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 an Alabaman lawyer and a never-been actor. Let’s fire up the accelerator and hope that this leap is the leap that brings us home.
1. It’s like Jeremy without hair plugs or Mercury poisoning
In “So Help Me God,” there was an actor that looked so familiar, but I could not place him. So, to trust IMDB did I go, and it turns out that the actor who plays ‘the Captain’ is Byrne Piven, father to Jeremy Piven. When Jeremy was best known for PCU, The Larry Sanders Show, and Grosse Point Blank, he was among my favorite actors. Then he turned into his character from Entourage and became both a weirdo Mercury addict (look it up) and a sexual assaulter, so let’s just pretend he retired in 2000, pre-hair implants.
But anyway, Byrne does a good job playing a stereotypically racist/corrupt Southern politician in the 50s, and Sam essentially is playing a poor man’s Atticus Finch, minus the competence. This episode is well acted, but everyone plays their parts almost too well, as there are few surprises. Every person acts exactly as you’d expect them to in every situation.
2. The duality of Sam’s love life
In “So Help Me God,” Sam’s leapee is married to a shrill, bigoted, status obsessed woman who Sam stays up all night working to avoid sleeping with. In “Catch a Falling Star,” Sam almost risks living out the rest of his life as a bad actor in order to bone his old piano teacher. We’ll get to those specifics in a few bullet points, but these two episodes show the first time that Sam does anything specifically for sex, or to avoid sex. Usually, Sam is a bit of a prude about these things, saying how it wouldn’t be right to sleep with another person’s partner, even if they think you are that person. But here, Sam is thinking with both heads for once. For the record, I do not want to advocate for Sam to, essentially, trick someone into having sex with him. I’m just observing what I see.
3. Highlighting Bakula’s real talents
This show often times sets Sam up in situations that seem unfair for him, but secretly are playing into Scott Bakula’s talents. This is how we get Sam playing the piano a few weeks ago, and being cast in Man of La Mancha this week. These are skills that can be tough to fake for an actor, whereas other talents that Sam’s leapees may have can be a little easier faked. But bad acting is bad acting, and Bakula is anything but a bad actor, so giving him a stage role makes perfect sense.
4. Sam’s personal life bleeding through (again)
In “Catch a Falling Star,” Sam is reunited with his first big crush, his piano teacher. Of course, to her, Sam is her old Julliard beau, but this allows Sam the opportunity to live out his teenage fantasy in real life. Al, never exactly the paragon of sexual propriety, is actually pretty bothered by this, as he sees this as Sam using his leaps to alter his, Sam Beckett’s, life, and not helping the person he leapt into. I get Al’s point, but as long as Sam isn’t scorching the earth beneath him, I can also see Sam’s point. If Sam is there to save an actor from a terrible fall, but can also reconnect old lovers and let himself get some nookie in the meantime, it’s not exactly destroying the timeline, now is it?
5. Good, but boring
These two episodes are good representatives of, to borrow a baseball term, a replacement level episode of Quantum Leap. That’s to say, these are pretty average episodes, but don’t do anything particularly interesting or exciting. Both of last week’s episodes were emotionally rending. Sam leaping into a woman, a blind man, or a person of a different race are all new to the show, and therefore exciting. Both of these episodes played out exactly as you’d expect, without too many surprises.
Continued belowDon’t get me wrong, these are still enjoyable and lovely ways to spend 48 minutes, but let’s hope next week gets back to the really great episodes this show is capable of delivering.
The Oh Boy Teaser
Sam is in a graveyard on a stormy night, and a woman in a ghostly white, flowing dress emerges from a crypt. Oh boy, indeed.
