Quantum Leap Heart o a Champion Television 

Five Thoughts on Quantum Leap‘s “Last Dance Before An Execution” and “Heart of a Champion”

By | September 8th, 2022
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back leapers! This week, Sam is a on death row and in a wrestling ring. Let’s go!

1. A truly heart-rending episode

In “Last Dance Before An Execution,” Sam leaps into a Cuban-American named Jesus Ortega, who is on death row, along with his friend, for the murder of a priest. Sam presumes, as does Al, that Sam is there to prove Jesus’s innocence. He has a bit of a guardian angel on his shoulder in the guise of Margerita, a lawyer from the DA’s office who has taken up his innocence as a secret project. Most of the episode is spent with Sam and Margerita trying to drum up evidence and prove Jesus’s innocence.

Of course, there’s a bigger issue at play here, and the one that really affected me during my watch, which is the idea of capital punishment itself. Quantum Leap is no documentary, but there’s a lot of heart in the performances, and they drive home just how terrible and unfathomable execution truly is. This episode also heightens Sam’s feelings as a leaper, as he’s not used to having such a primal and close encounter with death. Sam is as unhinged as we’ve seen him, aside from a few moments throughout the series.

The kicker of all of this, story wise, is that Jesus is not innocent. In fact, Sam gets Margerita to essentially prove his guilt definitively through Al’s interference. Sam leaped in to get his friend, Raul, to be freed. It’s a bit of a clusterfuck at the end of the episode, but the job gets done, and Sam leaps just as he’s about to die.

2. A relatively Sam-light episode

This episode has multiple scenes that take place outside of the prison holding Sam, and becomes one of the least Sam-heavy of the entire series. I mean, he’s still on screen for 75% of it, but we rarely get him so physically silo’d that he isn’t at least on the periphery of a scene. But Margerita is a true secondary lead in this episode, with a few scenes totally sans-Sam.

This doesn’t really help or hinder the episode, it’s just an observation.

3. Deus Al Machina

Whenever it wants to, Quantum Leap reminds you that, for some reason, Al can sometimes be seen by pure of heart children. This becomes convenient when Al is in a church with Margerita, and a small girl thinks he’s an angel, and uses that to communicate through her. It’s a bit of a weird scene for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is its exploitation of someone’s genuine faith, but it is done in the service of saving a life, and I think just about any God-fearing person, atheist, or agnostic would say that tricking a rube kid to save a life is probably ok, in the grand cosmic karmic sense.

4. Chainsaw Charlie, if you’re nasty

“Heart of a Champion” brings Sam to professional wrestling in the 1950s in Atlanta. Now, I’m no David Shoemaker, but I’ve watched my fair share of wrestling over the years, and there are a few really weird things in this episode that I would think even someone who has never watched a full wrestling match would notice are weird.

The first one is how people are “pinned.” The pinning in this episode is a combination between pro wrestling and boxing, where there is a three count, but the winning wrestler doesn’t need to actually cover their opponent. Maybe this is how things were done in the 50s in Georgia, but it seems totally strange for a modern audience.

The other part that doesn’t ring (pardon the pun) true at all is that when Sam and his ‘brother,’ Ronnie, go out for beers after the match, they drop their Russian characters and are just acting like the good ol’ boys they are. In this era, kayfabe was the law of the land, and if you were playing a Russian, when in public, you were Russian. Sam says at one point “those are just characters!” This is about as verboten as it gets for old school wrestlers.

All of this would be easy to chalk up to the show being made by people who don’t really know wrestling. But Terry Funk is in this episode! A wrestling legend who has done it all, Funk should’ve said “just so you know, you need to PIN your opponent to get a pinfall.” Also, Funk is a little stiff, but not bad, in his role here. It’s pretty funny that the majority of his time on screen is spent trying to kill Sam as some sort of sex game with his wife.

Continued below

5. Bah gawd, that’s Angela Patton’s music!

As a man of a certain age, I get real pleasure out of seeing character actors on Quantum Leap and recognizing them from a million things. Angela Patton was a theater actress almost exclusively for the first 60 years of her life, and then found work in a billion things since then. She’s maybe best known as the innkeeper in Groundhog Day, but if you watched TV in the 90s/00s, you saw her in lots of stuff. There’s no real point to this entry, other than to say that I’m a big Patton fan. She’s good in everything I’ve ever seen her in.

The ‘Oh Boy’ Teaser

Sam leaps into some sort of an air-raid situation.


//TAGS | 2022 Summer TV Binge | Quantum Leap

Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

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