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 leaps into a mortician and a pool shark. Let’s fire up the accelerator and hope that this leap is the leap that brings us home.
1. Did David Lynch direct this episode?
Quantum Leap is not a show that often deviates from its visual formula. There is a look and a tone to the series that, despite its different settings and time periods, remains somewhat consistent. “Goodnight, Dear Heart,” and the next (and “Her Charm” from last week) are all directed by Christopher T. Welch, a relatively unknown TV director with just a handful of credits under his belt before this run of episodes. Welch doesn’t seem to have a particularly art-house style to his work (maybe I’m misremembering The Secret World of Alex Mack as less edgy than it was), but this episode has a really persistent and jarring technique of giving Sam a flash of a vision of the murder victim, Hilly, sitting on a lakeside, looking gorgeous.
This is never really explained, with the closest we get being the idea that Hilly, or God, or whatever, is trying to get Sam to investigate her death more, and that these flashes are reminders of his responsibility to her. It’s a crazy thing to introduce to a show that has dealt with life and death in 40% of their episodes.
2. Sam’s fixation
Along with these flashes, Sam seems uniquely determined to ‘solve’ this leap, and not just so he can get going. Sam seems absolutely single minded in his pursuit of an ‘answer’ to the dilemma of what exactly happened to Hilly. While her death is tragic and mysterious, nothing can bring her back, and yet Sam seems intent on doing just that. He is reconstructing her life: listening to her music, reading her journal, sitting in her bedroom. His cause is just, but Al is correct in finding the whole thing just a little disconcerting.
3. Again, this show is trying its best
Quantum Leap attempts to be on the right side of history with most things, and does a shockingly admirable job not falling to too many stereotypes. “Goodnight, Dear Heart” attempts something of a bisexual love triangle, but it gets really eaten up by 1990 mainstream understanding of sexual orientation. To recap: Hilly and Greg were a couple, but when Hilly got pregnant, they broke it off. But a secret diary (side note: on television, there’s always a secret diary) reveals a former lover, which turns out to be best friend Stephanie, who stabbed Hilly in the temple with a stiletto heel and then dumped her body in a lake.
While there isn’t a ‘queer folks are so crazy they’ll brain you for breaking up with them!,’ it does seem a little more melodramatic than it would be if it were a heterosexual couple that broke up. Again, the show is a product of its time, and tries its best to be better than that.
4. Al’s history
The second episode, “Pool Hall Blues,” sees Sam leap into a pool shark in the 1950s. Sam’s never heard of him, but of course Al has and, beyond that, this one is personal to Al. We’ve seen a lot of episodes personal to Al in the past, but this is the first time that he’s been directly interfacing with someone he knows outside of the leap. Al ran away from his orphanage and got hooked up with Charlie ‘Black Magic’ Walters, the same pool shark that Sam is now leaped into.
Al is key to this episode, as he is able to use Ziggy to calculate the perfect angles for Magic, so that even Sam, a shit billiards player, can rise to the occasion. It takes Al a little too long to figure this out, as it seemed like the most likely solution the entire time, but that’s TV for you. Along with a secret diary, some obvious things must be held back.
5. The proper tension
After solving a murder in the last episode, suddenly fighting for your business doesn’t seem as consequential, but Al’s connection helps the episode maintain a certain level of tension. And this is as good of a time as any to praise the series for consistently having stakes that are felt, even if the outcomes are almost always easy to see. You know that Sam’s not going to let Violet, Magic’s granddaughter, essentially allow herself to be raped to save her business. You know that Sam isn’t going to leap out without solving Hilly’s murder. But that doesn’t change how well the show handles these moments.
When Ziggy cuts out right before the big shot, we know that Sam’s going to make it, but Quantum Leap let’s us all believe for a moment that, perhaps, there’s a chance Sam fails. That’s the sign of a compelling series.
The ‘Oh Boy’ Teaser: Sam leaps into a trapeze duo, mid-routine. Oh boy, indeed.
