Analyzing Quantum Leap (2022): S1E1: July 13th, 1985
One of the best things a writer can do to hone their craft is step outside of their comfort zone. I don’t normally write critical analyses of TV shows. I don’t even write reviews. But I feel like Quantum Leap (2022) is such a great example of how not to do some pretty important things, that it would be worth picking apart. This is a writing exercise for me, and perhaps some kind of therapy.
That said, I hope you will find my analysis informative and educational, especially if you’re a writer — or trying to figure out exactly why this show sucks so hard for a school project or something.
Now the elephant in the room.
I’m aware that I’m wandering into dangerous territory by putting out (largely negative) commentary on a show that is ham-fisted in its attempt to be progressive and inclusive. That’s a minefield wherein no matter how carefully I tread, some of my observations can be written off as politically incorrect by anyone who cares to do so.
I’m not writing this for reactionaries who fall apart every time they see an opinion that doesn’t match their worldview. I’m not sure anyone should write for them, actually, because it tends to produce vapid, meaningless garbage that will be halfway to the cancellation chopping block by episode five…
…and that is the most fitting way possible to introduce my reviews of Quantum Leap (2022).
Obviously, I have no love for this show. It’s rife with the kind of slipshod storytelling that I find insulting as both a viewer and a writer — and storytelling competence is largely what this series of posts will be analyzing.
I loved the original Quantum Leap, though. That show was a masterpiece. I was too young to fully understand it when it aired, but I recently rewatched the entire series and I was blown away by how well it did everything it set out to do. It handled sensitive issues with aplomb, it didn’t take itself too seriously, it had fantastic tension and pacing, and managed to nail characterization while only having two main characters to speak of.
Coincidentally (or not) these are all things that Quantum Leap (2022) gets horribly wrong.
Now with all that out of the way, let’s take a big, deep inhale of the turd known as S1E1: July 13th, 1985.
We open on this bit of backstory that I must immediately address:
You’ll see the very first thing this show does is establish continuity with the original Quantum Leap series. They’re acknowledging the existence of everything that happened in the original show. At the very least, the show is telling us that what we’re about to watch will take place in the same universe as Scott Bakula’s Quantum Leap.
That means this show is not a reboot. Sorry, but one thing you’ll learn about me from reading these analyses/reviews is that I believe language to be a pretty important thing. Words have meaning — specific meaning — and pop culture has a tendency to just spew words all over the place without due consideration of what those words imply.
If you look up anything about Quantum Leap (2022), you will see it referred to as a reboot about a million times. It bothers me that people do this even though we can see it’s not a reboot within the first second of pressing play. Does no one give a shit any more?
There’s a reason this is important, not only from a writing perspective, but from a viewer’s perspective. It sets expectations and rules.
A “reboot” is when a familiar concept is torn down and rebuilt from scratch. It borrows the premise, but it does not share the same universe or continuity. The rules can change. The past can change.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is not a reboot of TOS, it’s a sequel. It takes place in the same universe and acknowledges everything that happened in Kirk’s era.
Likewise, this show is not a reboot of the original Quantum Leap, it’s a sequel. Clearly. They’ve spelled it out right here.
I can tell you that later on I’m going to point out some reasons why NBC absolutely should have made this show a reboot rather than a sequel. It’s largely because the writers chose — for whatever reason — to inherit the logic and rules from the original show, only so they could come up with terrible, half-assed reasons to ignore them completely as soon as they came up.
Anyway, we haven’t even started the damn show, so let’s move on.
If you type the word “hacker” into a stock photo website, you’ll see the opening scene of this episode. Someone in a dark room surrounded by server racks and monitors running a TRS-80 emulator.
A woman, unidentified, sees something important and places a call to Ben Song.
Cut to a POV walkthrough of an upscale party that transitions to dialogue between Ben Song (we know it’s him because the guests we walked by said so) and this woman, played by Caitlin Bassett.
The next few minutes are pretty clumsy, as the writers chose to introduce every major character in the show in a single conversation. First, Ben (Raymond Lee) comments on how he doesn’t like parties, and throws in something about how he would have proposed sooner “if he’d known we got to do this.”
And by “this”, he means have a completely stilted conversation where absolutely no chemistry can be detected between these two characters. If he hadn’t mentioned proposing, I would have thought this was some random coworker.
But no time to dally on that, because Nanrisa Lee walks into the shot and says that she wants a raise if she’s also supposed to be head of security at the party. We find out later that her character is head of security at the Leap project, but her line delivery is wrong, so it sounds more like she was a caterer talking about also being security. (Not security talking about also being security at this party.)
Immediately we cut to Ian, the first character whose name I remembered longer than it took to switch over to my notes. Ian, played by Mason Alexander Park, does a great job of coming across as a sort of overenthusiastic and analytical nerd in a few lines, but the set up for those lines is kind of lame. I find it hard to believe that anyone would need to get into an argument with a hired DJ in a private residence about song selections. You’re paying them, so wouldn’t they play whatever the hell you want?
Ben’s alleged fiance makes a comment to Ian about writing an algorithm for the perfect playlist, and it’s about the most bullshit line ever conceived to explain that someone “writes algorithms”.
Ian gets another line or two and now Ernie Hudson joins the massive, growing exposition huddle. There’s an exchange about how the head of security — now I know her name is ‘Jenn’ — told everyone at the party that Ernie’s character is a game developer.
She proceeds to loudly ask him, “would you rather I tell them you’re in charge of a top secret time travel project” while swinging around a glass of chardonnay. So, great security, I guess.
The entire group is consumed by laughter at this massive breach in security protocol and we learn that these are some close-knit, casual, and warm coworkers indeed. We also learn that Ernie’s name in the show is “Magic”, which I sort of recognized as a call-back to the Quantum Leap (1995). It is, but I’m going to save explaining it until the episode where it’s actually relevant.
I grabbed this screenshot in hopes that no more characters would be introduced for now. See if you can spot the GRU agent in the background creaming his pants because of all the top secret intelligence he’s gathering at this party.
I don’t know if this is a blocking mistake or some kind of foreshadowing, but notice how Ben and fiance Addison are the two people farthest apart from each other. They’re so in love, right?
Anyway, Ben remarks about hating parties again, then goes on to say that public speaking and small talk also suck, so the writers really nailed the characterization of this guy.
Or have they?
His coworkers immediately rope him into giving a speech and every eye in the party is on him. He seamlessly goes into a speech about how he’s a physicist and romance is like quantum entanglement.
It probably would have been a good bit of dialogue for characterization if not for the fact that a) he doesn’t come off as someone who is even remotely uncomfortable giving impromptu speeches; and b) the salient lack of chemistry between Ben and Addison robs it of any emotional impact.
Every character is telling me that Ben Song doesn’t like giving speeches, but when it comes time for him to give a speech, he just does it without hesitation and everyone loves it.
Then we’re told that Addison and Ben are engaged and deeply in love, but then they show us this:
She looks like she’s wondering who this asshole is that grabbed her hand while babbling about quantum entanglement in front of a roomful of people. As far as I can tell, these two met five minutes before this party started.
They part ways, Ben looks at his phone, then stares blankly into space for a few more seconds while the music swells. I don’t know if I’m supposed to get some sense of fear or concern or boredom from this, because Raymond Lee has the world’s best poker face — something that every actor is shooting for.
And I just realized we’re not even five minutes into the episode, but I had to do some introduction to the characters and it’s not my fault the show’s writers decided to hit us with a firehose before the title sequence even ran.
Maybe now we’ll have some space to step back and look at the episode’s arc as a whole.
Cut to Ben walking into the Quantum Leap Accelerator™, and I figure something is probably gonna happen.
And boom, he finds himself in the 1980s, inhabiting someone else’s body. I’m not here to explain the basic premise of the show unless it helps with the analysis, so let’s leave it at that for now.
He’s clearly confused and has no memory of leaping.
What’s interesting is that when Addison, his fiance, shows up a minute later, Ben Song looks at her and speaks to her in pretty much the same way he did when he knew who she was.
My theory about the lovebirds meeting five minutes before the party stands.
And this is after he quickly responds to the name “Ben” when she calls it (only once) despite his amnesia…and while looking at the ID in his wallet that says his name is Nick. Not a good way to convey that he’s forgetting his own identity.
Moving on, he finds out he leaped into the life of a getaway driver when a bunch of balaclava-wearing robbers run out of a nearby building carrying the ark of the covenant and climb into his van.
The next shots establish that Addison is a hologram and that only Ben can hear her or see her. She’s also unable to interact with the physical world. All important things to know and they convey them quickly and organically through action, rather than having the character explain it.
That’s good.
Ben climbs into the van and a car chase ensues. A couple of funny lines are delivered by the talking head in the window behind him as he drives, but it all plays out pretty quickly and ends with Ben finding out that this robbery was only the first phase in a greater scheme.
Ben is left alone in an alley for a few minutes, giving Addison a chance to explain that he’s a time traveler from 2022 and she’s his coworker. Because of their white-hot passionate romance before his amnesia, she’s clearly afraid of telling him that they’re actually engaged and enjoy long periods of staring blankly at each other and kissing when the script tells them to.
Addison’s hologram starts to break down, and we cut to the imaging chamber inside Leap HQ. It’s a nice reveal of how the tech works (“works”), and we can see that Addison is able to experience Ben’s reality in the past in great detail.
But this brings us to one of the major complaints about the 2022 sequel that I’ve come across online. We’re now in Leap HQ, and we will be spending a lot of time here as the show goes on. In the original series, we almost never switch over the “present”, meaning that 99% of Quantum Leap (1995) takes place in Sam Beckett’s reality-de-jour.
In fact, the only episode that I remember cutting back and forth between Sam in the past and Al (the original show’s holographic helper and a damn fantastic character) in the future was a two-parter about Al saving the project from being mothballed. Because it was two parts, it technically gave the show the same amount of time to develop Sam’s story of the week while sharing time with Al’s B story.
This show breaks that formula, and many reviewers blame the show’s myriad problems on that departure. Because we’re sharing time between the Leap HQ cast and Ben’s time travel, there’s less time to devote to either in any given episode.
While I agree that this presents a challenge, it also gives the writers a chance to focus on serialized story arcs that carry over throughout the season. Considering that modern viewers expect season- or even series-long arcs, this was probably a decent idea.
Unfortunately, if I’m remembering my first watch-through of Quantum Leap (2022) correctly, they don’t really use it this way. We’ll see if I remembered that right in the coming episodes.
So now we’re in Leap HQ and we find out that Ben installed a bunch of new code into the computer system, Ziggy, and fucked everything up.
Ian and Addison argue for about five minutes about how much time it would waste to bring the imaging chamber back online — time that would presumably be better spent fixing Ziggy, the ultimate A.I.-powered stack of glowing storage bins.
After Magic interrupts the argument, Ian fixes the imaging chamber in about three seconds, so I don’t know why the hell it even warranted an argument. Contrived conflict is not good writing.
We get more of that stilted dialogue when Allison returns to the imaging chamber to talk to Ben, who wonders why he can’t just be sent back to the future. He says, ”Obviously I time travel into other people, and I chose to travel into this guy, so just travel me out.”
That’s a painful non-sequitur that was obviously written to set up another line of exposition. No human would ever say that line, because the idea of choosing the guy doesn’t support the assertion that Addison should be able to “just travel him out”.
He might as well have said, “Obviously, I’m wearing a blue shirt, so just travel me out.”
But that sets her up to tell Ben that he doesn’t control who he leaps into. It’s something the audience needed to know, so the writers devised awful dialogue to explain it. This is the sort of laziness I’m talking about when I say that poor writing offends me.
It also allows Ben to become the Watson character* of the scene as Addison starts explaining the backstory of the Quantum Leap Project™. She begins by showing him a hologram of fucking Scott Bakula, so anyone who wants to argue that this is not a sequel can officially kiss my ass.
I’d also like to take this opportunity that Scott Bakula was asked to make in appearance in this pilot episode and told NBC to fuck off (or something to that effect). Not only do I respect him for doing that, but it makes me wonder how much he knew about the show when he declined. Was he privy to how awful it was going to be? I assume he saw the script for the pilot, but as bad as this episode is, the worst is yet to come. It makes me think he might have had insight into the show’s planned direction and dismissed it accordingly.
Anyway, I brought this up because it seems like this scene would have likely been the place for his cameo (as a hologram) since Dr. Sam Beckett is still lost in the past within the show’s own logic.
All I know is that I’m glad he didn’t waste his time on this trash bag of a show.
More exposition unfolds, then Addison tells Ben to act like the guy whose body he’s inhabiting until they figure out how to bring him back.
A bit too late, it turns out, as the other robbers drag Ben/Nick out of the bathroom to ask why he’s acting weird and talking to himself, at which point he’s told not to screw up or they’ll kill him.
We then cut to Leap HQ and watch the other characters talk about why Ben is in that body, what’s going on, etc. This is all stuff that Al would’ve easily covered in a scene with Sam, so it’s already making me think that I’m right about these cuts to 2022 being a waste of time.
Returning to Ben/Nick, he goes to a jewelry store with one of the robbers, Ryan, to pick up a fake Hope Diamond for the next phase of their heist. It’s here that we learn Ben Song can speak Romanian…along with “several other languages” because I guess he studied physics in Moldova. What’s worse is that the writers didn’t commit to what languages he speaks, and I’m worried that he will be able to speak whatever languages are demanded of the situation in future episodes.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does remove some chances for conflict if your hero has an unspecified set of skills that just happens to fit whatever danger he finds himself in. Are the writers setting him up that way? I hope not.
Even Superman, who could just make up godlike powers whenever he wanted, had kryptonite to bring him down. The only kryptonite established for Ben Song so far is his dislike for public speaking, and that factoid was smashed into the ground about five seconds after they introduced it.
All I can say is that his knowledge of Romanian wasn’t even essential to resolving the scene, because he just has Addison look up info on the jewelry store guy to hold over him as leverage. He could have done that without speaking the language, so I guess it was just supposed to impress us that Ben speaks, of all fucking things, Romanian?
Cut back to Leap HQ and Jenn, the head of security, tells Magic that they have some shitty security footage of someone breaking into the facility before Ben’s leap. Even though the video is all corrupted to hell, the one thing they’re able to see is the ring on the intruder’s finger (lol).
I guess this is supposed to inform us, the viewing audience, because we saw that ring on the hacker’s finger in the stock footage segment from the opening scene. Makes sense now why they made such a point of lingering on it, but damn.
If someone feels brainy for catching that connection, they deserve this show.
Jenn asks Magic if he recognizes the ring, at which point he says, “No, but it’s military.”
So does he recognize it or not? I mean, it could be a fucking novelty ring from Hot Topic if he doesn’t, but if it’s so obviously military, he must recognize it as somehow being a military-esque signet ring. And if you recognize the emblem or the meaning, then you recognize the ring, full stop.
Jenn then tells Magic that she should be fired because she designed the security system that allowed the break-in to happen. Not only is this a pretty illogical and non-human thing to say, but it goes heavily against things we’ll learn in later episodes about her cookie-cutter backstory.
And it makes me start to wonder about this whole “head of security” thing in the first place. Jenn has yet to be shown in any kind of military uniform, so I’m already meant to believe that the head of security for a government-run program — probably the most important government-run program — is a civilian. Maybe she’s supposed to be a federal agent?
But I’m inclined to think that a high-ranking CIA spook who worked their way up to running security on History’s Biggest Secret wouldn’t respond to a break-in by saying “wah, something went wrong, fire me”. It just doesn’t compute.
But this gives Magic a chance to tell her that she’s doing a good job so she can think about it and smile awkwardly. Personally, I think he should have bitched her out for giving up instead of trying to fix her perceived mistakes, but hey.
All pointless.
Cutting back to Ben, he’s realized that he has to save Ryan from getting shot if he wants to leap. Now the show addresses something that bothered me in the original series: the idea of just telling people in the past what needs to happen.
There were plenty of times when I was pulling out my hair and screaming at Sam, “just tell the woman not to go to that place!” or “Just lock that guy in a closet so the thing doesn’t happen!”
Granted, this is probably my only consistent gripe about Quantum Leap (1995), but it didn’t ruin the show because everything else was done so well. The show earned my suspension of disbelief, and anytime you’re writing sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal, you should earn it.
In S1E1: July 13th, 1985, Ben essentially tries to do this. He tells Ryan not to participate in the crime, and flat out says that he’s going to get shot in the face if he does. He then uses the fact that he knew all sorts of crap about the jewelry store owner as evidence that he does know some pretty important things all of a sudden.
I do like this. It’s probably what I would do in that situation because it makes logical sense. I might even ask Addison to tell me more facts that I could use to convince him right there on the spot that I was communing with a higher power that could predict the future.
Anyway, it peters out because Ben/Nick and Ryan walk onto the set of a J.J. Abrams Reservoir Dogs reboot and get guns pulled on them.
The ringleader accuses Ben/Nick of being an undercover cop.
Ben, sensing that his life is in danger, does the logical thing and agrees that yes, he is an undercover cop. I can see the reasoning behind him doing this in the heat of the moment, but it still bugs me.
I’m still entirely unconvinced that this is a guy who has problems with people, parties, crowds, and public speaking. He’s completely out of his element and has guns pointed at his head, and he seems to have no problem keeping his cool. Not a stutter or stammer. He hardly even looks like someone who has lost control of the situation.
Now is this bad writing or bad acting? It’s often hard to tell in these situations, but I can say with 100% certainty that poor acting skills are not improved when they’re fed bad situations and dialogue.
So the baddies zip-tie Ben to one of the flimsiest shelving units you can buy at Walmart and leave. Seriously, if the show makes a big deal out of escaping from this at all, it has lost quite a bit of credibility.
I would say that he should just yank his arms back really fast and break the zip tie, but those shelves are so lightweight, he would probably just pull the whole thing over. The real answer is just to lift up on that shelf slightly because they pull apart. I know, I have the exact shelf in my kitchen.
At least we can blame that on the set designer or the props department or whatever. That’s definitely not a fault that can be linked back to the writers.
We cut back to Leap HQ and see that the cutaways to 2022 are probably just going to be showcases for all of the side characters’ emotions. In other words, they’re still unnecessary. The only reason their emotions would matter is if I’m invested in the characters, but the only reason the characters exist so far is to show their emotional reactions. It’s kind of a weird characterization circle-jerk that hasn’t added anything to the show so far.
Anyway, Magic scolds Ian for being away from their desk. (I haven’t picked up yet on what Ian’s preferred pronouns are so I can use them appropriately. Maybe this will be addressed in the future.) Turns out Ian was taking a break from the emotional weight of the situation.
This is fine, but these diversions have to start shaping up into something. Otherwise, the majority of the internet will be proven right in their theory that Quantum Leap (2022) fails because it doesn’t spend enough time on Ben’s interactions with the past.
At least something kind of happens when Ian and Magic talk about the Hope Diamond. The latter reveals that the famed jewel actually was stolen in the 80s. There was a government coverup around the theft, and Magic knows “because when you live in DC long enough you hear things”.
Sure. Just handwave that bullshit away, right? Don’t bother coming up with a decent explanation that might actually add to the character or the story.
I had to rewatch this scene a couple of times to understand the explanation that Magic spoons out, but all it taught me is that it’s complete, unfiltered bullshit.
First off, he says the Hope Diamond was insured for half a billion dollars in 1985. It’s currently only insured for $250M, so I don’t know why that huge number was pulled out of someone’s ass. Then he says it was stolen and the government covered it up rather than take the financial loss.
Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me. The diamond was insured, so why would they take a financial loss by reporting it stolen? I can understand not wanting a hit to your reputation, but the insurer would pay you, not take half a billion dollars from you.
Did insurance work backwards in 1985 and I was too young to know? That must be it.
Anyway, all this bullshit is being spewed around the room because the fact that it was stolen means that Ben’s crew in the past must have succeeded. Magic then tells Jenn to hack into the Department of Defense computer system real quick because that’s what high-security government agencies do all the time.
I won’t even ask why the Pentagon “mainframe” has detailed files on a robbery at the Smithsonian, but the idea is that if they can find the files, they’ll know more about how the robbery played out so they can relay that information to Ben.
Yeah, whatever. This is just more time wasting crap, honestly. Throughout Quantum Leap Classic, Al was always relaying information to Sam about the events surrounding his current leap. Names, places, things that were going to happen.
Never once did I say, “I wonder what’s going on back at the office where people are looking this shit up.”
Apparently, this show’s writers thought the research department of Quantum Leap was a gold vein just waiting to be mined.
We cut back to Ben struggling to free himself from the Wonder Bread twist tie that was used to bind him to a shelf that weighs six pounds.
I guess they are going to labor over this after all, which makes me a bit more angry that they didn’t take some time to plan out the props and scenery better.
Ben is grunting and slightly moving his hands, then informs Addison that if he creates enough friction, the plastic zip tie will break. That’s better than just lifting the shelf slightly, sure.
Fine. So maybe he’s too rich and out of touch with the common folk to have my knowledge of consumer-grade shelving. What I don’t get is that the physics genius is trying to create fiction by slowly worrying his hands against each other. Wouldn’t the best way be to rub the zip tie up and down on the perforated metal pole?
This is like a survivalist character saying they know how to make a campfire by rubbing two sticks together, then they proceed to bang them against each other like a drummer at the beginning of a set.
Either convince me this guy is a genius or don’t.
Ah, then the payoff. Addison tells him to stop fucking around like an idiot and yank on the zip tie and just break the damn thing so we can move on.
This is all wrapped in dialogue about how Ben is stubborn, but I’m not entirely sure why. I would understand if she told him to do that and he refused, but she just paced back and forth calling him stubborn and talking over him before finally telling him how to escape.
Doesn’t that make her the asshole in this exchange? It’s just more forced conflict in the dialogue, which happens when you make people say or do things that aren’t natural or human in any way.
It’s just like the earlier argument about fixing the imaging chamber. I don’t buy that someone would have a two-minute long argument about something that takes three seconds to fix.
And now I don’t buy that Addison knew how to free Ben from the zip tie, chose to talk over him while watching him struggle, and then called them stubborn because he was trying to escape instead of listening to her.
No, a real person would tell Ben how to get the fuck out, then talk to them.
We also get some dialogue here that makes me think Nick actually was an undercover cop. I hope that gets resolved somehow. See, if original Nick (before being body-snatched by Dr. Ben Song) was a cop, there should be a good reason why the robbery still occurred. It should also play into the fact that Ryan got shot, which is the whole bollocks premise behind him leaping here in the first place.
Thinking about it now, I think they really bungled that whole thing up. They’ve implied that Ben/Nick is getting zip tied because his strange behavior led the robbers to believe he was a cop. That wouldn’t have happened to Original Nick, because his body was never possessed by a time traveler.
They also implied that Ryan gets shot because the robbers don’t trust him after bringing a cop into their midst. This wouldn’t have happened either if Ben Song hadn’t made them suspicious.
But if any of this did happen to Original Nick, it means that they left a real undercover cop zip tied to a shelf, and I’m meant to believe that he wasn’t able to break that zip tie in two seconds and stop the crime from even occurring.
Fuck. When you’re writing about time travel, you’re willingly grabbing a double-edged sword. Yeah, you get to play around with the space-time continuum, but you also have to make some amount of sense. The entire premise is that changing things creates a ripple effect, but the show is already tripping over its own feet on that. It can’t decide what actually happened in the past, who anyone really is, or why anything is happening to anyone.
Anyway, Ben gets to the phone in the next room and starts calling the Smithsonian to tell them they’re about to get robbed, proving that these criminals trusted a ten-cent piece of plastic to protect their elaborate heist scheme.
But uh oh! Ben has second thoughts about calling because if they all get arrested, it means Ryan will go to jail and his kid will grow up without parents. I get that this shows how caring and selfless Ben is, but it seems a little crazy that he’s willing to take on unknowable risks to himself and others because “he can’t let Ryan down.” His words.
I’m not saying that people aren’t that selfless, but it has not been established in the episode that Ben should give two shits about this guy or his family. All he knows is that Ryan ending up in jail is a net gain over him getting his brains splattered all over a national museum.
This could be an indicator of the kinds of problems you run into when you keep cutting back to Leap HQ to see bullshit, unnecessary character interactions instead of spending that time building the relationship between Ben and his surrogate reality. We didn’t have enough time to see Ben start caring, thus I don’t care.
Ben hangs up the phone and Addison agrees to help because Ben’s stubborn, presumably, which is why the whole stupid thing with the zip tie had to happen. Foreshadowing is important, but jamming it haphazardly into manufactured situations is crap.
Cut to the Smithsonian and Ben asks what happens if Nick dies. He dies, too, according to Addison.
Now this makes me wonder about something from Quantum Leap Classic. When a leap occurred in that show, the person whose body he inhabits actually trades places with Sam. In fact, we later learn that Sam isn’t inhabiting their body at all. He’s wholesale swapping with them and something about the technology (or whatever) just makes Sam look and sound like the person he’s replacing.
When Sam traded places with a pregnant woman, the actual pregnant woman appeared in Leap HQ and started going into labor. It was a pretty core feature of that episode and hammered the point home again and again that Sam was still in his own actual body.
So is that not happening in this series? Or is Original Nick wandering around Leap HQ stealing ashtrays because the cast doesn’t know he’s there, either?
That seems like a pretty damn important thing to talk about during these cutaways back to 2022. In fact, I’m going to say my first major “I would have written this differently” rant is going to be about this fact.
Instead of cutting back to unnecessary and padded conversations about how insurance worked in reverse in 1985, why not spend those cutaways showing how the Leap HQ crew deal with the person who Ben swapped with?
Replace the cookie-cutter hacker/security character with a psychologist who talks to these people about the struggle they are going through in their timeline. They could have breakthroughs and actually explore the emotions behind whatever is playing out in Ben’s A story.
In doing that, we wouldn’t necessarily break the formula the way they’re breaking it now. Ben Song doesn’t have a reason to care about these people so deeply, but if we can see the plight of the real person who does care — the leap counterpart — maybe we, the audience, will care. If that happens, we’re more likely to give a hall pass to Ben for getting so invested in apparent strangers.
Since Quantum Leap (2022) is so obviously running down the checklist of progressive television requirements, it would make more sense from a narrative standpoint than these nonsense diversions about hacking the Pentagon.
Moving on, Ben executes his plan to foil the heist.
Step one is to punch one of the robbers in the face right outside of the security office, so I’m not quite sure how this is any better than just calling the museum and telling them to lock down the Hope Diamond. Wouldn’t that have been enough to stop the robbers from carrying out their plan?
Ben/Nick intercepts another robber on the dance floor and recreates the tango scene at the beginning of True Lies or something. It’s pretty dumb because the robber reaches under her dress for a handgun as if she plans on shooting him in the middle of a museum full of dozens of witnesses.
She’s not the only stupid one, as another robber sees them dancing and starts to go for his gun. In the middle of a museum full of dozens of witnesses.
I don’t know if this is supposed to build tension, but damn…we all know they’re not going to shoot him…
Whoops. Maybe I’m wrong.
She fires her gun into the air to clear out the building. But if she’s willing to fire the gun for this, why not shoot the guy who’s right in front of you and threatening you? She just indicated that she wanted to shoot him for fuck’s sake.
Well, no one shoots Ben so I was half right.
Instead, the crowd of museum guests runs outside where the robbers have a huge bomb rigged on a timer. Now Ben has to get rid of the bomb or his interference with the past will actually have a worse outcome when a hundred innocent people get blown to bits.
He doesn’t have a way to cut the bomb’s wires so he drops it down a manhole. None of this shit about the bomb makes any sense to me. Again, it seems very contrived. The writers wanted certain things to happen, so they created the world’s most idiotic heist plan to allow those things to happen.
Ideally, everything needs to work in service of telling the story properly. It’s not impossible to tell this same story while also allowing the story to make sense. You just have to try.
When writers don’t try, I can only assume that they have no respect for their audience. And to hell with any writer (or white knight) who gives me some shit about how they’re allowed to make huge mistakes because “it’s just a TV show”. Anyone who thinks that way should not be writing TV shows. They don’t respect the craft, and they don’t respect the viewers’ time.
Moving along.
Ryan thanks Ben/Nick and then we get the completely insane, nonsensical wrapup that I believe becomes a regular feature of Quantum Leap (2022). It’s not enough that Ben saved this guy from getting shot, his intervention also kept him out of jail, saved his dying wife’s life, and got him his restaurant back.
The reasoning behind this is so flawed that I’m not even going to try explaining it. I just want to point out that this seems to be a needless stretch. Why couldn’t he have just saved the dude’s life? Why did his brief appearance have to solve years worth of Ryan’s accumulated problems?
It would be great if that were an organic resolution, but it wasn’t. Addison might as well have said, “everything shitty about Ryan’s life magically vanished because you’re awesome and we should all love you.”
Ben leaps out and we cut back to 2022.
In the old show, this is where we would get the satisfaction of seeing where he’s going to leap next and be done with it. That’s the hook that brings you back.
Instead, we get the cast of side characters huddling around a computer to reveal that Ziggy is a huge piece of shit and they lost Ben. Oh no! I’m willing to bet they find him pretty damn quickly when the next episode starts, so that’s not much of a teaser.
Then we cut to Jenn telling Magic that she identified the “looks military” ring and it was associated with a Navy platoon that included our beloved Al from Quantum Leap Classic.
There he is, MFing Dean Stockwell. Not a reboot, dammit. This is a sequel. If it isn’t, they’re trying really hard to establish a continuity that does not belong in a reboot.
I’m not going to rag on the fact that Jenn says “look at the last name on that list” and the tablet is clearly highlighting a name toward the top of the list. I will mention it though.
Unfortunately Al died in 2021 (as did Dean Stockwell, so he was spared even being asked to be on this show) so the gang surmises that it must have been his daughter wearing the ring.
Turns out Al’s daughter wanted to be part of the new Quantum Leap project, but the DoD thought her emotional ties to Al and Sam were a liability — as opposed to, say, a damn good reason for her to work her hardest to make the project succeed.
I guess the DoD doesn’t mind self-confessed incompetent civilians taking the lead on security. And they don’t mind an engaged couple working on the project together, with one of them taking the high-risk role of leaping through time. But damned if they’ll let in someone who has a personal connection to Sam.
None of it makes sense. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lack of sense we’ll be uncovering moving forward.
We cut back to Addison strolling around what I assume is her and Ben’s place. She finds Ben’s phone and scrolls up a video message where he says he’s really sorry for ditching her to fuck around with the space-time continuum, but it will all make sense someday, and just be chill about it.
This puts me in a headspace where his reason for running off on his fiance, threatening national security, and potentially destroying the universe better be a really good one. This is a promise that needs a hell of a good payout, or else Ben Song is just a selfish dick. Since none of his current behavior tells us that he’s a selfish dick, that would be incongruous.
However, I’ll put my writerly predictive hat on here and say that it could turn out that he ran off selfishly and that he’s the nice guy worthy of Christ-like admiration that the show paints him as.
It’s already been hinted that Ben’s leap-induced amnesia (referred to in the old show as ‘swiss cheese brain’ by Al) has left him behaving differently than the man Addison knows. For example, he’s punching people rather than staring blankly at her face and talking about atoms.
It’s possible that she didn’t really know the old Ben and that he was hiding things that he no longer knows he’s supposed to hide. Maybe 2022 Ben was secretly a spy who was only using Addison as part of a grand plan to sabotage the project.
This would lead to an interesting development arc where swiss-cheese Ben gets to develop as a completely new character based on selfless actions, ultimately finding out that he was actually a traitor, criminal, monster, etc. in his “real life”.
We’ll see.
For now, we end on a shot of Ben leaping into an astronaut and I’m reminded that my true hatred of this show begins in episode two.
Thanks for reading! There’s more to come…
*A “Watson” is a character used as a sounding board for exposition. (I always referred to it as a “Philip J. Fry” character before finding out it had a more established name.) It refers to someone who doesn’t know the world or doesn’t have the same level of knowledge as the main character(s) such that there’s a reason to explain things to them for the benefit of the audience.
When done poorly, Watsons are really fucking annoying, as this show will enthusiastically demonstrate in the future.
These reviews were inspired by my dear, departed friend Philip J. Reed. They were originally lost during a website migration, but I’m bringing them back in honor of Phil’s passing. Not much of a tribute, I know…
