Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 5, 2023
Last Spring, while everyone was shutting down production for the season, Quantum Leap was one of the very few shows with enough foresight to begin working on the second season of their series, knowing that they could be affected by the Hollywood strikes. They weren’t wrong, and while the networks this fall are mostly airing reality competitions, game shows, and Yellowstone reruns, NBC has five episodes of Quantum Leap to take the network into 2024 and another batch of season two episodes.
The mission in the episode is a vintage Quantum Leap mission: It’s 1978. Ben is on a military cargo plane shot down by a surface-to-air missile and crashed in Russia with a crate on board. Everyone somehow survives except the pilot. The Russians want what’s in the crate, and the only people who can stop them are Ben and his military compatriots — the white guy, the closeted gay guy, the Joe Pesci type, and the jingoistic ’70s feminist, who is played by Melissa Roxburgh of Manifest. She’s much better here and has an actual personality, which strongly suggests that “stilted and wooden” was just the Manifest aesthetic.
The crate turns out to be a decoy, so Ben and the gang have to figure out how to stop a surface-to-air missile from shooting down the plane with the actual crate that has the important stuff inside. En route, the closeted gay soldier steps on a landmine with a pressure plate, and Ben MacGyvers him out of it. He then attaches the landmine to their jeep and drives the jeep into the missile launcher after the missile is shot at the American plane. Because it’s a heat-seeking missile, it boomerangs back around and blows up the missile launcher.
Cool.
However, the difference between this mission and others is that neither Addison nor any other holograms are there to help Ben. He has to go at it alone. Pieces of his memory do return, however, which means we catch flashback glimpses of how he and Addison met.
The big twist at the end of the episode is that Ian shows up in hologram form instead of Addison. Ian tells Ben that Ben hasn’t been seen in three years, he was presumed dead, and they shut down the Quantum Leap project in the meantime. Oh no!
The big question is: Has Addison moved on? Because I really don’t want to do a Cider House Rules storyline where Ben has to compete with Addison’s new boyfriend for her affections while also continuing to leap. Also, if they shut down the project, why is Ian there?
I also don’t know how to unravel the time logic of this. In the present, Ben has been missing for three years. In the past, Ben went from one leap to the next, although all leaps were into different years in the past. However, all of the leaps are in the past and the only way those in the Quantum Leap project would know about a leap is if they helped to facilitate it. If, in the present, Ben has gone three years without a leap, how did Ben miss three years of time in the past if he made one immediate leap to the next? I think I may have broken my brain and that I probably don’t make sense, anyway.
I asked ChatGPT, and at least it agrees that this doesn’t make sense: “It seems there might be a paradox in the time logic presented here … This scenario might require a more detailed exploration of the fictional universe’s time-travel mechanics to provide a definitive explanation.”
Tune in next week for a more definitive explanation.
