“Disco Inferno”
Originally aired 9/27/1989
In which Sam has to teach a family that it’s okay to rock
Part of the charm of going back to a show like Quantum Leap—a show I grew up with, have fond memories of, and which is absolutely a product of its time—is seeing how things have changed. This may seem like a curious sort of “charm,” and it’s not like there aren’t downsides to it. I didn’t particularly enjoy the show’s take on American-Japanese relations, and there are times when Sam’s inspirational speeches can read more as condescending lectures from the school of White Privilege.
There are times when it’s relatively harmless, though, and Sam’s immediate discomfort at finding himself in a leisure suit, standing on a set that wouldn’t be out of place in Saturday Night Fever, and listening to disco music, was pretty funny to me. These days, it’s widely understood that the great disco backlash of the ‘80s was as much about homophobia and racism as it was about actual taste, but at the time “Disco Inferno” was released, the pendulum was still very firmly planted on the “Disco sucks” side of the debate. Sam’s objections aren’t deeply considered; he sounds more like a teenage boy sneering at something because he thinks he’s supposed to.
I haven’t talked much about Sam’s characterization over the run of the series thus far, apart from praising Scott Bakula’s charisma and charm, but it’s worth noting that “teenage boy” isn’t far off the mark. Thanks to the “Swiss cheese” effect of traveling through time, the genius wunderkind seems to have been reduced, at times, to a horny 13-year-old, intelligent but always just a few steps behind whatever’s going on around him. It’s not quite Tom Hanks in Big, but it’s along the same lines, and it’s a counterintuitive but smart creative decision; there’s an innocence to the character that allows for comedy and unexpected moments of wisdom.
“Disco Inferno” finds Sam leaping into Chad, the older brother in a father-sons stuntman outfit. The opening scene is something of a fakeout: Sam isn’t in a disco, but on a set, and the scene being filmed ends when he takes a full shotgun blast to the chest. We quickly learn that Chad is quite the ladies’ man (his reflection screams “fuckable farm boy”—I mean, not literally, but y’know), much to the chagrin of his younger brother, Chris. Chris wants to be treated like an adult and take part in the family business, but he’s also a gifted musician, and Sam’s task this week is to get both Chris and their father to acknowledge his talent.
We’ll get into this more in the next episode, but in addition to being amused at the dated aspects of the show (the ones that aren’t inadvertently hateful, at least), I’m surprised at just how old-fashioned all of this is. In my memory, Quantum Leap was a kind of high-concept procedural, a sci-fi spin on Highway To Heaven, and while that remains an accurate assessment, the execution is simultaneously bizarre and quaint.
In “Disco,” the conflict is an old one. The Jazz Singer-old, to be clear, minus the minstrel part. Chris wants to be a musician, but his dad, hung up on his own ideas of masculinity, thinks it would be a mistake. What’s weird is that the “masculine” profession in this case is working on movies and TV shows. Yes, stuntwork has been coded as “manly” for a long time now, but it’s not like Chris is trying to move out of the family carpentry business. He’s just trading one sort of show business for another, and the amount of effort Sam has to expend to make that happen is comical, especially given that Chris wants to get into rock music. It might have been more compelling if Chris had wanted to get into disco—then Sam would’ve had to struggle against his own prejudices while trying to convince Dad that everything’s cool.
Still, I ended up liking this one a bit more than I was expecting, largely because of the brief bits we get about Sam’s backstory. Once again the show benefits by connecting Sam’s history to the case at hand; here, we learn that Sam had an older brother who he revered, and who died in Vietnam. As histories go, this borders on cliche, but Sam’s excitement and heartbreak feel real enough to be convincing, and it adds a nice depth and melancholy to his efforts at holding the family together.
That’s good, because without that emotional connection, this is all goofy as hell. We learn a few interesting bits about stuntmanning, and the portrayal of a short-sighted, asshole director (who nearly gets Chris killed) feels authentic enough. But the narrative as a whole doesn’t fit together quite right. The time Sam spends working as a stuntman (including a very silly fakeout involving footage from the Charlton Heston disaster epic Earthquake) has no connection to Chris’ efforts to become a musician, and while I enjoyed it, the whole thing feels like a show that still hasn’t quite figured out what it wants to be.
More on that in a moment, actually. For now, though, it’s worth appreciating the messiness for what it does get right: some solid history for Sam, some great outfits from Al (who, unsurprisingly, loves the disco era), and another chance to make fun of Gerald Ford.
Stray observations
- • Reminder that we initially skipped this episode, as it wasn’t available on streaming (likely due to footage rights). After this, we’re back into regular “continuity,” for as much as that matters with this show.
- • It’s silly as hell, but the last scene with Chad and family, which has Sam betting Chris’s future on Gerald Ford falling down, is a hoot.
- • Sam keeps leaping into hot guys, which would be more fun if Sam himself wasn’t already a hot guy. I did appreciate the interracial flirting, though.
- • It blows my mind a little how often TV shows from this era would use movie footage to fill out the gaps.
(Screenshot: Quantum Leap)
“Blind Faith”
Originally aired 11/1/1989
In which Sam plays “Chopsticks,” and some other stuff happens
I mentioned this in the previous review, but Quantum Leap often feels like a show that’s still working out what it wants to be when it grows up. The format is tailor-made for a TV series, but apart from Sam and Al’s presence, we’ve been getting a lot of scripts that could easily have been transplanted from the ’60s and ’70s. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Bill Bixby trying to pass some time as a stuntman on The Incredible Hulk; and while Leap has the flexibility of letting its protagonist be pretty much anyone, it sometimes struggles to make that flexibility come across as more than a gimmick.
That’s especially true in “Blind Faith,” which has Sam jumping into a blind piano player. There is, so far as I can tell, no reason why Sam needs to be a blind piano player for the story to work; the episode’s actual crisis is a young woman trying to escape from under the thumb of a domineering mother before she’s murdered by a serial killer. None of these elements really connect, and I spent most of “Faith” just trying to figure out what the hell this was supposed to add up to. Nothing? Probably nothing.
Really, though, this is bonkers, a melodramatic story about finding yourself that also happens to be wrapped up in a Brian De Palma thriller that also pauses briefly before the end for a remake of Gypsy. I can summarize the plot for you easily enough, but I can’t really convey just how incoherent it all is; events seem to lead logically from one point to the next in the moment, but when you pull back, it’s a huge muddle of disparate impulses which only occasionally rise to the level of entertaining camp.
Take Sam as the piano player. One of Quantum Leap’s original hooks is putting its protagonist in situations where he lacks the training necessary to accomplish what he needs to accomplish; the very first episode had him leaping into a fighter pilot who flew experimental jets, which required some quick thinking on Al’s part to save the day. Here, we get a perfect set-up for shenanigans, with a healthy dose of dramatic irony. Unlike the leapee, Sam can see just fine–but he has no idea how to play the piano, and unlike flying a plane, it’s not something Al can teach him overnight.
You’d expect some kind of comic mischief here, a farce as Sam has to keep coming up with increasingly elaborate excuses as to why he’s not doing the main thing he’s supposedly known for. And we do get some of that (Sam leaps in at the end of a successful concert; to get out of the encore without humiliating himself, he plays “Chopsticks,” and the crowd treats it as a hilarious joke), but when it comes time for him to play for real, Al reveals that Sam, in addition to being a scientific genius, is actually an accomplished pianist in his “real” life.
While we get some cute business with Al bringing in holographic sheet music for Sam to play, this is a bizarre and deflating solution to a self-created problem. It’s not a huge stretch that Sam can play piano, but for us to learn in this context, after spending a good chunk of time worrying that he’s going to bomb, turns the whole thing into a disappointing joke. Why didn’t Al tell him straight away? Why bother making this a plot point at all?
What’s even stranger is none of this has anything to do with the actual story. The pianist’s girlfriend, Michelle, is keeping their relationship a secret from her overbearing mom, and Sam has to find a way to help her come into her own without completely alienating her from her mom. Oh, and also save her from a serial killer, who turns out to be the only other character we spend time with, a cop who goes around complaining about Beatlemanics. Did I forget that bit? Right, so the leap also happens to coincide with the Beatles’ debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. There’s no reason for this whatsoever.
The best I can guess is that Scott Shepard’s script originally started out as something else entirely before he decided to pitch it for the show. Even if that’s true, there’s no excuse for how big a mess this turned out to be. The mother character is the most memorable thing about it, and that’s mostly because of her off-putting intensity. I spent most of the episode wondering if she was going to turn out to be the murderer; I knew that couldn’t happen in a show from this era, but even after the real killer is revealed, Mom looms so large over everything that she makes murder feel like an afterthought.
All this and I haven’t even talked about how Sam goes temporarily blind after getting a flash-bulb in the face. There’s a subplot about Mom realizing that Sam (in the pianist’s shoes) is actually not blind, and her trying to convince her daughter that the whole thing is an act; so of course Sam has to lose his sight in order to convince them both that it’s not a grift. But Bakula plays it like he suddenly popped into a Douglas Sirk movie, and his utter terror at being briefly inconvenienced calls the whole leaping project into question. In the past, the show has tried to use Sam hopping into a different person as a chance to build empathy and understanding. Here, there’s a real “Oh god I’m actually blind? EW GROSS EW” vibe that doesn’t work at all.
So yeah, this is a bad one. It’s strange enough to have some novelty value, but there’s no catharsis, no satisfaction of a job well done. Nothing in this registers as coherent enough to be worth caring about. On to the next leap!
Stray observations
- • The Beatles stuff is especially baffling to me. Are we supposed to suspect Pete the traffic cop because he doesn’t like them?
- • Points for having the cop be the real killer, I guess.
- • It always bothers me when shows like this stress the importance of reconciling with unreasonable, abusive family members. The mom in this sucks, and there’s no reason whatsoever that Michelle should make peace with her. Sometimes you just need to let go of people who are intent on ruining your life!
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