Welcome back leapers! This week, Sam is a TV sidekick and a dick dancer. Let’s hop to it!
1. A fun setting
“Future Boy” presents Sam as a TV sidekick to someone called ‘Captain Galaxy,’ whose kids’ television show is all about time travel. That’s already a fun premise for a show about time travel. Very meta! But putting it in the 1950s, during the ‘golden age’ of television, adds to the metatextual narrative at play, and also allows the producers to do some fun stuff like live commercials and cheesy special effects. In many ways, the episode is a love letter to the TV that series creator Donald P. Bellisario grew up watching, and that love shows.
The episode also does a really nice job of showing Moe, the Captain, as a flawed and troubled man, but never feels comfortable straight up calling him ‘crazy’ or anything of the like. There’s a heft amount of respect tossed his way, which is shocking for both the period that the show was set in and when it was made. I was very taken aback by that, in a good way.
2. A near-leap…
One of the best moments in this episode is when Moe shows Sam the time machine that he’s built, and essentially describes a crude version of string theory to him. This is followed by his machine almost working; we see Moe begin to tingle blue like Sam does before a leap, but in a much smaller, less powerful way. His theory is almost there, but the technology isn’t. It’s great to see Moe’s genius ‘justified,’ as well as give a little scientific context to the ideas of the Quantum Leap Accelerator.
3…Followed by a too cute moment
The part of the episode that fell flat was the very end, where Sam watches Captain Galaxy read a letter from ‘young Sammy Beckett’ asking about time travel, and we see a near paradox: Moe tells Sam about string theory after Sam told Moe about it. This show is one walking paradox, so I’m not going to get too much into it, but this felt just a bit too cute for the episode, and somewhat dulls the meeting of the minds that happened earlier.
4. Another stigma free episode
Look, is “Private Dancer” perfect? It is not, but what it does do is a) cast a deaf actress in a deaf role, and b) allows her to succeed based on her talents, not as a sympathy move for her disability. Let’s talk about the second part first. The episode does a good job of showing people’s feelings about the hard of hearing, even today, without making anyone too much of a monster or too much of a white knight about it. We see people struggle with how to treat someone different than them, as well as people who are doing their best simply failing. Sure, a few folks are meaner than they need to be, but no one is really making fun of her or being unreasonably cruel to her. They treat her deafness as matter of factly as can be imagined in this instance, which is frankly shocking. Again, this is a progressive show by its nature, but this episode seemed even more progressive than I would’ve expected.
5. The casting
Maybe a part of that is because of the casting of Rhondee Beriault as Diana, a deaf waitress and dancer who works with Rod “the Bod,” aka Sam. Beriault is deaf herself, and does a great job of being natural and understated in the role, due in no small part to how close to her reality parts of the episode must have been. Perhaps her consultation or even just her presence in the room(s) led to a more nuanced, balanced take on the deaf experience. Whatever did it, this is the first episode involving a disability that didn’t feel preachy or performative in some way.
The Oh Boy Teaser
Sam wakes up in the living nightmare that is being a character in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.”
