dudes and knocked out. Al reveals to Sam that his dude got kicked out of the naval academy for being gay. Or at least, 86% chance he’s gay. I’d like to see Ziggy’s working for that calculation. Sam needs “solid proof” for some reason. Not clear why it matters or where that proof would be found. Sam is trying to say him and that other guy are just best pals, not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
There’s a really weird scene where Al is like, Sam I don’t remember you crossing your legs like that. Al also tells Sam not to put his hands on his hips like that. Implying, I don’t know, that Sam is ‘catching’ gay? I feel like this whole episode might be straying into problematic territory. At least Sam is like, Al, shut the fuck up and join the current century. But they needs to figure something out because Sam’s guy is going to be dead in two days (as per usual.)
The chain gang shows up and threatens Sam, punching him out again and saying they don’t like his type and all that regular homophobic nonsense. At practice the next day, Sam is dragging ass, which lends credence to the idea that it’s his body, since his body is (I think) a 40 year old dude in decent shape, but not an elite college runner. Coach wants to know how he got the black eye and Sam plays it off as a fall.
Sam’s gf is also being weird, asking Sam why, in the three months they’ve been dating, Sam has never even tried to take her to the bone zone. She says she understands he’s sensitive but she’d like him to be aggressive. Al is leering in the background cracking about how Sam/Tommy probably like show tunes and Sam should hurry up and bang this “choice morsel” who, Sam points out, is at the most SEVENTEEN.
It’s harder to understand Sam’s behavior than Al’s. Al is just a regular, old fashioned, homophobic idiot. Sam however, keeps looking for reasons that Tommy is not gay, just quiet and sensitive. Why can’t Sam just be like, yeah, probably he is gay, so what?
After practice, Sam and his former best pal, now sworn enemy/leader of the chain gang, report to the commanding officer about what went down the other night. Sam claims the chain is beating people all over the place, which there is ample evidence for, and the other guy is claiming Sam is a sexual deviant who’s made passes at every dude. Neither of them have any concrete proof. The commander gives chain guy gang 24 hours to display proof.
Instead of looking for proof, the chain gang kidnap Sam, string him up and perform a fake hanging. The noose isn’t tied to anything, or maybe it’s just really long and that’s why Sam just falls in the dirt, unclear. Anyway, Sam is left in his pants in the mud and the chain gang is like, you’re out of here just resign or next time we’ll really do it. That’s the way of bullies, safety in numbers, always.
Sam dries off and makes some tea in his room. Of course Al is like, oh, tea. Not coffee. I guess tea is a gay drink?? Al is fucking insane. Sam finally spazzes out and is like, my dude what in the good christ is your problem? Al comes out with it. He says it’s not that he hates gays, he just hates gays in the military. His justification for this is as dumb as you might imagine. In a life and death situation you wouldn’t want a gay guy next to you. Because why? He’d be too busy dancing to shoot the enemy? This was a couple of years before the US military even got to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ so Al’s opinion was probably the nationwide sentiment, widely accepted, nonsensical though it was/is.
The guy who got kicked out of the military school is printing a list for widespread distribution, with the name of every gay guy in town on it. Sam is like, this isn’t a good idea for a few reasons. Outside of privacy and so forth, the chain are going to kill the printing guy if he gets that list out. Printing guy doesn’t care, he’s going ahead with it.
The commanding officer gives Sam the same nonsense speech about how gays in the military is a huge liability because they could get blackmailed and you know, would want pink uniforms and the like. Yeah I mean, they wouldn’t get blackmailed if you normalized homosexuality genius, so that reasoning is even dumber than the rest of this shit. Or there’s no way to blackmail heterosexual people or trap them in any way. The funny thing about all this is how incredibly gay all those military uniforms are. Gold epaulets, huge emphasis on looking absolutely perfect, sharply pressed, shined shoes, none of that slovenliness people associate with heterosexual dudes.
Sam tells his coach about the chain and their plans to kill printer guy. Coach is a pretty pleasant, understanding guy who seems to have been trying to talk to Sam the whole episode about anything that might be ‘bothering him.’ Coach and Sam head to the locker room to stop the chain from their ‘business.’ Sam is like, you guys are pathetic and there could be a reason why the main guy is taking this so personally. Right away the other guys are like, yeah, actually, this has maybe gone too far, with the you know, planned homicide. In about five seconds all the guys apart from the leader come to a consensus that the chain is whack and they all leave. Well that was easy.
But of course, bad news from Al, the guy is still going to die. In the next two hours! Al and Sam escape the dorm room and run into the coach. Coach believes Sam that something bad is about to happen and even though it could cost him his job, he agrees to help, again. Al transports across town and finds printer guy is going to kill himself and blame it on the chain, in order to, I guess, further the cause? Sam gets there just in time and with the help of coach, talks printer guy down. Turns out coach is of course also gay and has always hidden it and felt ashamed. He tells them, it’s OK to be different. He’s realized from watching them that they have nothing to be ashamed of. Nice one coach!
Sam hasn’t leaped yet, because he still needs to win the big race! So wait, what the hell was the mission here? If the mission was just to win the big race, why wouldn’t Sam have jumped in just for that part. Although that would be insane, since Tommy would be much better at doing that. So Sam’s part must just have been the resolution of printer guy ending up dead? Or getting the chain to disband? Or not getting Tommy kicked out of school? This one is pretty messy. At least printer guy goes onto be a big part of the movement, when he gets a job at a little bar in New York City called Stonewall.
The real resolution comes from Al. He admits he was totally wrong. He thought he was right, it was always what he’d believed, but he was totally wrong. Nice growth Al! His final question is, so, was Tommy gay or not? And Sam maybe has his own growth, since he’s like, does it matter? Nope!
He leaps out just as the gun goes off, which makes not much sense for a few reasons. So Tommy jumps back in, one second he’s stood in the weird imaging chamber, and the next his body is already in motion in a race? Not exactly going to help him win it. And at the start, Sam was receiving the baton, meaning he definitely wasn’t running the first leg, so why would he be practicing like that? Weird. Well anyway, being gay is A-OK!
