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I was inspired by part one of this Youtube review of original Quantum Leap’s pilot Genesis hosted by Price of Reason  to revisit the show.

As some of you know, I have been working my way through the “update” or “remake” or “continuation” or whatever you want to call it of Quantum Leap starring Raymond Lee, Caitlin Bassett, and Ernie (Ghostbusters) Hudson. However, I have only rarely reviewed anything from the Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell original from the 1990s.

I’m here to change that.

For your consideration, my review of the original QL S2E5 episode Blind Faith.

Sam Beckett (Bakula) leaps into a blind concert pianist Andrew Ross. It’s February 6, 1964 and Ross has just finished a performance at Carnegie Hall. His “unpaid assistant” and love interest Michelle Stevens (Cynthia Bain) is just off stage watching him with adoration.

In this version of QL, animals and children under five can see Sam as he really is, supposedly because of their innocence. So Ross’ guide dog immediately knows the difference. That doesn’t seem to prevent the dog “Chopin” from obeying Sam as much as he would Andrew.

Of course the audience wants an encore and Al (Stockwell) still hasn’t shown up. Bakula radiates as much charm as he does awkwardness in going back on stage and does the only thing he can think of. He plays “chopsticks.” Fortunately, the audience is delighted and he gets away with it.

I should say that the original show works differently than the continuation. In the original show, Sam actually changes places with his host, so it’s Sam’s body in 1964. Ross is supposedly in a part of the QL project called the “waiting room,” but we never know if he’s aware of what happened or, after Sam leaps out, if he remembers anything. During the leap, everyone, except the aforementioned children and animals, sees Sam as Ross. That means Sam isn’t blind even though he appears that way to everyone around him.

Imagine if Ben Song (Lee) in the updated show leapt into Ross. In the update, we have no idea what happened to Ben’s body when he leapt. We do know his electrical pattern or soul or whatever actually possesses the body of the host, putting them into some kind of coma or state of unawareness for the duration of the leap. If Ben leapt into Ross, he really would be blind, which would be quite a twist if the showrunners had the nerve to pull it off.

Sam makes it off stage and walks home with Michelle. We see a discarded newspaper saying the third female murder victim has been killed by a serial killer. It’s later confirmed when Al shows up that Sam is there to prevent Michelle from being murdered.

Alas, as Sam enters Ross’ apartment building, he passes a neighbor, a French woman played by Hilla Mol (no character name given) on her way out to walk her dogs. Shortly afterward, we see she is strangled by the killer in the park. I guess Ziggy wasn’t particularly concerned about saving her life.

Sam meets one of Ross’ neighbors Peter O’Shannon (Kevin Skousen) who is a police officer. Seems like a nice enough guy.

Meanwhile, Michelle sneaks back home but is caught by her mother Agnes (Jennifer Rhodes). Long story short, when Agnes was 22 and Michelle was a toddler, Agnes’ husband abandoned them and Agnes has become bitter and cold trying to be a single mother. She’s running Michelle’s life, compelling her to study to become a nurse so she can be self-sufficient and not have to depend on a man. Michelle thinks up a few feeble lies, but Agnes suspects there’s a man involved in her disappearances.

I should say this was three days before (in real life) the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and New York is going crazy. The crowds of crazed girls in the streets play a role in Sam’s adventure later on.

Agnes, in following Michelle the next day, sees her meeting with Sam for lunch. Later, she manages to get into Ross’ apartment and sees Sam kidding around with Chopin, reading him labels from his dog food. She confronts him as a fraud and being able to see, ordering him to stop seeing Michelle.

Oh, at one point, Sam meets Pete while he’s on duty. He’s a mounted officer and makes some offhanded remark about his horse being the only dependable female he’s met.

Murder mysteries don’t often work well on a television episode. You have something like forty to forty-five minutes to present your characters and try to conceal the murderer, and with just a few guest stars, it’s not easy.

I guessed almost right away that Pete had to be the killer. I briefly considered Agnes, but there’s no way she’d murder her own daughter, even if she had some sort of psychotic motivation for killing young, wayward women.

Sam is supposed to give another concert the next day but he can’t find any music. Of course, why would a blind man need sheet music? Al says he plays by ear. Al also promises that Sam will give a terrific performance.

The night of the show, Michelle is there against her Mom’s wishes. Al appears just as Sam is about to panic, sheet music in hand. Sam is still puzzled how this works, but his swiss cheese memory does not recall that he also played in Carnegie when he was (or rather will be) 19 years old.

Once Sam starts playing, everything is perfect. Even with no conscious memory of knowing how to play, as long as he can see the music, he’s terrific (awfully convenient). The trivia for this episode says that Bakula did all of the playing, which is pretty amazing. In fiction, Sam has five degrees including a medical degree, and is good at just about everything. That’s handy if you’re a time traveler and can end up in a lot of puzzling environments.

In the updated show, Ben is also a genius, but although like Sam, he’s multilingual, his main focus is physics. He hates guns, is a terrible shot, doesn’t know martial arts, isn’t (as far as I know) a musician, and frequently panics. This is more realistic for a person who, in spite of being brilliant, is really not equipped for such challenges. For that matter, if someone stuffed me into a quantum accelerator and I started time traveling, in real life I’d lose my mind.

Anyway, this is fiction and what’s the point of being a larger-than-life hero if you’re not heroic?

After the performance, Sam sees that Agnes has shown up. She told Michelle that Sam’s blindness if a fake and Sam recognizing Agnes seems to prove that. Michelle runs away in tears.

Al says she’s going to be killed very soon so Sam and Chopin go after her. The Beatles are nearby, crowds are everywhere, and a news photographer’s flashbulb does off right in Sam’s face blinding him.

I don’t know if it would have blinded him for long, but in the episode, he sees nothing but “chunks” of light in his field of vision. He really does need both Chopin and Al to guide him to the park.

The killer is there, all in black and with a scary ski mask. He jumps Michelle, but she manages to stab him in the back with a nail file from her purse and runs away. She gets turned around and sees Pete. I guess she knows him from being Ross’ neighbor. Except Pete is dressed all in black. She hugs him in relief but then her hands are covered in blood from the wound she inflicted on the killer. Pete tries to strangle her.

Sam manages to get there and Chopin jumps Pete. Sam follows up with Al guiding him. Pete, out of uniform, still has his handcuffs and Sam cuffs Pete. I can’t recall why Pete couldn’t just get up and run away, but he doesn’t.

Agnes shows up while Pete’s being taken away by people who were drawn by Michelle’s screams. Lighting a cigarette, Agnes thrusts the lit match in Sam’s face. Even after fifteen minutes or so, he’s still completely blind and doesn’t react. Agnes is convinced she made a mistake before and that Ross really is blind.

Sam’s eyesight slowly returns but he hasn’t leapt yet. He’s saved Michelle’s physical life but still has to do more, according to Al. He convinces Agnes to let Michelle guide her own life and that Michelle isn’t Agnes. She agrees and Sam leaps.

In spite of the obvious plot holes, the episode is charming, not only due to the usual chemistry between Sam and Al, but because of the kindness and compassion Sam showed not just to Michelle, but to Agnes. She was a royal pain in the ass but Sam saw through her anger and how she was trying to protect her daughter.

We don’t find out what happens to Pete or if the relationship between Ross and Michelle becomes something permanent, which would have been more satisfying.

As I mentioned before, Pete’s motivation as a serial killer was implied at best. There wasn’t time for anything else, but it was a weakness in the episode. So was Sam’s blindness. I’m not a medical expert, but even if a flashbulb in the face could blind you for fifteen minutes, I don’t think the visual effect shown on screen would be the result.

In other reviews of the original show, people say that they don’t know why Sam Beckett leapt in the first place. Actually, in some of the later episodes, the opening narration tells you, but Sam tells Michelle the following over lunch:

Sometimes I feel like a scientist in the middle of an experiment that nobody else believes in. But then, you just have to tell yourself that you’re the only person you can listen to, that you have to forget about the others.

That’s it in a nutshell. Like so many other science fiction based shows and films, in order to not lose funding and have their experiment shut down, the scientist uses the experiment on themselves. In fact, that’s the exact premise in the pilot episode of The Time Tunnel (1966-67).

I (and a lot of other folks) complain that modern entertainment (TV, movies, books, comic books, and so on) exhibit a startling lack of good writing, and that other things such as representation, have replaced trying to tell the audience a good story.

That doesn’t mean older shows such as original Quantum Leap are anything like perfect or that they aren’t inconsistent in terms of quality. But I think what is missing now is a sort of innocent charm, humanity, and basic wholesomeness. That goes along with the writers and showrunners actually wanting to please the audience first and foremost rather than the critics, the opinions in the writer’s room, social media influencers, and the personal and social biases of the showrunners.

In that sense, the Bakula and Stockwell Quantum Leap will always be a better fit for me than the 2023 version of QL. It’s not that the Raymond Lee incarnation doesn’t try or that Lee and company are bad actors. It just means everything from the foundational premise to the details behind each episode is dedicated to a very different outcome than what would have been tolerated let alone enjoyed in 1989 when “Blind Faith” first aired.

Addendum: November 9, 2023 – Deborah Pratt, producer of the original Quantum Leap and the current show “liked” the tweet I posted on twitter/X promoting this review. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I’m appreciative. I just hope she visited my blog and read the review.