It’s awkward, and in my head, I’d imagined a scene where they’d actually slept together, which would’ve been deeply uncomfortable. But as I said, I did Sam wrong in my assumptions. He’s able to remember Donna leaving him at the altar in the future, and theorizes that, because Donna’s father abandoned her as a child, that she’s simply re-enacting that trauma from the other side in order to avoid being hurt again. So, with Al’s reluctant (and creative) help, he decides to track down Donna’s dad and arrange a meeting between the two, in the hopes that it will “fix” Donna’s psychological problems and, eventually, allow her to commit to marriage with his real self.
Confused? It’s a bit of a temporal tongue-twister to be sure, and it’s also pretty shallow as psychology goes; while people are absolutely shaped by their experiences as children, the assumption that Donna can be healed by such a simple, obvious step feels a little too convenient. But then, that’s kind of the show, and just realizing that Sam was trying to help her in the long run (even if that help meant as much to him as it did for her) went a long way towards improving my appreciation of all of this.
We get plenty of great Al content here, further establishing his relationship with Sam as well as suggesting some potential antagonism with the people in the future responsible for the project. Al threatens Sam that if his behavior continues to violate protocol, someone might bring down the ax; this allows for some fun tension (as Al has to find a way to help Sam without immediately revealing that help to the people observing him), but it also doesn’t bear a whole lot of scrutiny. There’s no way to stop the Leap project at this point, which is likely why Sam made his first jump to begin with. The biggest threat they have is taking Al away, but then they’d have no contact with Sam at all.
I honestly can’t remember how this particular idea develops, if it develops at all. We learn bits and pieces about the future (and we do get at least one episode set there), but most of what we know is just to provide a little more context for Sam; apart from Ziggy (the computer) and Gooshie (the programmer guy with bad breath) and, of course, Al himself, none of the names stick around long.
Which is fine. While it’s fun to try and piece together an idea of where Sam came from out of the various clues Al drops, the real focus is always on the present, whenever that may be. “Star-Crossed” also gives us the first of what will be many Forrest Gump-esque twists of our heroes happening to stumble their way into world history. In his efforts to reunite Donna with her estranged father, Sam inadvertently gets the Watergate burglars caught, leading to Nixon’s downfall. All that and he convinces Jamie Lee to stick with her meathead boyfriend. Not a bad bit of work.
Stray observations
- • Looks like we’ll have to wait a bit for the classic opening narration to stick; for this week’s two episodes, Sam himself provides the narration explaining the show’s premise. It’s fine, but I think the other narration is better.
- • Given the timing of the jump, it looks like Sam’s real purpose was to make sure Jamie Lee and the professor didn’t get married.
- • It’s interesting: Sam is in a fine mood after getting Donna and her dad back together, and while Al points out that this might just make Donna stick with her first attempt at marriage (the one before she met Sam), Sam is optimistic that he’ll win out in the end. Despite the fact that Al should know one way or the other, he neither confirms nor denies Sam’s hope. (We do find out what happened eventually, but I won’t spoil it here.)
- • Bakula really does make this work so much better than it might have. There’s a fundamental sweetness to his performance on the show that makes it impossible for him to feel predatory.
“The Right Hand Of God”
Originally aired 4/7/1989
In which Sam learns how to throw a punch
Here’s where the series really begins to test your tolerance for corn. While the opening crawl tells us that Sam has jumped into a boxer in October of 1974, most everything that happens in this episode feels like it could’ve been copied from a B-movie in the ’50s, with little updating between then and now. A group of nuns buys the contract of a down-and-out boxer prone to taking dives, and everything hinges on a big title bout—the only problem being, Sam has never boxed a day in his life, and while Al knows the moves, being a hologram severely limits his ability to spar.
“The Right Hand Of God” is where we find the series settling into its most basic form. “Genesis” had the novelty of being the first leap, one which required a fair amount of time and exposition for both Sam and the audience. “Star-Crossed” mixed up a regular leap with Sam’s personal life, perhaps as a way of easing the audience into the premise; our hero isn’t just leaping through time, he’s getting a second chance with the love of his life.
“God,” though, is where Quantum Leap arrives at the formula that will define most of the episodes going forward. Sam jumps into a new person at a funny or awkward moment (here, it’s in the middle of a boxing match where the other guy has been paid to take a dive); he adjusts to the situation as Al provides background details; the two of them take a guess at the crisis that needs to be resolved before Sam leaps; Sam resolves said crisis (often in a clever and unexpected way); and then we get that flash of blue-light and a glimpse of where our hero is going next.
In Sam’s opening narration for this episode, he compares himself to the Lone Ranger, a reference that dates the series as much as anything else (I’ve heard the term “Boomer nostalgia” before, and that’s pretty much what we’re working with here). It’s not a bad comparison, but in order to understand why Leap feels at once familiar and completely new, it’s worth looking at how it fits in the context of the television adventure shows which preceded it.
I’m not sure what was the first series to introduce the concept of a wandering hero, driven to travel the world in a way that conveniently gives him an opportunity to fix other people’s problems on a weekly basis. It’s a clever way to provide the novelty of an anthology series with the emotional stability of a recurring familiar face. Before Quantum Leap, there was The Incredible Hulk, which followed David Banner as he hitchhiked across America, trying to stay one step ahead of an obsessive reporter and his own big green secret; before Hulk, there was The Fugitive, featuring falsely accused Dr. Richard Kimble on the run from the law as he sought the identity of the one-armed man who murdered his wife.
Leap wasn’t even the only wandering hero show on TV when it originally aired. MacGyver was still going strong, and The A-Team (which offered four heroes for the price of one) had only been off the air a couple of years when “Genesis” premiered. What sets Leap apart from the rest of these shows is the way the premise directly addresses the format, literalizing what was typically just an assumption. Kimble and Banner would end up trying to help people in whatever small town they found themselves in because they were good people in a bad spot; Sam does the same, but for him, helping others is literally the only hope he has of ever achieving his own goals.
It’s a neat trick, and one could imagine a version of this series where Sam didn’t start off as a hero; one where he was forced to learn empathy and kindness in order to save himself, like a long-form version of Scrooge’s Christmas ghosts. But the version we got works just as well, and I like how the show more or less elides why it’s necessary for Sam to accomplish a goal before leaping. Most of the time, our heroes are too busy trying to figure out what needs to be done to worry about why they need to do it, and because they keep their focus on the task at hand, audiences do too. Sam mentions a higher power that may or may not be God at one point, but that’s about as specific as it gets, and the show is all the better for its simplicity.
As for this specific episode, it’s a relief to have something so simple after the high-concept shenanigans of “Star-Crossed.” I said it was corny, and I meant it, but I’ll admit to having a fairly high tolerance for corn; and the mix of Sam’s idealism and Al’s mild cynicism makes the cliches easier to appreciate.
Still, it’s hard to ignore just how cliche dependent this particular outing is. Not only do we have a beautiful, faith-driven young nun to inspire Sam, we’ve got the beautiful stripper girlfriend with a heart of gold, the trainer who’s tired of his boxers taking dives, and the gruff gangster who plays by his own rules. The episode also reveals one of the basic limits of the premise: the one person out of all of these who could use some character growth is the boxer Sam jumps into, the guy hanging out in the imaging chamber while Sam goes and makes better choices for him.
“God” feints at darkness without ever being that interested in delivering, but the straight-faced sincerity of it won me over by the end. It’s not a classic, but I appreciate how it was necessary to do something more basic this early in the run. We’ve established the bounding box, we’re setting viewer expectations. In the episodes ahead, there will be plenty of chances to push at the edges. For right now, there’s nothing wrong in enjoying nice things happening to nice people: escapism at its most absolutely pure.
Stray observations
- • There’s a lovely moment where Sam tells Trixie, the boxer’s girlfriend, that she’s a stripper and that stripping is a profession, not an identity; sex workers were typically either victims or punchlines in this era of television, and having the hero express a fairly modern perspective on the industry is indicative to the show’s ongoing efforts to treat everyone with dignity.
- • Sam uses future knowledge to bet on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman fight in order to make enough money so that everybody ends up getting what they want. (He also wins the big fight with a little help from Trixie and Sam, but this seems less important, money-wise.)
- • I’m always curious what it’s like for people when they return to their own times after Sam leaps. I think we get some kind of explanation down the line, but one of the reasons I love this show is the number of things it leaves up to the viewer’s imagination.