Nerfect Drifty

The ending felt weirdly anticlimactic because it came down to one final duel, and the amount of territory was so lopsided. I had thought it would come down to something like 40 and 60 or something, but it was like 79 to 2. I liked that it opened with a big duel between two guys with lots of territory.

Been an addictive show and I wish I had remembered to post here before the night before the finale. Last week there were two huge swaths of territory on the board: the one on the left that kept changing hands and the one on the right. I kept wanting to see a challenge between the two big patches so we could get that satisfying huge light-up and someone controlling half the board. Of course that's not a good idea for the player because it gets harder to hold and jeopardizes the $20,000 nightly prize. At one point there will be only two people left so I wonder how that duel will go. It seems anticlimactic to just have it come down to a single duel. I'm hoping there will be special rules, like a best 2 out of 3 thing.

So this corrupt corporate executive is releasing a pesticide that is gonna kill people and cost his company a crapload of money in lawsuits. The only way he can be stopped is if his enemies get a copy of an incriminating memo of which there is only one copy. Instead of feeding the memo into the nearest convenient paper shredder or open flame, this idiot decides to hold on to it? I guess it's for sentimental reasons? Like his dearly departed mother gave him the sheet of paper it's printed on? Or maybe it's a religious thing? I've heard there are some ultra-strict sects of Judaism where you cannot destroy anything that has God's name written on it.

Remember Lothos from the original series? The evil leaper episodes got a lot of hate back then, but I thought it would have been cool if Gideon somehow became Lothos. Some people wrote some original series fan fiction which gave an origin story to Lothos, and that he was a normal guy who got trapped in a supercomputer after a leaping mishap.

I watch because I keep holding out a foolish hope that Sam Beckett will return home.

I think they did that in the original series because it would be too difficult to control animals and babies and stop them from reacting to Dean Stockwell's presence. Here they can just avoid animals all together and CGI them in when they want to.

You think the hacks that write this show are going to take a good actor and give him good material?

Yes but when they did that, it was the story. Like Sam being the young woman who got raped, or the housewife dealing with a husband who didn't approve of her feminist activism, or the first leap as a woman where he dealt with all the sexual harassment and sexism at the car company, or the one where he leapt into a possibly gay military cadet and they tackled the issue of gays in the military. They didn't have some story where Sam had to save someone from drowning, then tack on a "oh yeah by the way my husband is a regressive sexist jerk". This B-plot and that big scene with the bandages was nothing but Author Filibuster. Wanting to spread some message is no excuse for doing your job (entertaining) badly. And given all the problems with the A-story, that part felt more like an Excuse Plot.

Oh okay. That makes more sense.

I guess that's a good point, but did those surgeries even exist back then? I could tell where this thing was going when Dina insisted on being called Dean, so I'm just left to wonder if the writers expected that whole thing to be a surprising reveal. Because it felt like they were trying to do a surprise reveal when the bandages were revealed. I wouldn't put it past the writers on this show to think they were writing a surprising reveal. They really are that terrible at their jobs.

See that's what got me the whole time. The last time they did a story about this, it was set in 2012 when society was thinking about trans issues. Also, that was the entire leap story. I can't see anybody being comfortable being open about that in the 1950s. It just didn't make any sense and they shoehorned it in because they wanted to tell some preachy message. And if they wanted to do THAT, why didn't they set the story closer to the present so that this B-story didn't seem so anachronistic? I hate it when telling a story becomes secondary to preaching a social message. This episode was just indescribably bad. Heavy handed social issue messaging, cliched story, idiotic character decisions. At least they finally gave Rachel's boss a name. But it wasn't some big reveal like we could be all "OMG it was that guy???" It's just, some guy named Gideon walks in, and I'm all "why were they keeping his identity a secret?" I mean, I never refer to my supervisor at work as "my boss". I call him "Steve" because that's his name. None of the writing decisions made sense. Why did they set this in the 1950s? Why did they make Ben a 17 year old girl? Why did they give the satchel containing the ever important map away? They were ACTIVELY USING IT FOR A TREASURE HUNT. Why were they being secretive about the name of Rachel's boss if he was just going to be a new character all along? Why were Addison and Tom so eager to get married right away, to the extent that the guy had to pull some strings to get a judge to stay late? You know, I used to look forward to each new episode of this show. Now I wait several weeks because it's like some sort of chore to slog through.

But if they didn't fly through hostile airspace, they would not have needed decoys in the first place.

I simply could not get past the fact that the robbers didn't wear anything to obscure their faces. Nothing. Even if one of the robbers was not brother to a bank employee and thus instantly recognizable, and even if things had gone perfectly to plan and they were in and out before the cops showed up, their faces would be all over the security footage. I know this took place in 1986 so I should not make too many assumptions about the technology, but banks had cameras all over the place even back then. They were bulkier and more expensive, but they were there.

A lot of talk about the series in general here, but not a lot about the episode itself. It seemed like there were an awful lot of plot holes. Primarily, why was the Air Force flying something so important through hostile Soviet airspace in the first place? They were flying from Germany to India. Today, a flight from Berlin to New Delhi doesn't go through Russia, although back in 1978 it did go through some of the Soviet satellite countries. Still, for something this important they could have taken a longer flight path. Maybe go down through Italy, over the Mediterranean, and through the Mideast? Then those 4 Soviet soldiers showed up at the crash site. The gang subdued them and stole their guns but didn't restrain them or anything. So what were the Russians doing while the Americans were having their little confab? Just waiting patiently? They were too polite to counter attack or leave or anything?

This happened in the original series too, but it wasn't as drastic and it was just a footnote. Between Sam's first and second leap, something like 2 weeks passed in the present when it was just an instant for him. Also, the present year in the original series started at 1995, then abruptly jumped to 1999 at some time. I don't think there's any explanation that would be satisfying or not sound like a lot of weird sci-fi mumbo-jumbo.

I think you underestimate the strength of forgetfulness and inertia among consumers.

Stawpah was implied to be a ghost sent back to Earth to save Tonchi and Pete from the mine collapse. Stawpah knew what was going on from personal memory. Unless Sam is going to keep leaping into things he has a personal memory of, he's kinda screwed.

It seemed like he DID want to come home, but knew that he couldn't until he saved Al's marriage. He did that, and apparently leaped somewhere else as himself. But even if he wanted to continue helping people, he can't do it by leaping as himself through time, with no knowledge of the future provided by a hologram. That's kind of what I was saying. If you assume that leaping through time caused the nuclear winter, then Martinez is the good guy trying to fix history, and the gang at PQL are the villains trying to thwart him. I thought it was an interesting perspective to think of.

Original series they didn't even have to do character development. There were, for all intents and purposes, 2 characters. They could develop the relationship between Al and Sam and they did a good job at it. You could sense that brotherly love through the little snatches of back story they slipped in now and then. Gooshie, Ziggy, and Tina were sort of characters from present day, but they were more frequently referenced than actually seen. Those three were mostly comic relief now that I think about it. Gooshie as the lead technician with terrible breath, Ziggy as the nearly omniscient computer with the big ego, and Tina as a basis for Al's anecdotes. Every character in this show felt like the characters in a slasher movie, except that none of them were killed. It's like, everyone was there just to be there, and some half hearted attempts were made to give them stock personalities. It feels like they took old school Quantum Leap and merged it with a boring workplace drama. After the original show went off the air, some fanfiction site called "Quantum Leap: The Virtual Seasons" went up. It does more story arc stuff with modern day than the original show did. It was written by fans, who are just amateurs, and the character development is STILL more interesting than this show. Lastly, I'm so pissed off that this show had the chance to put right a big wrong from the original series: Sam Beckett never getting home. And yet they don't bother. I know it's just a TV show, but the thought of a good man like Sam Beckett all alone, permanently leaping through time, or trapped there, just upsets me. You know, even if they did like one episode, where it's discovered that Sam stopped leaping and settled down somewhere in time, like what Captain America did, I would be happy. I just need closure damnit.

Ziggy was only figuratively the mole. The gang in 2022/2023 were giving information to Ziggy, and the antagonists in the 2040s were using it against them. It was not a conscious act of subterfuge by anybody. It's like this... if you were a regular Texan in November 1963, you would have no knowledge of what was going to happen on on the 22nd of that month. If you time traveled from now and went back there, you would have knowledge from what is currently a matter of history. If you showed up on the 6th floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, Oswald would wonder what you were doing there and who told you his plan. Well, nobody did... you just found out after it became public information and part of the historical record.

In that last shot, where they are expectantly watching the accelerator for Ben to come back, was anyone else hoping to see Sam pop out? I know Scott Bakula said he'd have no involvement with the new series, but I have endless optimism that him saying this was just a misdirect. I know. I hate that talking in riddles bullshit that TV dramas like to use, just to create tension as characters try to figure out the riddle.

I know. They gave us these little drips of story arc for the first 17 episodes, then opened a garden hose on the 18th. And I agree that Addison and Ben had no chemistry. It was a whole lot of "tell, don't show". Just keep having these people moan about how in love with each other they are and how much they miss each other, and hope the audience buys it. Then at the end of the episode, they tried to say that Ben has some sort of wrong to set right, even after saving Addison's life and stopping the accelerator from imploding. I guess he had to stop himself from asking Ziggy to run projections on his compatibility with Addison, so that their love would be more pure?

If you think about it, Ian and the QL gang could be considered the villains of this story. Project Quantum Leap and their meddling in time causes this apocalyptic nuclear winter scenario. In 2051, the government uses their time travel capabilities to send loyal and decorated Marine back in time to stop PQL from causing the disaster by killing their leaper and destroying their accelerator. Ian gets word of this and leaps back in time to 2022 to warn Ben and lay out a plan for stopping the project. Ben thwarts the Marine and government from 2051 from preventing the disastrous Quantum Leap from 2022. Crapsack world of 2051 is preserved.

The nuclear winter was unrelated to Project Quantum Leap. It happened for reasons that are not explained. However, the government blamed Project Quantum Leap for it, then sent Martinez back in time to kill first Addison, then destroy the accelerator. Because of this, Martinez was the antagonist, but not a villainous one. He was working for the government and trying to stop a pretty huge wrong. If the government of the future was right, then really, the people we know at PQL in 2022 were the bad guys, trying to preserve a post-apocalyptic status quo.

That was Sam's major problem with it too the first time. He leapt into an attractive 26 year old woman in the mid 60s and had to deal with a lot of crap. Another time he dealt with being 9 months pregnant. I kind of recall he got used to it after a while.