TV Round-Up: Quantum Leap: “Fellow Travelers”

When last we saw Dr. Ben Soong, he had just remembered the reason he stepped into the accelerator and began traveling through time – it was to save his fiancee, Addison.

Now, as we pick up the story, the fallout from that revelation is hitting everyone – and causing a bit of a rift between Ben and Addison. Addison is upset that Ben kept this from her and that he can’t remember why he did.

These feelings parallel his current leap where Ben is a bodyguard protecting a young singer from a threat to her life. Addison’s dialogue about Ben keeping secrets and not helping things takes on a huge double meaning, as do several of Ben’s conversations with the singer that could be directed at the singer and Addison. It’s not exactly subtle, but it is fairly effective, especially Ben’s promise that he and Addison are a team and moving forward he will keep her in the loop.

It echoes a bit of what we heard before the break when Addison confesses to Magic that Ben is different in the past, with parts of his memory wiped away. I do wonder if this is setting up some kind of conflict down the road between these two as Ben remembers why he didn’t or couldn’t tell Addison.

Meanwhile, Jenn catches up to Janice and brings her into the project for questioning. I can’t help but feel that somehow Janice is playing the crew yet again and that she wanted to get caught. Is this part of the plan she and Ben hatched? Also, will we get Addison to talk to Janice to try and discern why Ben started leaping and what will the consequences of that be?

Honestly, this is one of the first times since the episode Magic revealed that he knew Sam replaced him that I was as invested in the timeline of the current events as I was in the leap for Ben.

Ben’s leap is a fairly standard one – save someone from getting killed. It feels like this was a go-to for the original and it works well here. What made the originals work is what works here – an interesting mystery full of red herrings and the show giving us characters we can invest in. Yes, it’s fairly cliched that you’ve got a successful singer who is killed by one of three people who can benefit from her being gone. And maybe it’s because Debra Ann Woll is well-known enough in genre roles that I’m conditioned to root for her. Whatever it was, it worked.

I do wonder if and how the news that the series is picked up for season two will play into the long-term arc. Will we now have to wait until the season finale for Ben to recall why he started leaping as a cliffhanger for next season? Or will they follow the map for season one and worry about season two later?

TV Round-Up: Quantum Leap, “What A Disaster”

After seeing “What a Disaster!” I can see why the producers shuffled the order of things, moving this from the pilot to the sixth episode of the season. That’s not to say “What a Disaster” is bad, so much as to say asking the audience to invest as much in Ben’s background in episode one would have been a larger ask.

Ben leaps into a John, a man facing imminent divorce from his wife, just moments before the San Francisco Earthquake in 1989. The series is doing well at having Ben cover his initial confusion upon entering a person’s life mid-drama, and this week is no exception. Ben having to cover for gaps in his knowledge of John’s wife as his wife asks for divorce works well enough, though I keep wondering why no one notices that Ben is focusing on Addison and her advice from the future.

Speaking of Addison, can I just say that I liked the handlink used here a lot more than the one we’ve seen until now? If there’s one aspect of the original pilot they can and should use again, it’s the link.

Back to our story. Turns out John is there to save the couple’s son from dying and reunite an estranged mom and son. This mission has a personal note for Ben, who once got B’s on his report card because he was tired of his mom telling him he was special and then after they got in a huge fight about it, she died. So, Ben’s carrying around a bit of guilt over that (as one would) and it all comes bubbling back.

Some of the better emotional beats of the original series came when Sam connected with the leapie due to some emotional connection. So, Ben’s connection here worked, as did his call to his mom seconds before he leaped.

TV Round-Up: Quantum Leap, “Salvation or Bust”

No matter how good or bad “Salvation or Bust” is, most of the conversation about it will probably cover the last thirty seconds of the show when another Leaper shows up who knows Ben and feels that Ben is following him through time.

The implications of this to the overall arc of why Ben leaped and what his destination is are fascinating. And given the pace at which revelations are coming in the show, I don’t think it’s something that will exactly be swept aside for an episode or two.

Part of me says that this new leaper is somehow connected to Janice and that the imaging chamber she’s building isn’t to try and contact Ben but to contact whoever this other leaper is. A big question it brings up is just how many accelerators there are and just where are they located? Given that leaping seemingly takes a huge investment of power, how exactly are the other leaping group keeping their tracks hidden?

Or is this all part of the time travel thing where the new leaper is from our future but ending up in the past.

Give the show credit – it’s got me intrigued to see where this all goes.

TV Round-Up: Quantum Leap, A Decent Proposal

For years, I’ve wondered what it would be like to be a person that Sam leaped into – would you recall much, if anything about it? What would you recall? How would you know that Sam had come in and changed things?

After thirty years, we get an answer to that question, with Magic sharing that Sam leaped into him at a younger age and changed his and others’ personal history.

While I like the explanation and the scene itself, I do find myself wondering about a few other things. One is that Magic says that Sam saved his life (and that of Tom) during the time he was away. I can’t help but wonder how Magic knows if and how Sam altered history. Would history instantly shift around Magic and those around him? Another was, did Magic know what Al gave up to that Sam could save his brother and Magic? Or was what Sam did for Al something that was kept under deeper wraps?

When you reference one of my favorite episodes of television, “The Leap Home,” it brings up a lot of questions and implications.

TV Round-Up: Quantum Leap, “Atlantis”

Watching “Atlantis” a detail from the original Quantum Leap reared its head and wouldn’t let go. Where exactly does the person that Ben is displacing in time go? The original had an area where the person would leap to and could then interact with Al in the future, but so far, we’ve not seen or heard it mentioned.

And while it doesn’t solve the question of when and how the astronaut that Ben replaces died earlier in the story, it does provide some better insight into the person Ben is replacing. We certainly got the impression that Al was interacting with the person first before coming to see Sam to help Sam “pass” as the person he had leapt into.

This was a better episode than the pilot last week, probably because that one did most of the heavy lifting in terms of exposition. Now that we have the team in place and a thumbnail view of who each person is, we can start digging in a bit to the future.

I did find the conflict between what the team in the future wants Ben to know versus what the person contacting Ben wants him to know intriguing. An early original episode saw Al sending messages to Sam via an ancient language Sam knew, written out on a sash Al was wearing. I did find it interesting to see Addison pushing Ben to recall things and jog his memory over the express orders of Magic in the future.

We also get a cameo from Beth, who puts Magic on the trail of Janice, Al’s daughter who has some type of connection to why Ben decided he had to go. I’m glad we got this cosmic map that the previews leaned heavily into on the radar now instead of making us wait a few more episodes to bring things into focus. The easy answer to where Ben is going is to somehow find Sam. I imagine that Janice could feel that given how much Sam gave up to save Al (one of the few through lines of the original series), maybe she owes it to Sam to bring him home when her father couldn’t do it. If that’s where this all leads (and assuming that Scott Bakula is hedging when he says he’s not involved), I will be all for it.

As for the main plot of “Atlantis,” it felt like a page out of the original. The original series was very imitative, taking pieces of successful films of its era and telling its own kind of story around them. In many ways, it felt like this was a Quantum Leap take on Gravity, with our characters in there.

I did like that we actually hear about and see Ben being the glue that can hold a team together – we hear about it in the future and see him doing it on the shuttle. His wonder about being in space and then his recklessness to solve the problem also worked well.

I do, however, feel like the moments with hidden meaning for Madison when Ben says something about coming home or the nature of their relationship, could become strained quickly. So far, they are achieving a good balance, but it could go ka-ka quickly if they aren’t careful.

TV Round-Up: LaBrea, “Pilot”

Early in the first episode of NBC’s La Brea, a character turns to another and notes that it feels like they’re living an episode of Lost.

Which is all well and good, if you’re doing something that feels fresh and original like Lost did when it debuted all those years ago. Alas, too many shows since Lost have come and gone by attempting to capture lightning in a bottle again by doubling down on big mysteries that promise answers that will be as mind-boggling as those we got on Lost.

Part of what made Lost work was that it allowed us to invest in the characters on the island. Even in the pilot, there was enough time to at least give us something to grasp onto about each character beyond the superficial.

In its pilot episode, La Brea hasn’t yet given me anything concrete about these characters that makes me want to invest in them. We have the estranged husband and wife, Gavin and Eve, and their two teenage kids. They’re separated but Eve is still wearing her wedding and engagement ring on a necklace. Meanwhile, Gavin has headaches and sees visions of something that he can’t quite identify yet. Those visions drove him out of the Air Force where he did, um, something.

Eve carries a massive amount of guilt over not being their for her kids — especially the daughter who lost a limb in a car accident because Eve couldn’t or wouldn’t get away from work.

One morning, while taking the kids to school, a massive sinkhole opens up in downtown Los Angeles. Eve and the son, Josh, are sucked into the sinkhole while the daughter, Izzy, isn’t. Turns out there is some type of tear (think Doctor Who’s tear in space and time from Matt Smith’s first season) and somehow Josh and Eve end up in a prehistoric time, complete with no cell service and hostile animals.

Meanwhile, Gavin sees birds flying out of the sinkhole that match his visions and now he’s seeing his wife. Is he somehow connected to them and will the governmental agents, who are covering up the rip in the space time continuum at the bottom of the sink hold up, believe him?

The pilot throws a lot of characters at us, fast and furious. We have a doctor/survivalist and his daughter, a guy who wants to commit suicide, and the wacky comic relief guy who has downloaded music to his phone and has working air pods. The pilot builds in a lot of mysteries and threads but none of them particularly seized my imagination in quite the same way a polar bear on a seemingly tropical island.

La Brea also suffers from some effects that make your basic SyFy series great by comparison and some rather dull direction. Again, comparisons to Lost, which had its pilot directed by J.J Abrams (back before he started polarizing fan bases), don’t help.

After a single episode and an extended preview of what’s to come, I’m not sure I necessarily will be coming back for more. I’m already behind on so many other things I want to or feel like I should be watching (looking back, I should have watched the first episode of Foundation instead) that I’m not sure I can or want to give this show any more bandwidth.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes Eve does lose the wedding ring necklace and its dug up by her husband near the exact spot she lost it. So, there is apparently some wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff going on here. Except, Doctor Who has already done it and done it better…

Robert Holmes Doctor Who Re-Watch: “Carnival of Monsters”

For the series’ twenty-fifth anniversary, Doctor Who took a moment to offer up a satire of the series and its fans with “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.” Set at the Psychic Circus, the serial sees various parties trying to keep a trio of ever-hungering god-like beings entertained with varying degrees of success. In many ways, the serial is a predictor of the ever-increasing hunger that the world seems to have to consume pop-culture and then how quickly it can be and is forgotten. The Gods of Ragna Rock use up various acts, quickly moving on to the next one with the constant chorus of “Entertain us.”

It’s a brilliant, subversive bit of Doctor Who and one that sits in my top ten.

But, it wasn’t the first time that Doctor Who would be so subversive. The series would offer up a satire of itself fifteen years early to celebrate the show’s tenth anniversary. But as with everything involving the late, great Robert Holmes, not only would the serial be subversive and point out the current state of Doctor Who, but it would also create a template for the next decade or so of our favorite program.

Robert Holmes Doctor Who Rewatch: “Terror of the Autons”

You have to admire the sheer audacity of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks. A mere three stories after “Spearhead from Space,” the team not only brings back the Autons to invade Earth yet again, but they’re brought back in virtually the same story as we saw in “Spearhead from Space.” Just substitute the Master in the role of Channing from “Spearhead” and the two serials are remarkably similar.

The Nestene, using the Autons, have decided it’s time to invade Earth again. Though this time, the attempt to take over our world features a different ally and is a bit more subversive. Whereas “Spearhead” is a full fledged frontal assault (complete with the memorable image of the Autons coming to life as shop dummies), this invasion comes more from within with the Master spearheading (pardon fully intended) the wiping out of a great number of the population and then invading in the chaos.

The Nestene appear to have decided — or possibly been persuaded by the Master — that taking over Earth is easier if you plunge the world into chaos by killing off large chunks of the population via plastic chairs or daffodils. The invasion plot continues a theme from Robert Holmes’ “Spearhead from Space” of taking the everyday, mundane, or even safe things of life and making them scary somehow. In this case, you can be killed by authority figures like the police or struck down in the safety of your home by a plastic daffodil cutting off your ability to breathe.

It’s a pretty chilling invasion plot, if you step back and think about it. And the idea of your final moments being given over to fear as you’re attacked by a plastic doll or daffodil is one that’s pretty chilling.

The Fonz and the Shark

This afternoon at 5:30 p.m. CST, MeTV will repeat the iconic Happy Days episode, “Hollywood, Part 3.” For those of you who don’t have episode titles of Happy Days memorized, this is the opening trio of episodes from season three when the Fonz goes to Hollywood for a screen test to become the next James Dean.

Oh yeah, he also water skis and jumps over a shark.

That moments has become iconic in pop-culture history thanks to Josh Hein and his college roommates coming up with popular phrase “jump the shark” to define the moment when a piece of pop culture (mostly TV shows) peaks and begins to decline in quality. And while I may not think the “Hollywood” trilogy of episodes is the best example of Happy Days at it’s best, I’d argue that the Fonz jumping the shark wasn’t the moment the series started to decline. (It’s the moment Ron Howard left and the show elevated Scott Baio to leading man status).

I’m not alone in this feeling either — the episodes’ writer Fred Fox made the case for this as well a few years ago. The episode was also the focus of a Mental Floss post earlier this month — almost as if someone there looked at the schedule and knew this episode would be on my mind this week.

I unabashedly love Happy Days. I enjoy the repeats on MeTV and I’ve got all the seasons available for purchase on DVD. (I’m still not sure why they released all but one of the Ron Howard seasons.) And while I would never put this Hollywood trilogy up there in my top tier of episodes, I do think the trilogy and Happy Days as a whole gets a bad rap for a memorable pop-culture moment.

Kicking off season five, the Hollywood storyline is meant to lure in viewers the way the three-part story with Pinky Tuskadero did a season four. It’s built on stunt casting (Lorne Green cameos, for heaven’s sake!), lots of location filming (the cast seem to be having a fun vacation and occasionally filming), and highlighting the cast in ways the show normally didn’t (Henry Winkler apparently told producers he could water ski and they wrote it in).

But the central dynamic of the friendship of Richie and the Fonz is still in place (it gets tested here when Richie gets a movie offer and Fonzie doesn’t).

At this point, the Fonz was the central marketing feature of the show, thanks in large part to Winkler’s charm and Howard’s understanding of pop culture and entertainment.

Early on, the Fonz was a bit of a harder character with a definite edge to him. Even in season three when the show reboots a bit from a single-cam show about being a teenager in the 50s to a multi-cam show with the Fonz living over the Cunningham’s garage, the Fonz still had an edge. In “The Motorcycle,” we see that edge as everyone tries to protect Ralph from Fonzie beating up him up over a destroyed motorcycle. Or in “The Other Richie Cunningham” we see it in the Fonz’s plan to allow Richie to double date with Ralph while having Potsie stand-in for him on a blind date Howard has set up and then Fonzie’s solution when the whole thing goes sideways thanks to Potsie getting handsy.

Probably my favorite example is from “Richie Fights Back.” After being humiliated by bullies and Joanie besting his at karate, Richie turns to the Fonz for help in being “tough.” Fonzie gives him a few pointers, including acting tough and using an intimidating voice. It all comes to a head when the bullies come back to Arnold’s and Richie decides to stand up to them. When the intimidation factor doesn’t work, Richie asks Fonzie why, to which Fonzie replies that at some point you have to have to actually have a reputation to back it up.

The Fonz would slowly lose this edge in the back half of season three and much of season four. He’d become a bit more super-hero like as the show progressed, though seasons once Howard left attempt to show some character growth from the Fonz (he enters a long term relationship and wants to become a father in the final seasons).

But, the jump the shark moment isn’t quite the decline that pop-culture would have us think it is. The show would get a bit sillier as seasons went on (the gang taking on the mob and the Fonz faking his own death are not a highlight). And it’s not just the Fonz who would lose his edge as the series went along. (I’d argue that Ralph Malph’s character becomes increasingly one-note as the series goes along. If you look at him in seasons one and two, Ralph has an edge to him that just becomes Ralph is easily scared by the time Don Most departs).

So, I don’t necessarily think this is the beginning of the end for one of my favorite shows. If you’re tuning in today, there’s still a lot of good stuff left to come (among my favorites, the Fonz’s date checklist) and there’s some moments that dim the Fonz’s edge a bit more (his own song and dance in season six, for example). But I’d argue that the show’s real decline comes when Chachi is included in the opening credits. But that’s a story for another time.

Robert Holmes Doctor Who Rewatch: “The Space Pirates”

What if I told you there was a Doctor Who serial written by the great Robert Holmes in which the presence of the Doctor and his companions wouldn’t alter the outcome of the story one bit?

You’d probably think I was talking about the classic serial, “The Caves of Androzani.”

And you’d be correct.

But I could also be talking about “The Space Pirates,” Holmes’ second offering for the series.

At this point in the Patrick Troughton era, scripts kept falling through and there was a behind-the-scenes scramble to get something on the screens to fill time. And “The Space Pirates” sure feels like it’s doing a lot of filing time over the course of its six episodes.

The story has a pretty dodgy reputation among Doctor Who fans. Part of that is that the single surviving episode features the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe locked in a room with little or no impact on the story unfolding. Another part of it is that there’s a lack of visual materials to go with the surviving audio, making viewing the telesnap version of this story a bit of a slog at times.