Quantum Leap (2022) - Episode 1x03 - Somebody Up There Likes Ben - Review
In its best episode yet (I mean, we're only 3 episodes in, so hopefully this happens a lot), Quantum Leap gives its procedural elements more room to breathe.
In 1977, Ben leaps into boxer Danny Hill the night before he loses the biggest match of his life. His brother, Darryl (Danny’s coach) struggles with PTSD post-Vietnam as he tries to keep his gym afloat. Is Ben supposed to win the fight just to save Danny’s career? Not quite! Darryl, without Ben’s intervention, was going to kill himself several months after Danny’s original loss. Spoiler Alert: Ben puts right what once went wrong.
Procedural Storytelling: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Shadowbox Against the Historical Record
Now that’s how you tell a story via Quantum Leap’s procedural engine. The first seven minutes take place entirely in the past—no distracting serial developments outside of Ben and Addison’s relationship (and Ben’s memory loss). For the first time, I felt a strong emotional connection to the guest cast (especially Darryl), and the character beats felt mostly grounded. Ben as Danny also seemed to have a deeper connection to the case of the week, with the scene where he confronts Darryl about getting help for his PTSD really standing out. Sure, the ending was a bit too abrupt, but even Addison’s obligatory expository ‘and they lived happily ever after’ felt somewhat earned (especially compared to the pilot’s infodump after nonsensically dropping C4 down the sewer to save the day). I don’t have too much to say here, other than I hope that we get more of these kinds of moving stories with interesting weekly players.
Serial Developments: The Real Housewives of Time Travel Hills
The serial developments are having a weird influence on the pacing of the procedural elements. We would expect Ben to leap the moment he puts right what once went wrong, but he’s given some extra time to chat with Addison for reasons of drama. We also need the last shot—the cliffhanger hook—to be of Ben leaping into the next life; however, the present-day ensemble also needs some kind of emotional resolution. So we see Ben fixing the past, Addison and Ben chatting, Ben leaping away at just the wrongright moment, the ensemble joining Addison for Real Housewives later that night, and only then do we see where Ben landed. Its awkward, but I can appreciate the storytelling challenges of servicing an ensemble in the present, here. I don’t know what else I would suggest they do, but I hope they refine the editing going forward.
Otherwise, while I am still fairly uninterested in the present-day story elements, Ian (who serves as an excellent combination of comic relief, technobabbler, and sensitive friend) remains the best part of the ensemble outside of Ben and Addison.
The show is also doing an awful lot of yadda yadda-ing around other serial elements, like the how they’re running a top-secret time travel experiment and hiding it from the pentagon (so it doesn’t get shut down, so they can rescue Ben, or something).
Legacyquel Baggage: Fun Retcon Nonsense
The way a Leaper relates to their body has always come across as a bit wonky. In the original series, while everyone (including Sam) perceived him to be the Leapee, he didn’t only swap consciousnesses. He fully swapped bodies; as in, Sam used his own body under some kind of timey-wimey quantum-leaping illusion. Weird, I know: He walked when he leaped into someone without legs, he employed his own physical strength when throwing punches, and (creepily) he even conceived a child.
In Somebody Up There Likes Ben, the opposite is the case. Addison explains that Ben has “leapt into the body” of someone with different physical characteristics—so Ben can use Danny’s “strength and speed” (though he lacks his skill) when boxing. This raises all kinds of interesting questions about experience, identity, and embodiment, ranging from dysphoria to how minds and bodies relate (i.e., Ben may have Danny’s physical strength, but he doesn’t retain his boxing muscle memory). Unfortunately, I can’t say that this episode deals with embodiment or identity meaningfully. Sure, Darryl gets arrested, but we only get subtext about racialized experiences of police violence; this is the closest thing we get to a reflection on Ben as a Black man. I really hope the show has something more interesting to say about identity and embodiment.
What will this mean for next week’s episode, where we see Ben leaping into a woman?
In another big change with big implications, Ben leaps past his own lifetime into the 1970s. In this case though, Ian provides an in-world explanation that avoids being a retcon via sufficient-if-silly gobbledygook about slingshotting across time; the take-home here is that Quantum Leap (2022) suddenly has many time travel options. There was a part of me that was largely excited about a Millennial / Gen X specific version of Quantum Leap, with Ben jumping into more immediately familiar eras (familiar to me). But I’m okay if the show wants an excuse to leap into all kinds of time periods.
Finally, most of this episode’s serial developments are actually legacyquel baggage. Al’s daughter Janis drugs her mother (Beth) to steal Al’s equipment—and seems to be building her own Leaping Machine. She’s stolen Al’s old Ziggy console, which goes a long way to explain why a powerful AI keeps missing key details that could predict how to help Ben leap. But is she still supporting Ben’s mysterious motivations, or does she have her own separate goals? Some fans have speculated that Janis could be the Evil Leaper1 we see in the original S5—though Janis only exists thanks to Sam’s last (onscreen) Leap, so it would be surprising to have her aim to undo her father’s legacy.2
The problem here is that Ben’s goals remain so opaque that it is hard to understand what Janis might be doing to support or oppose him at this stage.
Quantum Leap’s third episode has a less clunky pace with a bigger focus on procedural over serial elements. I liked this episode a lot! Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
I always hated this plot. If Sam has some kind of divine purpose here, it was annoying to have him working against some sort of cartoonishly evil opposite force.
It’s complicated, but in the 1993 series finale, Sam stopped Al’s first marriage from ending (Al went missing for several years as a POW in Vietnam), thus completely rewriting his own history. It’s nice to get confirmation that Al had still been Sam’s hologram, as I had always imagined that Sam changing the past for Al had changed his own timeline so significantly that it left Sam leaping forever as some kind of Unstuck Timeless Godlike Being.