Analyzing Quantum Leap (2022): S1E2: Atlantis
Ah, episode two.
The first episode was a mess, but this is the one where I stopped halfway through and googled something along the lines of “why does Quantum Leap 2022 suck so hard?”
I wanted to see if I was being overly critical or something, and interestingly enough, a lot of search results came back on this particular episode.
You see, the masses swarmed to the internet to point out that this episode is supposed to involve the Shuttle Atlantis, but it takes place during a year that Atlantis never launched. I find it interesting that the Historical Sticklers Society mobilized post-haste on that factoid, but few people failed to rail S1E2: Atlantis more thoroughly on its many other faults.
Sure, the date of the launch was fabricated. But my concerns with this episode are far bigger. Monumentally bigger.
The first is a sweeping issue with the episode’s setup.
Imagine a job that would be impossible to fake your way through. Something that requires thousands of hours of training. Specific knowledge of highly-classified equipment. Intimate familiarity with your co-workers.
In short, a job that no person could ever just drop into and go unnoticed.
Did you come up with “astronaut”?
Maybe, maybe not. But the writer’s of Quantum Leap (2022) sure want us to believe that anybody could swap places with an astronaut in the middle of a mission and not get everyone killed.
Quantum Leap Classic did something similar by making Sam a test pilot in their…uhm…pilot. Yes, their pilot episode was a pilot episode. Anyway, the immediate result was that Sam almost killed everyone by crashing a plane. Then he had massive anxiety about the mere thought of having to fly a plane again. He did everything he could to not end up flying another plane.
It was about as realistic as that sort of story could be.
So when Ben Song leaps into the life of an astronaut right as the Shuttle is blasting off into space, I’m immediately concerned.
It gets worse when the Shuttle reaches orbit and the crew starts chatting.
The mission commander asks the pilot a bunch of questions to confirm that she’s ready to do various space things. She replies by snapping at him and telling him that she’s done it a bunch of times in a simulator and to back off.
This just seems wrong from the get-go because it looks like a scene where a father is teaching his daughter to drive or something. Where’s the professionalism? Is it not normal for a mission commander on a fucking spaceship to ask about safety perameters and such?
It gets worse when the pilot turns to the commander and says, “I promise, I’m gonna make you proud up here.”
Again, was this originally a scene of a young girl getting her learner’s permit?
She then turns to Ben and asks if he’s okay because he’s floating around stunned, totally not giving away the fact that he doesn’t belong there. This is when he begins the annoying trend of never, ever trying to blend in when he leaps.
He answers, “remind me again where the space toilet is?”
I’m pretty sure if that happened on a real Shuttle, the other astronauts would immediately assume that he was hypoxic and they’d start looking for holes in the ship. I don’t think they’d just laugh and actually tell him where to find the bathroom.
And really, finding the shitter is the least of your worries when you’re on a Space Shuttle, right? I mean, they don’t usually send people into space who don’t have a purpose, so at some point he’s going to have to know how to operate something. They’re showing a four-person crew on this mission and Space Shuttle crews are normally seven people. So you’d better fucking believe they’re not carrying any dead weight.
At the very least, he needs to know what the hell he’s expected to do on the ship. I just don’t believe that there’s a lot of “free play” time on a space mission that would allow an imposter to hide and avoid being called out.
So yeah, the writers put their main character into a really stupid position. That’s not always a damning decision as long as the story they want to tell justifies it. We just have to wait and see if it does.
We cut to Ian visiting Addison at her apartment where he discovers that she’s torn the place apart looking for clues about Ben’s decision to leap. Turns out she found an encrypted flash drive and she’s worried that it contains damning evidence about Ben’s motives.
This is all good. Addison should be shocked that her fiance might not be the person she thought. It’s still trapping her in that one-note realm of only caring about Ben, but some doubt adds a bit of timbre to that note.
Unfortunately for her character, Mason Alexander Park’s presence in the scene draws attention to how Ian is the only character with enough range of emotion to be interesting. Ian comes across as human whereas every other character thus far is pretty much some kind of one-dimensional archetype.
Ian and Addison get a message telling them that Magic has important news and they should really get their asses to work.
Cut to Magic’s office where he and Jenn explain to Addison and Ian that the intruder was Al’s daughter, Janis Calavicci. A weird continuity and forced conflict avalanche follows.
First off, at the end of the last episode, Magic was on his way to catch a plane to D.C. when Jenn stopped him to talk about matching the image of the ring to Al. It’s now the next day — we know this because Jenn says she figured out about Janis “last night” — and Magic is somehow back in his office.
Sure, maybe he canceled his flight and his meeting with the general, but that wouldn’t bode well for concealing the fact that shit is hitting the fan at Leap HQ.
Then we’re hit with the manufactured conflict. Addison reacts to the news of Calavicci by freaking out that they didn’t tell her about this discovery sooner. It’s a little weird, because how much sooner could they have told her? We can assume she went home to get some sleep at the end of episode one after two days of being awake, and now it’s the next day.
What they’re telling her isn’t world-shattering information anyway. It changes absolutely nothing about what’s happening right now, and it doesn’t affect Ben’s leap. So wouldn’t it make sense to let her get some rest and wait until the next day to tell her?
And if she would have gone straight to work instead of spending all morning tearing her apartment apart — which Magic and Jenn have no idea she was doing — she would have probably gotten the information as soon as she arrived.
So as it stands, she’s the one who is inexplicably late for work, and she’s furious at Magic and Jenn for keeping this information from her.
What?
Again, forced conflict. And it’s not a small interaction — this issue of trust becomes the theme of the entire episode. Well, if “theme” means blatantly hammering a point using all the subtlety of an enraged gorilla. Pretty sure it does.
The scene continues with the gang having an argument about how it’s safer to keep Ben in the dark rather than say anything that might jog his memory. Magic and Jenn posit that if Ben has nefarious intentions, the only thing stopping him from carrying them out is his amnesia. It sort of makes sense, but not as much as the writers want it to.
My counterargument is that Ben has no control over his leaps, so even if he remembered some malicious plan, there’s little chance he could carry it out anyway.
But hey, I know how the military thinks, and I can see where keeping the variables to a minimum would be logical.
Naturally, Addison hates this idea and Magic has to step up and tell her to shut up and follow orders. Ian again acts as the sole human-like voice in the scene by being visibly concerned for Addison’s feelings and suggesting that everyone calm down.
Then, to no one’s surprise, Ziggy locks onto Ben’s location just in time for Addison to go visit him in space.
Ian delivers the episode’s best lines in the discussion with Addison that follows. Well, the delivery and characterization is great, but the context blows.
It’s more buildup of this idea that no one trusts each other, so I contend that it’s additional needless crap that robs air time from Ben’s actual story in the past. So these cardboard people are having minor workplace issues? Yeah, that’s more entertaining than the time traveler in the fucking Space Shuttle. Keep mining that gold vein, show.
Speaking of which, we cut to Ben/Astronaut hiding out in the space crapper. Another astronaut knocks on the door and Ben says he’s having a hard time taking a shit. The other astronaut replies that since he’s a mathematician, he should work it out with a pencil.
Not really, but Ben is using an hour-long dump as an excuse to be absent from their monumental space mission, so…
Addison materializes and the dance between two characters with no chemistry ensues. There’s one decent part where Ben seems to be genuinely geeking out about being on a Space Shuttle, and that’s nice because a physics nerd who wanted to be an astronaut when he was a kid would be geeking out.
There are actually only a couple of interesting things that happen during this space mission (as you would expect — being an astronaut is probably boring and stupid and there’s no way to tell interesting stories there) so I’m going to use this opportunity to talk more about the character selection problems in this show.
According to google, another common conclusion about why Quantum Leap (2022) needs to be canceled and forgotten is that it “lacks fun”. That’s kind of a blanket statement that doesn’t address the core issues of the show, but I can see where it comes from.
Primarily, it comes from the piss-poor decision to make Addison the holographic guide.
I’m just going to come out and say that New Quantum Leap would be a thousand times better if Ian were the hologram. Ian is a character. Ian makes jokes. Ian has a range of emotions rather than just being a one-note cardboard “worried fiance”.
In fact, when I first watched episode one, I thought for sure that Ian would be the new Al. It would have been a perfect decision. It would even address another major complaint from the masses about Addison’s tendency to blend into the background of whatever time she’s projecting her hologram into.
See, one of the cool things about Al is that he dressed like a futuristic pimp. He would wear outfits made out of gold foil and light-up tie tacks and all kinds of crazy shit. Not only did this help convey the personality of his character, it helped to identify him as something that didn’t belong in the past. Al never blended in.
Ian doesn’t dress in crazy outfits, but Ian is clearly gender-fluid. What better way to allow a character to organically stand out in the past? No one would have to say a word about it or draw attention to it. It wouldn’t need to be discussed.
Ian would be a living, breathing example of how far society has come in the last five decades (or further, when the show decides to just shit all over its own premise about time traveling within one’s own lifetime). The audience could draw that conclusion, see that contrast, all on their own.
Keep in mind that I’m in no way saying that Ian should be the new Al because of the way they look. I’m saying Ian should be the new Al because the character is shaping up to be the only decent one and this show desperately needs some chemistry.
But no, fuck it. We get Addison. The most boring and single-minded character in the show — and a violent antagonist to the Bechdel test because all she thinks about or talks about is her fiance.
Quantum Leap Classic did amazing things with two characters, Al and Sam. The show would have been garbage without their chemistry, and though it’s easy to see that on its own merits, this show is conclusive proof.
Then it compounds the problem by adding in the workplace drama and comparatively boring crap happening back at Leap HQ. Honestly, if not for the fact that the writers gave Ian a character and not just a name and a job, the cutaways to 2022 wouldn’t just be bad, they’d be insufferable.
Anyway, we’re stuck in a scene with Addison and Ben talking and we find out Ben leapt into an Japanese-American astronaut named Tamura.
He starts to remember some things about his past and Jenn cuts in to tell Addison to shut up and stop helping him remember things.
Addison blatantly ignores her, also disobeying Magic’s direct orders in the process. Anyone want to place bets on whether she gets beaten and dragged off to a CIA blacksite for insubordination during a fucking time-traveling military operation?
She doesn’t.
At least Ben/Tamura acknowledges that he’s eventually going to be expected to do astronaut things and if he starts randomly hitting switches, he will likely drop a flaming ISS module on Moscow and kick off a thermonuclear war.
Holo-Addison solves this problem by walking him through the right way to flip switches. It’s a sort of callback to that Quantum Leap (1995) episode when Al helps Sam keep a supersonic plane in the air by giving him holographic movements to mimic.
I’m still not convinced that the other astronauts wouldn’t be concerned about the guy hesitating and fumbling with his basic duties, but whatever.
Oh, Ben also learned that he’s in Tamura’s body to keep him from dying on the mission. He shortly thereafter finds out that Original Tamura died during a spacewalk when high-speed debris tore him apart like pulled pork.
The shuttle goes apeshit and flips around, but it’s not Ben/Tamura’s fault. The mishap does cause mission commander/weird father figure Reynolds to crack his skull open and pass out or die.
This causes the pilot, Stratton, to wax on and on about how Reynolds was always this slightly oppressive father figure during training, sort of explaining — but not justifying — the weird learner’s permit exchange from earlier.
And so we get this odd setup to tie in this theme of trust with the Shuttle crew, I guess. The idea seems to be that Reynolds doesn’t trust Stratton to be a good Space Shuttle pilot. Which doesn’t make sense because he spent ten years of his life training her and fighting for her to pilot the fucking Space Shuttle.
Hell, he even personally selected her from thousands of candidates. Yup. Sounds like he doesn’t trust her. What an asshole!
I don’t know, it feels like completely tacked-on emotional horseshit that is supposed to elevate the dangerous space mission into something meaningful on a personal level? Fuck if I know.
Cut to Magic visiting Janis Calavicci’s mom in her driveway, and I now believe the real reason he’s called “Magic” is that he can teleport anywhere in the world that the plot needs him to. He was totally bullshitting about “catching a plane” to D.C. — he just materialized there. That’s why he got there and back in four hours.
Sadly, we learn that Al did not procreate with Tina, which is only something that matters to people who watched the old show.
The rest of this is just needless crap setting up a plan to figure out where to find Janis Calavicci, so again, padding. Maybe I’m alone in this, but because this is a time travel show, I’d rather spend time on the fucking time travel than the half-assed attempt at turning Leap HQ into CTU from 24.
In the cutaway, Jenn Chu does something where she’s emotionless and suspicious of people because that’s the character. They also pull her out whenever they need to handwave something that involves technology, but for the love of god we did not need this character in the show.
Cut to Ben/Tamura being forced into doing a spacewalk, which means he’s putting himself in the situation that leads to Original Tamura’s death. It understandably couldn’t be avoided, I guess. Astronauts gotta astronaut.
Cue more meandering poetic crap from Stratton about how great of a mentor and teacher Reynolds was. I was hoping that all of this would help flesh out the weird dynamic between pilot and mission commander, but it really doesn’t.
It’s just interminable, rah-rah bullshit about how when you’re in space you should ignore checklists and flowcharts and just go with your gut. I’m willing to bet they do not teach astronauts to ignore the procedures they spend a decade learning.
Anyway, Ben/Tamura goes into the vacuum of space and moves some levers around. There’s more drawn-out dialogue between Ben and Addison that’s not even worth mentioning.
Eventually, she sees space debris heading their way and Ben/Tamura ducks about three inches. This is apparently enough to avoid the catastrophic death that whisked away Original Tamura, so Ben is happy because this means he should be able to leap out.
But oh no! Something fucking stupid happens.
First, Addison says “you don’t control the leap, Ben” for the second time this episode, which is annoying because it stands out so much. That’s our big red flag that they’re setting something up, so let’s stay on our toes for that amazing payoff.
Now the stupid thing. Addison says Ben can’t leap yet. The debris that missed Ben/Tamura damaged some thermal protection tiles.
Fuck you, show. I mean, seriously…fuck you.
Take a look at this screenshot. See where Ben/Tamura is standing? He’s inside the payload bay. See those black things around the bottom of the ship, nowhere near him? Those are thermal protection tiles.
There is absolutely no way that him crouching slightly to avoid the debris caused debris to hit the fucking thermal protection tiles. This is just horseshit. The only thing the debris could have hit instead of him is the inside of the bay, which can be closed off with those big obvious doors.
Again, here’s the lazy writing. Just like with the pointless bomb in episode one, the writers wanted things to happen so they just distorted common sense and reality to make them happen.
Cut to Jenn and Magic having a conversation about how he should ease up on everyone even though this is a military operation. The Vietnam veteran who has been trusted with national security actually goes along with this shit.
This comes at the tail end of him asking Jenn why she didn’t cut Addison off and pull her out of the imaging chamber when she disobeyed a direct order. Jenn’s reply was that “it wouldn’t have gone over very well,” meaning that in the execution of her lawful duties to her station and country, Addison would be butthurt, so she didn’t do it.
Good enough reason.
He then asks Jenn if Ben leaped into her because she suddenly sounds like a cookie-cutter bleeding heart rather than a cookie-cutter emotionless hardass.
It’s actually kind of funny, but they step all over it when Jenn says, “that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me”. Fuck me. They’re really tripping over their dicks trying to convince us that Ben is the most amazing, wonderful person ever.
Not to mention that it’s an incredibly dumb thing for the head of security to say in the middle of investigating her own suspicions that Ben is a lying, dangerous, fucking traitor.
Of course she also just finished rationalizing Addison’s refusal to follow orders and subsequent act of treason because “Addison didn’t choose for any of this to happen.” Be sure to use that when the NSA is waterboarding everyone in Leap HQ for time traveling and hiding it from the rest of the government.
It’s great that they’re trying to humanize Jenn beyond being a cardboard standup of a person who they can drop in the scene whenever someone needs to touch a computer, but why are the writers characterizing her in a way that goes against the type of person she’s already supposed to be?
Conflict is interesting. The only thing that will make these cutaways to 2022 have any purpose is conflict. There’s no point in just seeing everyone working — Quantum Leap Classic proved that because we never saw the people back at Leap HQ working.
But here we have a character who should be creating conflict — her motivation is security — and she’s actively stepping out of her existing characterization to make it disappear. Then of course, Magic just says “yeah makes sense” and plays along with this shit.
Does the show not realize that they’re diffusing one of the most potentially engaging story dynamics they have at their disposal? Imagine if Leap HQ was run by a strict military organization that was at odds with Ben’s need (and desire) to be magnanimous in the past. That’s tons of drama, tension, and suspense right there.
Fuck, imagine Ian being the holographic go-between in that situation. That would be an amazing show.
Instead, we’re being steered toward this place where everyone is acting non-human and putting friendship over safety, common sense, national security, their careers, and the fabric of space-time.
This is what happens when poor writers are tasked with humanizing a story. They think humanizing means that you make it friendly, sweet, and non-offensive. You don’t know fuckall about human interaction if you think it’s all friendly, sweet, and non-offensive.
All that leads to is boredom. If everyone gets along, nothing happens. That’s fantastic in real life — I hate drama in real life and I love when life slows down enough to be boring for a little while — but it’s miserable when you’re trying to be entertained.
The show tries to compensate by giving us shit like we’re seeing in the rest of the scene: Jenn and Magic breaking into Janis’ house to sift through all her l33t hacker gear.
I don’t care. I really don’t. Wasn’t something happening in space or something?
Yeah, the space stuff sucks too, but at least it has something to do with the show’s basic premise. You know…a guy traveling through time.
Okay, so now we’re back in space and the crew is arguing about how to proceed now that the heat shielding has been damaged. One astronaut says they should just attempt reentry because they don’t have much oxygen left, but Addison tells Ben that there’s a 100% chance the shuttle burns up if they try it.
Naturally, Ben/Tamura shoots the idea down and our pilot, Stratton, agrees that they shouldn’t risk it.
Unfortunately, the limited oxygen supply means they don’t have time to fix the tiles, so Stratton suggests docking with the Russian Mir space station to get enough O2 to carry them through the repair process.
Stratton is acting commander, so she tells everyone to shut up and follow her orders, but Reynolds comes back to life and is a raging asshole. He tells her that she’s about to get everyone killed and I’m not sure why, because he then says that it would be embarrassing to turn to the Russians for help which decidedly wouldn’t kill anyone.
I’m not sure how one statement supports the other, but hey, I didn’t write it.
Reynolds takes charge and tells everyone to sit the hell down and get ready to deorbit. Pilot Stratton storms off, which I would say is a reprisal of this weird father/daughter thing, but I guess if I was convinced he was about to burn us all alive on reentry, I’d get up and leave, too.
Ben/Tamura proceeds to recite to Reynolds, word for word, every single sappy, boring thing Simmon previously recited to him. There’s some more back and forth discussion, but it culminates in a speech about love and trust that really seems out of place in a Space Shuttle disaster episode.
Whatever. It convinces daddy Reynolds to give Stratton’ idea a chance, and the scene again devolves into this weird “victory” where I guess the condescending patriarchy is defeated? I don’t know because these one-shot characters didn’t make any sense.
You’ve got the father-figure who spent ten years of his life helping Stratton become an astronaut but is painted as some kind of dick for it.
Then he suddenly is kind of a dick who can’t maintain a congruent point between the beginning of a sentence and its end.
Then he has a change of heart after Ben/Tamura recites nonsense back to him that he said to Stratton years ago?
Fuck it. I just hope real Space Shuttle missions were never this loaded with weird social drama.
Oh well, Ben is on another spacewalk because he has to point an antenna at Mir. The only reason I’m mentioning this is the strange audio that makes it sound like he’s blasting farts in his spacesuit the whole time.
Cut to the big reveal of Al’s daughter, Janis. Of course, she’s a cavalier, angsty hacker who minimizes the severity of what’s happening. I mean, why not jam both stereotypical female hacker archetypes into the same show, right?
The strained smugness is palpable throughout her line reads. I’m sure excited about her getting more screen time in the future.
Back in space, Ben realizes that the Mir crew isn’t answering the broadcasts of his Tang farts because they’re all asleep.
And guess what?
We get the big payoff of that awkwardly forced “you don’t control the leap” shit I noticed earlier. Ben decides he’s going to jump from the shuttle to the space station, and when Addison asks what he’s doing, he says…
“I’m controlling the leap.” Fuck, that was a long road to a really bad line.
Not a great screenshot, but notice how they didn’t even bother CGing an expressive face on Ben for this scene. He’s hurtling through space and he still looks like he’s reading a magazine on the space shitter.
Anyway, he misses the Mir space station and floats screaming into the sun and the show ends on a high note.
Not really.
But he does realize that instead of jumping to Mir, he accidentally jumped to the orbital prison where Russia entombed the immortal Rasputin for all eternity:
Not really, either.
We just get a thankfully hasty wrap-up where Reynolds apologizes to Stratton. I hope he’s apologizing about briefly being a dick after sustaining a head injury, and not for being overly concerned about the lives of his crew.
Then we learn that Tamura goes on to live on the ISS instead of becoming a smear of frozen meat trapped in orbit around Earth. At least Ben’s leap didn’t cause all of his debt to be erased, his family to win the lottery, and his penis to grow three inches like it did for Ryan in the last episode.
There’s an “emotional” exchange between Addison and Ben before he leaps where she’s actually crying. Ben, however, might as well be gazing at a Magic Eye stereogram poster in hopes of seeing the little sailboat.
I still don’t believe he cares about this woman at all.
Cut to some godawful fucking shit in Magic’s office.
Magic apologizes to Addison for withholding the discovery about Janis and for making a decision without her input, then my head explodes and I’m dead.
In what universe does this fucking show exist?
Let me recap by saying that based on the salient timeline, no one withheld jack dick from Addison. She wasn’t at work. She showed up late to work, and even then only because Magic called her so he could tell her about Janis.
How the fuck is that withholding anything?
Then there’s an apology for not allowing a military-run operation of massive scale to be run as a democracy. This is circular bullshit, because even if he’d have asked Addison’s input on keeping Ben in the dark, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that doing so was justified.
Think about it. His concern was that Ben could be up to some seriously fucked up shit. We’re not just talking about stealing state secrets — we’re talking about a guy who is traveling through time and can change history.
I made a joke earlier about how Ben could screw up and drop a flaming space station module on Russia, but remember that he actually had the opportunity to do something like that if he wanted to. At the very least, he could have sent a transmission to Russia calling them assholes and plowed the Atlantis into Mir.
In short, they’ve got a rogue, unknown entity running around the timestream who has the ability to end the world. If not the entire world, he could certainly end their world just by messing up something big enough that the butterfly effect does the rest.
So, yeah, don’t you want the leadership in that situation to err on the side of caution? Wouldn’t you want Magic telling everyone else to shut the fuck up because he’s making a decision that’s protecting billions of lives?
Remember, his decision to keep Ben in the dark wasn’t hurting anyone. No one. All it did was hurt Addison’s feelings. So we’re supposed to believe that Magic and Jenn and everyone else came around and realized that it’s better to slam dunk the fucking world into a flaming dumpster than to make Addison feel like she didn’t have a say in the decision?
What the fuck is Addison doing working for the Department of Defense in the first place? Seriously. What is she bringing to this operation other than being a pain in the ass?
Fuck that. This is all absurd. Again, this is what happens when people who don’t know how to write human characters and human interactions are put in charge of a show. They bend all credibility and common sense in favor of some lousy, tacked-on “moral” message.
Sorry, but if your moral compass tells you that it’s okay to let a person with questionable motives steal a time machine and run around unchecked fucking with history, then you have no business giving viewers moral guidance.
Anyway, we cut to Leap HQ where all of the dicking around with hackers and hard drives and other wannabe 24 nonsense leads to the discovery of this:
It’s either a map of time or Ben’s No Man’s Sky Twitch stream. Who cares?
They notice there’s one dot flashing and Ian tells us that it’s a destination, but we don’t know when or where or why so everyone looks concerned. They really don’t know any more or less than they did at the beginning of the episode, so I don’t know why this is so frightening.
If anything, it should be a relief that if he does have some nefarious plan, he needs to be in one specific point among billions to accomplish it. I like those odds.
Cut to the final scene where Ben leaps into the body of a boxer, gets punched in the face, and demonstrates that his expression after receiving lethal brain trauma is exactly the same as when delivering a romantic speech to his fiance.
You know, Quantum Leap Classic had this thing at the end of every episode where Sam would leap into a new person, he would notice something weird or frightening, and he would say “oh boy”. It was his thing.
I hope Ben Song’s new thing is that every time he leaps into a new person he gets punched in the face. That would bring this show a few notches in the right direction.
See you next time!
