One of the hardest types of episodes to make are the episodes that are intended as season finales but may need to act as series finales. This is what Quantum Leap had to do with “Against Time,” even if the producers will claim that they never saw this as a series finale. The fate of the show is still up in the air – and reportedly will be until May – but the show gave us an interesting, if not totally finite, ending, at least for now. Let’s get to it.
1. Evil is so easily repelled
I had talked in my Boomb Tube review of “As the World Burns” about the idea of Jeffrey ‘becoming’ Gideon Ridge and how that seemed like too simple of a solution, because Jeffrey seemed like a nice enough kid, and Gideon is as broad a character as we’ve ever seen on either iteration of Quantum Leap. But that’s what happened, and the series leaves all ambiguity aside for just why he’s become who he is: he is doing all of this to ruin Ben’s life.
On one hand, it is something a kid would dream up, but you’d think that, at some point, the realization would set in as to just how extreme this plan is. But just as extreme as the plan is, it only took one conversation from Ben to a young Jeffrey to change the entire timeline. Ian goes so far as to call him a “mensch” which seems like such a crazy 180 from the Gideon we saw just two minutes earlier that I actually laughed out loud.
So I guess the moral of the Jeffrey story is that one conversation can change a kid’s life forever, so make sure to inspire every child you encounter to make the best decisions they can. #themoreyouknow
2. Fake outs
Just like we knew that Magic’s resignation wasn’t going to really get Ernie Hudson off the show, it seemed absolutely certain that Jenn’s ‘death’ would be retconned somehow. Don’t get me wrong, seeing Jenn killed was heartbreaking and I don’t wish the character ill, but the sacrifice she made – again, like Magic’s resignation – undercuts the drama that the show is trying to project.
This is part of the problem with a procedural show that quasi-resets every week: the drama has to feel important week to week, but then it gets erased. Having the HQ crew around gives the show extra gravitas and stakes, but when all of those stakes are undone at the end of the episode, it is hard to get too invested in any changes.
3. No Ashton Kusher, though
So this episode makes a big deal of the possibility of a butterfly effect taking out the entire timeline if Ben is successful at stopping Jeffrey from becoming Gideon, but it takes that term in the loosest possible sense. The whole idea of the butterfly effect is that things you’d never expect to be changed get changed through small actions. Gideon Ridge is supposedly this huge player on the tech scene, as well as the man who pulls the strings for the NSA. You’re telling me that if that guy never existed, the only change to a government agency that somewhat falls under his thumb is that things are slightly brighter? If he’s a huge donor to the project in this new timeline, shouldn’t they have way better tech than they did before he was pumping money into it?
4. The Hannah of it all
I’ve been a broken record about not loving the Addison/Ben relationship and how refreshing his relationship with Hannah has been. But Hannah has been totally written out of the series now, even though she’s potentially more important to the plot/future of the show than Jenn, Magic, Janis, or anyone not named Ben, Addison, or Ian. The chemistry that they had was really special, and the way she kept showing up was a really interesting wrinkle in a show that, sometimes, relied too heavily on a 35 year old concept without a ton of innovation.
5. The next season?
So if there is a third season, it’s going to look quite different. Hannah’s formula, which everyone presumed would bring Ben back to the modern time, was intended to reunite him with Addison, which is actually very funny. Imagine if Gideon had entered the imaging chamber and wound up having to just hang out with Ben for all of eternity? Or if they did what Magic said and got some 25 year old soldier to enter it?
Continued belowBut putting Ben and Addison together into the leaps does change things quite a bit. It’s going to be really awkward for folks to see them, when they leap into teenage brothers and sisters or old men at a factory, just making out all the time. These lovers haven’t touched each other in like 4 years, they’re going to be super horny and PDAing all over the place.
Beyond all the smooching, it will also change how the leaps work, how the home team deals with them, and will make things that much harder in some ways. It took Ben some time to be able to roll with the leaping punches, and now he’s got to train Addison to not freak out. Can he enroll her in some improv classes? Can they leap into a Del Close Second City class from the 70s?
Regardless, this truncated season was a lot of fun and, even if all the things that made it interesting were sort of tossed away, I hope there is a third season for us all to enjoy. If not, it’s been my pleasure recapping the Quantum Leap reboot, even if I’m still salty that they didn’t use the original theme song at all.
