Reviewer’s note: I’ve been streaming the show off Amazon, which was fine for the first season, but I ran into a snag this week; the second episode of the season, “Disco Inferno,” is unavailable for streaming thanks to rights issues. (If I had to guess, I suspect it’s because “Disco” has footage from the movie Earthquake in it.) We’ll be skipping that episode this week to give me time to get the show on physical DVDs; fortunately Quantum Leap isn’t huge on continuity, so it shouldn’t be too confusing. Apologies for my poor planning!
“The Americanization Of Machiko”
Originally aired 10/11/1989
In which Sam is a sailor, and it gets worse from there…
I knew going into this project that there’d be rough episodes ahead; I love Quantum Leap dearly, but even through rose-colored glasses, I was aware that its take on social issues was defined by the time in which it was made, which can create … problems. Problems like this week’s first episode, “The Americanization Of Machiko,” which is, as a whole, pretty terrible. The premise—an American sailor returns home from World War II with a Japanese wife—is supposed to be a chance for Sam to face off against the bigotry of the early ’50s. Instead, it simply replaces one form of racism for another, friendlier, more paternal sort.
There is some interesting stuff to unpack. The biggest surprise is how little Sam really does in this episode, to the point where he’s basically a secondary character, wandering around in the background as other people do the heavy lifting of the actual plot. This is clear right from the start: After a cute monologue about how leaping has improved his instincts for deduction, Sam gets a ride from a kindly farmer who turns out to be Charles’ dad. After they leave, Machiko gets off the bus, and we realize that, improved deductive skills or not, Sam has abandoned Charles’ wife.
This unintentional meanness is never really addressed. The sheriff finds Machiko, who speaks just enough English to tell him she’s married to Charlie, and he drives her to the Mackenzie farm, where she’s met warmly by Charlie’s dad and coldly by Charlie’s mom, Lenore. No one lectures Sam about the importance of “not forgetting your immigrant wife at the bus stop,” and I don’t even think he has to come up with an excuse as to why he forgot; the episode is too busy setting up Lenore as Machiko’s mortal enemy.
This will be the episode’s main focus: Machiko’s struggles to adapt to American life, and the people who make those troubles exponentially more difficult. It’s not a bad template for a story, but it’s largely a collection of cliches and tropes, and Machiko herself never comes into focus as a person. Ideally, we’d be able to see her perspective on things through her conversations with Sam, who so regularly lends a sympathetic ear to the people he meets. But while their few scenes together are cute enough, they never rise above basic kindness. We never have any idea what’s driving Machiko, or how she might be upset or even angry about her treatment.
We get three different antagonists this time around, which seems excessive. There’s Lenore, who is ice-cold to Machiko for almost the entire episode; we learn that Lenore has a daughter who died by suicide, and that Lenore’s main reason for rejecting Machiko has less to do with Machiko’s race and more to do with Lenore’s own nagging guilt. It’s a concept that could’ve used some more unpacking, but instead we have to waste time on Rusty, the psychopath who kidnaps Machiko late in the episode (which gives Sam a chance to rescue her, and Machiko a chance to be injured, thus thawing Lenore’s icy heart), is, well, a psychopath. He has his reasons for hating Japanese people, but he’s still clearly an outlier from the rest of the town, which makes him easier to defeat and remove from the equation.
More interestingly, there’s Naomi, a woman who set her cap for Charles, fails to seduce Sam, and gets revenge by humiliating Machiko at a family picnic. She’s legitimately cruel in a way that feels more specific, and more memorable, than the other characters, but given that we only know two things about her—she’s horny and she’s mean—that memorability doesn’t add up to much. The whole episode has a flat feeling to it; everyone here is slotted into a specific role, and nothing they do really transcends or escapes it.
The worst of all is poor Machiko herself. The character is a collection of every possible stereotype of Japanese culture, to the point where she has no personality trait that isn’t a cliche. She’s subservient, asking to wash people’s feet to show respect, and when she isn’t desperately trying to please, she’s embarrassing herself. One hot afternoon while hanging laundry out to dry, she takes her top off, which Al is quick to reassure us is just what Japanese women did when they worked in the fields back home. I don’t how true that is, but it sure does come across like the episode trying to find some new way to make the woman stand out.
As someone who grew up on ’80s TV, none of this is hugely surprising, but it is shocking to revisit now, the way a show as well-meaning as Quantum Leap is still an utter product of its time. Even the attempts to give Machiko a personality outside of eagerness to please fall flat; she shows Sam some flowers and tells him how beautiful they are, and Sam immediately monologues about how he hopes she can become more American without losing the specialness of her own cultural heritage. Which is a reasonable wish, but what heritage? Liking pretty flowers?
I’m struggling to articulate what will continue to be Quantum Leap‘s biggest flaw. It wants to tell a variety of stories about all different kinds of people, but its perspective on those people, and on our past, will always be shaped by the time the show was made. Quantum Leap isn’t singular in that respect, but the contrast between its ambitions and its execution is far more painful than it is in something like, say, The A-Team. It’s a show that, at its worst, spends way too much time patting itself on the back for how smart we are “now.”
The end of “Americanization” has Lenore showing up to Sam and Machiko’s wedding in a traditional Japanese robe. This, after all of Lenore’s cruelty and coldness, is the moment of catharsis; this is when we are reassured that everything after Sam leaps really will be okay. It is maybe the funniest joke in the entire 40 minutes. A pity it wasn’t intentional.
Stray observations
- • The fact that Sam doesn’t leap until Mom walks into the church at the end suggests the god who’s running things is more interested in effective drama than actual results.
- • There’s a bizarre sequence where Sam is moving hay in the barn and takes off his shirt (having moved hay before, this seems like a bad idea to me; getting uncomfortably sweaty is better than having your torso stippled with needle marks). Naomi comes in and tries to seduce him, and Sam does an extremely bad job of pushing her off. There’s some narrative justification for this (Naomi gets revenge on Sam for rejecting her by embarrassing Machiko), but it mostly plays like an attempt to give the ad men something spicy to put in the teaser trailer.
- • I think the title is a riff on the movie The Americanization Of Emily, starring James Garner and Julie Andrews, although as far as I can tell, the only real connection is World War II.
(Screenshot: Quantum Leap)
“What Price Gloria?”
Originally aired 10/25/1989
In which Sam has to walk in a woman’s shoes, and girdle, and make-up, and…
Good news: This isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. There are problems, but the fact that the script was written by a woman (Deborah Pratt, the producer and actor who would eventually be responsible for the show’s opening narration) counts for a lot. Sam’s insights about womanhood—the clothing, the impossible demands, the constant sexual harrassmnent—feel rather quaint now, and the show doesn’t handle those issues with the seriousness one might like, but there’s just enough authenticity here to make the good parts ring true.
Still, it’s difficult to pick what thuds the most: the “comedy” music that plays every time a man comes on to Sam, or Al’s confusion over Sam’s feminine appearance. The latter is probably most irritating, given how much Sam and Al’s relationship has come to define the show. In “What Price Gloria?,” we learn that Al sees Sam the same way everyone else around Sam sees him. I can’t remember if this contradicts anything we’ve heard in the past, but I suppose it’s nice to have it set in stone (so to speak) for future episodes.
The problem here is that, because Sam Beckett is now Samantha Stormer, Al is losing his shit. He’s so immediately horny for Sam’s new body that it throws his marriage (never exactly stable) out of whack and sends him into therapy. We’ve known about Al’s womanizing from the start, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in “action,” and as much as I love Dean Stockwell, this is embarrassing and stupid. It’s just too much, too fast. At one point, Al talks about how Sam is his best friend, and how confusing it is to see his (male) best friend in a hot woman’s body. That’s almost an interesting idea, but there just isn’t enough time for it to develop.
There is some argument for Al’s behavior here in terms of theming. One of the challenges Sam faces as a woman is having to learn firsthand just how awful men can be, and having Al, his confidante, behave as badly as all the other dudes around him, makes that isolation even more noticeable. I think Sam acquits himself pretty well this episode, and I like how immediately frustrated and sympathetic he is; I can see how the lack of his usual confidante isolates him further in a useful, and dramatically meaningful, way. I just wish it could’ve been done without turning Al into Pepe LePew.
The “comedy” music is also bad, as it reinforces the idea that harassment and even borderline assault are more absurd and annoying than they are threatening. Multiple men hit on Sam in a variety of off-putting ways, and it’s arguably funny because we know Sam could beat the shit out of any of them, should the situation call for it. There’s also the inherent absurdity of horny men acting like buffoons. But the episode leans into the humor too hard, I think, possibly as a way to make the show more appealing to a male audience.
The dramatic fulcrum of the hour is Gloria (Sam’s roommate) and her relationship with Buddy, a shitty male exec who keeps stringing Gloria along by promising to divorce his wife. This is a common enough plotline for sitcoms, but it reminded me strongly of The Apartment, where Shirley MacLaine finds herself in a similar situation with Fred MacMurray. The comparison (unsurprisingly) does the episode no favors. The movie is funny, and it plays most of the infidelity shenanigans for laughs, but MacLaine’s melancholy is taken seriously. She’s smart enough to know she’s gotten herself into a trap, but unable to find a way out, and we see enough of the story from her perspective to empathize.
“Gloria” doesn’t really give its titular character much depth. The story hinges on Sam stopping her from attempting suicide after learning the truth about Buddy, and her travails aren’t played for laughs; but there’s still something one-note in how she goes from beat to beat without any real self-awareness. We can feel pity for her, but unlike MacLaine, we aren’t encouraged to identify with her; she becomes more of a problem to be solved than a person. That’s likely a function of the running time as much as anything else, but it does feel like a missed opportunity.
Yet, as I mentioned, I’m still largely positive on this episode. I think it’s mostly because of all the things it doesn’t get wrong. Having Sam struggle with the demands of female signifiers, having him shocked at his treatment from men—these aren’t revolutionary ideas, but they ring true. Even better, there aren’t really jokes about seeing Scott Bakula dressed in what’s traditionally women’s clothing. The tailoring is legitimately fantastic, and Scott carries himself well; I think most of what he ends up wearing looks good on him, even if it isn’t something he’d normally wear as “himself.”
The episode’s final scene has Sam confronting Buddy directly; he lets Buddy get intimate to the point of kissing, and then tells him flat out that he (Sam) is a man. I’m curious how this scene plays to other people, because I can absolutely see how it could be labeled transphobic. To me, it works because we’re on Sam’s side. We’re not horrified that he’s dressed in women’s clothing, and (apart from the physical discomfort) Sam isn’t either. Buddy is because he’s a sexist creep. There’s even a reference to Christina Jorgensen, the trans woman who became the first woman widely known in the U.S. for having gender-confirming surgery. Sam makes it clear that he isn’t like Jorgensen because he is a man, he just happens to be dressed differently.
Judging on the curve, this works for me. I do wonder what the actual Samantha did after coming back to find herself standing over the unconscious body of her creepazoid boss, but Al (in between leering) at least let us know that Samantha does all right in the end. As does Gloria. We don’t know much about Buddy, and honestly, who cares.
Stray observations
- • Al makes a point of stressing how Sam needs to successfully convince everyone he’s a woman because of the rules of time travel, which feels like an odd thing to stress. The show is still trying to codify its rules, I think; in this case, maybe they were worried people would be baffled by a man pretending to be a woman.
- • It was a smart choice, I think, not to have Sam try and create a fake bosom, although I do wonder how Samantha actually fit in some of those outfits.
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