Welcome back to our journey through the lifetime of one Sam Beckett, as we follow him through lifetime after lifetime of righting the mistakes of the past. This week: Sam returns home from the Navy with a big surprise and has to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes heels. Let’s fire up the accelerator and hope that this leap is the leap that brings us home.
1. The most realistic opening yet
I really appreciated the opening of “The Americanization of Machiko,” as it did a few things really well. First of all, it took us directly inside of Sam’s mind; we saw him looking for context clues to figure out when and where he was. Lucky for him, this was a situation where he had a moment to get his bearings before having to jump directly into action, unlike when he leap into a gun-toting gumshoe over a dead body or a post-coital gangster.
But what really worked here was that Sam, because he could’ve had no way to know, left Charlie (his leapee)’s new wife back at the bus station. This is the first time that Sam’s initial actions when leaping, though totally logical, set a bad precedent for his time in that body.
2. The Intolerance of 1953 Ohio
Occasionally, Quantum Leap episodes exist as an opportunity to show how far we’ve come as a society. Both episodes this week tackle a social issue, but “Machiko” really is just a full court press on the anti-Asian, specifically anti-Japanese, attitude that the United States held in the years following World War II. There are a few different characters that act as the avatar for this, with the two most prominent being a former baseball player veteran who blames the Japanese for the failure of his career and Charlie’s mother.
While the veteran is drawn about as broadly as you can imagine, yelling and spray painting slurs at every chance he gets, Charlie’s mom (played by Knives Out‘s grandma, K Callan) is a much more honest and realistic version of racism. She has “nothing” against Japanese people, as long as they aren’t marrying her son. Sadly, this is the type of racism that still lives and breathes strongly in our world today, and so the message of this episode still rings true, even if the immediate circumstances depicted likely wouldn’t have happened in the exact same way.
That said, the mother’s eventual embrace of Machiko seems over the top, even donning traditional Japanese garb (acquired where?) for their American wedding. But the point is a strong one, where people, when they get to know someone as someone more than ‘the other’ often times cannot keep up their prejudice. Of course, it shouldn’t take a personal experience to not hate, but sadly it often does.
3. Another first
“What Price, Gloria?” was shot at the end of season one but, as previously discussed, was not aired as the season two premiere as originally intended, but in the fourth slot. I wonder if this was to allow new viewers at the start of a season an easier entry into the show and its world. Because this episode, as teased in the “Play it Again, Seymour” write up, was the first in which Sam leaps into a woman.
Now, let’s get a few things out of the way. This show, and Sam in particular, attempts to be on the right side of social issues, and so Sam never bemoans being a woman for any reason that isn’t basically “can you believe heels and bras, amirite?” Al, on the other hand, basically acts the entire episode as if he’s five seconds away from jerking off because Sam is an attractive woman. There’s a particularly cringey moment as Al recounts how the project’s psychiatrist says he has issues with latent homosexuality, and Al treats this as if it is the worst thing anyone could’ve ever said about him.
The only part of this episode that feels gross, from Sam’s actions, is the end of the episode, I’ll will get to in the fifth bullet point.
A note on Scott Bakula’s acting in this episode: I appreciate how Bakula never attempts to walk with a ‘feminine’ gait or to carry himself in a way that feels unnatural to him. An easier acting choice would’ve been to have Sam feel at home in Samantha’s body, but that is not very believable, nor is it as enjoyable from a viewing standpoint. Seeing Bakula, a tall man, attempt to walk in heels and fail makes for a better visual than him navigating his new reality with aplomb.
Continued below4. Issue of the Week
Much like how last episode was all about Asian discrimination, this episode is basically a treatise on 1990 mainline feminism. Sam is aghast at 1960’s behavior in the office, whether it is the idea that a woman would get a job to meet available men, or Sam’s boss’s suggestion that she needs to sleep with him to keep his job.
I’m always torn on these episodes, as they are clearly produced with the best of intentions, but they also come off as dated and a bit preachy. Not that the messages don’t deserve to be preached, nay, screamed from the mountaintop. It is simply that there isn’t enough time to actually handle these issues effectively with, you know, fitting in a sci-fi time travel plot and effectively advocating for systemic changes.
5. So…God wants a fight?
So each leap ends once Sam accomplishes his goal which is always on the side of good. So, in “The Americanization of Machiko,” once Charlie’s mom accepts Machiko and their love, he leaps. The goal of “What Price, Gloria?” is to keep Gloria, Samantha’s best friend, from dying by suicide after being rebuffed by Samantha’s boss. Sam accomplishes that, but doesn’t leap yet.
Why? Well, because God, the established curator behind when/where Sam leaps, wants Sam to put Samantha’s boss in his place. How? Well, by stoking gay panic and getting punched in the mush, of course!
Sam shows up to work in a hot little number and goes into the boss’s office and, more or less, says “I want to fuck you.” When the boss starts getting ready to get down, Sam reveals his own truth, which is that he’s a man, even if that is not Samantha’s reality. He mentions how he walks like a man, and carries himself like a man which, as noted in point #3, is correct. The boss reacts poorly to this, upon which Sam decks him for being a general sleeze.
Now, here’s the rub: Sam was trying to get into a position where he could beat the shit out of the boss, but also make him never try to hit on Samantha again. Those are noble intentions, and he knows that a piece of shit like the boss (cleverly named Guy Wright, aka the right guy, get it? GET IT?) will likely be incredibly homophobic. But still, using ‘eww gross a penis’ is not a good look. At the time, it was probably not an issue on anyone’s mind, but it didn’t age particularly well.
The ‘Oh Boy’ teaser
Sam leaps onstage, playing the final chord of a song on a piano. He hears thunderous applause, but cannot see anything. That’s because Sam is blind! How will he get out of this pickle? Find out next week!
