“How The Tess Was Won”
Originally aired 4/14/1989
In which Sam makes a pretty good cowboy…
All right, we’ve settled in now, and this week we’ve got a couple of good examples of Quantum Leap doing the sorts of things that QL does: namely, stumbling through, fixing whatever looks like a problem, and delivering the late ’80s version of women’s lib and empowerment to earlier, arguably less “enlightened” decades. It can be a little eye-rolling to watch, and “How The Tess Was Won” has some clunkers, but as I’ve been arguing, the show’s essential good-nature—the sense that everyone involved is trying to do what’s best even if they aren’t sure what that is—helps soften the blow.
After an overlong introduction (the show is still working overtime to explain itself to new viewers, with Sam’s belabored introduction and a quick reminder of what happened last week even if it has no real bearing on this week’s events), Sam finds himself in the shoes of a mild-mannered country veterinarian in Texas, circa 1956. He leaps just as “Doc” Young is checking on the pigs for local ranch owner Tess McGill, and while he’s trying to get his bearings, he overhears Tess and her father having one of the most load-bearing conversations in history; Tess’s dad wants her to get married and have a kid, Tess resists, and they come up with a bet to see if she’ll seal the deal.
It is extremely hokey, and while I was kind of charmed by the artifice, it’s hard not to wince at the sexual politics. It’s not just that Tess is doing what’s normally considered a “man’s” job that stings, obviously; it’s that everyone around her, including herself, seem to think that doing so requires her to, uh, ignore her softer side and be more of a dude that any other fella on the ranch. This isn’t a story about Sam helping a woman prove herself to a group of well-meaning sexist dopes. This is a story about Sam helping Tess show her vulnerable side and be more feminine, with all the complications that entails.
I’m being a little harsh here, but if you grew up in this era like I did, this idea—that a woman loses some essential part of herself if she tries to get involved in a man’s world—was a tediously pervasive one. It’s been explored more interestingly elsewhere; like much of Leap’s surface level politics, we’re embracing what’s assumed to be the “norm” with Sam’s perspective. He pushes back against Tess’s dismissive father, but we also get a scene where he reminds the overdriven Tess that there are some things men can do better than women. This is just before she collapses from heat stroke and he has to take her back home and undress her, in case the point was unclear.
There could be an interesting story here, one that’s less about tired concepts of gender norms and more about the simple challenges facing Tess, running a ranch where even the men who love her all seem to want to step in and take charge. And we get a version of that. After Sam “wins” the contest, it looks like Doc and Tess are going to get married; but then another, more traditionally handsome ranch-hand appears to say he loved Tess all along. It’s a good joke on Sam (who’d gotten overly emotionally invested in the whole thing), and also a happy ending for Tess, who gets a hunk who doesn’t seem to want much more than to support and follow her orders. It’s just a shame that Sam, our moral center throughout the series, doesn’t quite get the dynamics right.
Kari Lizer does a good job of making Tess more complicated than the script might have envisioned her, and there’s solid chemistry between her and Sam (honestly, I don’t think there are any actors who don’t have chemistry with Bakula; on this show at least, he clicks cheerfully with everyone he meets), enough to make the reveal of another lover sting a little. You get some jokes about Texas being Texas, none of which rise above the level of “oh yes, that is what they say, isn’t it,” and there are no villains here, even if maybe there should’ve been.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the kicker ending. Sam lingers in Doc’s shoes for longer than he was expecting, with Al theorizing that he’ll jump as soon as Tess says “I do.” (Gotta say, that seems pretty arbitrary to me.) The teen boy who’s been hanging out on Doc’s property playing his guitar for most of the episode turns out to be a young Buddy Holly, and when Sam suggests replacing “Piggy” with “Peggy” (as in “Peggy Sue”) in the song he keeps singing, he immediately leaps. It’s a Forrest Gump kind of joke before Forrest Gump, and it’s mostly carried by Al and Sam’s bemused enthusiasm.
Stray observations
- • I really need Sam to start saying “Oh boy” every time he leaps.
- • Sam somehow avoids looking at himself in the mirror until near the very end of the episode, when Al points out what an “uphill” battle he had winning Tess (if only temporarily). It feels a little mean-spirited, especially considering the real Doc had kept his feelings for Tess private, and Sam has now broadcast them to the world.
- • I’d forgotten how long opening credit sequences used to be. This once has Sam’s narration over clips from earlier episodes, and then the title montage with the show’s theme music. The music is great, but the montage is a bit goofy, especially how it feels the need to repeat a date range.
- • Al’s worries this week: Tina, his girlfriend (the lady we saw in the pilot cold open), runs off to Vegas with Gooshie. It’s all extremely silly, and while I appreciate learning more about the future, and Stockwell keeps it light, it still feels like he and everyone else should be taking Sam’s journeys a little more seriously. Al’s distracted support plays like they’ve been doing this shtick for years, and while that makes for a comfortable, TV-friendly dynamic, it robs us of some of the drama that made the pilot so effective.
(Screenshot: Quantum Leap)
“Double Identity”
Originally aired 4/21/1989
In which Sam gets two leaps for the price of one, capiche?
At its goofiest, Quantum Leap sometimes feels like visiting different countries in Epcot; or, more appropriately, visiting different planets in the original Star Trek. We’ve been to scrappy boxer land; last episode, we were in Texas-ville; and now it’s time for mafia world, a place that operates on the same level of grit and violence as the classic TOS entry “A Piece Of The Action.” Clearly someone on staff watched The Godfather, took careful notes on the costuming, wrote down as many Italian words as they could remember, and decided that was enough for the day.
And you know what? It almost is. “Double Identity” borders on self-parody if you view it as an authentic commentary on the mob, but as a light-hearted romp, it works fine. Bakula gets a couple of comic setpieces to double-down on the absurdity, first with an impromptu wedding performance of “Volare,” a song which he does not know; and later, trying to speak Italian (which he also does not know) to a jealous mob boss holding a straight razor to his neck. In both cases, Al feeds him information in an almost but not quite helpful way, and in both, Sam gets out unscathed.
It’s cute, really, which is the best thing you could say for any of this. And to be honest, I’m not sure a more authentic, accurate depiction of mafia life would really fit the show as it currently is. We have characters referencing past violence, we have one character threatening violence on a couple of different occasions, but there are no deaths on screen, and no one suffers for very long.
We don’t even have a particularly compelling crisis. Sam leaps into a handsome hitman named Frankie just as he’s finishing up some afternoon delight with Teresa in the middle of a wedding (again, The Godfather references are not subtle); we soon learn that Teresa is the former mistress of Don Geno, and Geno is not thrilled to learn she’s found a new romance. There’s no obvious problem to be solved, apart from keeping Frankie from getting killed, and instead of trying to work out what Sam needs to do to leap, Al arrives with a crazy plan to bring Sam home.
If the mafia stuff is goofy, the plan to retrieve Sam is goofy-plus, involving a hair dryer getting plugged in at an apartment across town while Sam re-enacts what (and, uh, who) he was doing at the moment he leaped in. I appreciate the effort to liven things up, and to acknowledge that Sam’s co-workers are still trying to save him, but I could’ve used a little more internal logic. Quantum Leap is really more a fantasy show than a science fiction one, but even by those standards, this is arbitrary, existing largely for a joke about the team inadvertently causing the Northeast Blackout of 1965. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)
Still, it does give us an unexpected twist: While Sam doesn’t get a ride back to his present, he does a rare leap into someone else in the same time and area—Don Geno, who was planning to murder him and Teresa in the middle of their scientifically engineered tryst. We’ve had a two-leap episode before, but this is the first time it’s happened where it lets Sam resolve a story that he might not have otherwise been able to fix. As Sam says himself, it’s almost like someone won’t let him leap away until he’s finished what he was brought there to do.
We could’ve used a little less cuteness here, though. As the Don, Sam lets Frankie and Teresa get married, assuming that matrimony will prevent the real Don from killing them the moment he returns to his body. This seems optimistic to me, as does the assumption that having hot sex with a hitman makes said hitman marriage material; I appreciate that Sam-as-Don orders Frankie out of the mafia for good, but years of The Sopranos have basically ruined the idea for me that anyone gets out of that business alive. As if this all wasn’t adorable enough, Sam finally leaps when he arranges for an old woman to finally win at the bingo table.
Next time, we’ll find Sam in the body of an elderly Black man in Alabama in 1955, so I guess we can all look forward to an extremely careful review on my part. (Given that the episode is a very clear riff on Driving Miss Daisy, I think it’s safe to bet that the show’s take on racial politics will look every bit as awkward to modern eyes as its views on gender politics.) Still, at least that’s going to be an episode that’s trying to say something, no matter how clumsy and antiquated that “something” turns out to be. “Double Identity” doesn’t even have the bittersweet romanticism of “Tess” going for it. It’s just the Mafia Planet, with all the camp that implies.
Stray observations
- • The great Mark Margolis has a guest turn here, playing the sort of heavy he played through most of the ’80s.
- • Sam’s big idea to get a haircut from Teresa, back before men got haircuts from women, is fun; and it’s sweet how he compliments her talents as a hairdresser later. Their second scene in the attack, where he does some classic Sam wooing (sincerity mixed with info-dumps), is as close as any of this gets to having an actual heart, and Terri Garber’s performance goes a long way towards selling it.
- • We get a quick sense of what it looks like when someone returns to their body after Sam leaps out, and it’s strange; Frankie, who’s forgotten all about being in the future, doesn’t remember anything before Sam leaped in the first time. Which makes you wonder if this happens every time, and if Sam hasn’t left history littered with strange cases of temporary memory loss.
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