By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 27, 2022 |
By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 27, 2022 |
This is going to sound like a weird hang-up, because it’s not like Quantum Leap’s original creator Donald P. Bellisario (NCIS, Airwolf, JAG) was exactly the Damon Lindelof of his day. Hell, the man completely botched the landing on the original Quantum Leap, and yet, I still feel a little old-man-yells-at-clouds at the prospect of another writer “solving” the Quantum Leap mystery, particularly here where the writers in question are the showrunners of La Brea, a dumb show that is also kind of fun. Granted, the La Brea showrunners have been replaced by the guy behind Blindspot, but part of me still feels like Al and Sam should have the honor of unlocking that mystery.
I will say this about the second episode of Quantum Leap, however: The mystery behind Ben’s decision to jump into the quantum accelerator still takes entirely too much time away from the leap, but it might have gotten a little bit interesting. I’ll also concede that, while the leaps will provide the entertainment for each episode, the mystery is probably what’s going to keep people like me writing about the show. Ben leaps into someone else’s body and saves the day isn’t all that interesting to write about the next morning, but “the whereabouts of Sam Beckett” kind of is.
Let’s quickly dispose of the leap: This week, Ben jumps into the body of an astronaut, David Tamara, on the space shuttle Atlantis in 1998 to help transport pieces of the International Space Station (Atlantis did exist, and construction on the International Space Station did begin in 1998, but Tamara and this particular Atlantis mission are entirely fictional). Ben learns that Tamara dies when he’s hit by debris on an emergency spacewalk, and while Ben avoids that, the debris that was supposed to hit him hits some tiles instead. Addison informs Ben that he changed history for the worse: Atlantis will disintegrate on reentry, exactly as the Space Shuttle Columbia does in real life 5 years later.
It takes some negotiating, but Ben convinces the other astronauts to avoid reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and, instead, reach out to Russian cosmonauts on the space station Mir. A couple of his crewmates hate the idea, but Ben helps another crewmate talk them into it. Thereafter, Ben has to basically leap through space from Atlantis to Mir and knock on the door to get their attention. Crisis averted. Everyone survives.
The mystery part involves a lot of obfuscation, thumb drives, some incoherent math equations, and a surprise appearance from Al’s wife, Beth, played by Susan Diol both here and in the original. Jen and Magic go to Beth’s house to find Janice, Al’s daughter. When they go to Janice’s house, they find a hard drive in her basement before Janice blows it up (she also tells Magic that Ben came to her, not the other way around). Janice is in the wind, but they have some valuable material.
Ultimately, the hard drive and the thumb drive reveal a small bit of the mystery: It reveals “millions of variables representing millions of places in time,” as well as one destination in particular, a “specific place at a specific time” that Ben wants to go to. The time and place is unknown, but maybe if Ben gets his memory back, he’ll remember where and when it is. That destination, apparently, holds the key to unlocking the mystery of the quantum accelerator and finding Sam Beckett.
Damnit, I like it. It’s simple, yet leaves open a number of possibilities that can extend Quantum Leap for seasons. I think that Donald P. Bellisario might even approve. Now hopefully they can focus more on the leaps and less on the mystery.