“The Color Of Truth”
Originally aired 5/3/1989
In which Sam sits at the wrong counter…
I had a whole intro prepared for this one. I was going to be clever, start off on a personal anecdote about seeing Driving Miss Daisy when I was a kid and then segue into this week’s first episode, an extremely blatant Driving Miss Daisy rip-off that has Sam leaping into elderly Black man in 1950s Alabama. Only problem is, when I looked the movie up, I found out it hit theaters in December of 1989, seven months after this episode originally aired.
It’s possible, then, that the similar story setups (old Black guy driving old, extremely proud Southern white lady around town as she snipes with him and he puts up with it and they form a friendly relationship) are just a coincidence. I doubt it, though; Daisy was a play before it was a movie, and while the two diverge quite a bit, I don’t think it’s a big jump to guess the screenwriter (Deborah Pratt) was at least aware of the stage version.
This used to be a fairly typical occurrence on ’80s adventure shows. Concepts would be lifted wholesale without anyone being too bothered by it—TV was, after all, still viewed as disposable trash, always chasing after the respectability of cinema (a.k.a. Real Art), and if some of those chases led to “borrowing” big ideas, well, it was fun to see familiar faces running through budget-conscious versions of last year’s blockbuster.
“Truth” is more high-minded than that, though. This isn’t a particularly elegant episode, and it suffers from a lot of the same problems popular media of that era suffered from when it tried to take on race directly. But it’s also not trying to make a buck off of Daisy’s success, or copy and paste to make for an easy week of screenwriting. We’re doing a Message Episode, and all that keeps it from being a Very Special Episode (like, say, that Family Ties about a dead friend) is the nature of the show itself. Part of Quantum Leap’s remit is to visit the past with present eyes, and report back on what we find there. To not reference the way things have changed for the better would be to make something as cloying as Happy Days.
It’s funny, although not in a ha-ha way: If I’d been writing this review 10, or even five years ago, I might have quibbled with the way it depicts racism in the South. I wouldn’t have pretended things like cross burnings or segregation didn’t exist, but I might have pointed out that it feels a little ridiculous that Sam’s innocent decision to sit at a lunch counter turns almost an entire town against him. These days, it’s become evident even to my privileged eyes that the insanity and cruelty of racism don’t really have logical limits; that even when the rules of drama might deem something absurd, real life has offered multiple examples of just how hatefully normal that “absurdity” truly is.
That doesn’t mean “Truth” is free of problems. It’s commitment to showing race relations in all their ugliness is laudable, but it’s still a story in a which a white man (pretending to be a Black man) forces progress, and one in which the white characters feature more prominently than the people of color. We only get one scene with Jesse’s family, and while it’s a decent one, it’s more concerned with Sam’s dislike of chitlins than it is with building real characters. Jesse’s niece, the only character who expresses any real passion for change, even gets a little “both sides” action when Sam lectures her about wanting to do something solely because it will make white people angry.
There’s also a very weird moment when Al talks with Sam about his own experiences with the civil rights movement. It’s not surprising that Al was directly involved in the movement—it fits Al’s character as an outsider and a rebel, one who hides a passionate sense of justice behind his womanizing and tacky (amazing) outfits. But at one point Sam asks him why he knows so much about the struggle, and Al says, “I have a lot of Black friends,” and Sam acts like this is somehow an offensive thing to say. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why; I guess, back in the late ’80s, saying “I have Black friends” was considered a form of tokenism?
There are other ways this has aged poorly. We get two uses of the n-word, which shocked me a little; it’s clearly not intended to be a good word, but hearing it thrown out here, in an era when even a “damn” would’ve gotten a raised eyebrow, is wild. It’s also clear that the script is leaning on cliches even when it’s not directly riffing on some version of Miss Daisy. At its worst, the episode has that Epcot vibe I mentioned last time, only instead of something campy like Mafia-land, it’s Racism-World, a place where every trope you ever heard about the South is presented at face value, without much nuance or interest in depth.
That being said, I can’t hate this one. For all its Boomer failings, its heart is in the right place, and the refusal to tone down the virulence of racism, the ugly things people do to other people when they think they can get away with it, is bracing even now. You can criticize the show for it’s naivete, and for its limitations in perspective, but, as ever, I still root for Sam, who can’t understand why things can’t be better and refuses to just lay back and accept things the way they are. At the very least, it’s hard to be mad at a show that knows who the real villains are.
Stray observations
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• An odd change between the ending of last episode and this episode’s cold open: at the conclusion of “Double Identity,” Sam leaped into Jesse after he’d already sat down at the lunch counter. But in “Truth,” he leaps into Jesse while Jesse is still standing in the diner’s front door. It’s a small change, but a meaningful one. Sitting down in a white’s only establishment creates a lot of complications for Sam, and taking that decision away from Jesse robs the man of what little character he might have had.
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• Al manages to talk to someone who isn’t Sam this week. It’s a bit the show doesn’t over-use, so it’s nice to note the few times it does happen. (He yells at Melny Trafford, the episode’s Miss Daisy equivalent, to pull over to the side of the road, and she does so, believing she’s listening to the ghost of her dead husband.)
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• I didn’t talk about Miss Melny much in the review, but it’s a nice performance, with just the right blend of prickliness and compassion.
(Screenshot: Quantum Leap)
“Camikazi Kid”
Originally aired 5/10/1989
In which Sam does drag, but not the fun kind
You have to wonder sometimes just what the point of all of this is. I don’t mean the show—we’ve got Sam’s narration to explain that. I mean Sam’s leaping, and why he’s stuck in time and can’t seem to get back home no matter how hard he tries. It’s already been suggested that some sort of cosmic force is working behind the scenes, picking and choosing moments in history where Sam’s presence can do some good. But the actual quality of that “good” changes from week to week, with seemingly little reason behind it.
One episode may have Sam saving the life of an elderly white woman and (just maybe) helping to ease race relations in a small Alabama town. Another may have him as a mafioso ensuring that a different elderly white woman finally wins at the Bingo table. Small ball, you might say, and “Camikazi Kid” has slightly higher, but still not huge, stakes: Sam needs to save a young woman from a bad marriage, and, in doing so, maybe resolve some of his own guilt at failing to protect his sister from an abusive marriage.
I’m not criticizing the show for this, to be clear; I think the constant shifting of stakes is to its credit, as it ensures we, like Sam, never quite understand the rules of what’s going on. We know he has to do something, and that, if he keeps helping people and doing what he knows is right, eventually he’ll leap to his next adventure. This gives the scriptwriters a considerable amount of freedom when it comes to creating new problems. Big or small, everything matters, even when we never really understand why.
“Kid” may not be the show’s most ambitious episode to date, but I think it’s the best we’ve seen since “Genesis,” and it might even top that one. There’s a specificity to this one that helps enormously, a feeling that we’re watching real people make choices and mistakes in real time. I don’t think the series will ever entirely escape that “Epcot” feeling I keep blathering on about, but that means those times when it tells a story that does seem to come from actual experience (as opposed to a writer riffing on pre-established cliches), it stands out.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable or unusual in “Kid.” Sam jumps into Cam, an acne-riddled teenager mere moments before losing a drag race. The kid’s a nerd, there are bullies everywhere, and worst of all, Sam’s sister, Cheryl, is engaged to marry the biggest creep of them all. Sam has to figure out how to stop her from marrying the abusive jerk and ruining her life; in the process, he attracts the attention of a good-natured tom-boy and learns how to use nitrous oxide to improve his drag racing skills.
It sounds a bit hokey in summary, but it works because it feels, for want of a better word, authentic. The show is at its best when the fantasy of living someone else’s life feels most real, and Sam’s time in Cam’s shoes rings true to me no matter how corny it might get. His relationship with his sister is lived in and sweet, and I love how slightly odd everything is—we’re not in David Lynch territory, but there is a subtle but persistent contrast between the expectations of the ‘50s and the actual real life experience that really works.
We get a bit more backstory for Sam, as he tells Al about how he believes he failed his own sister when she needed him. While I don’t need Sam to have a personal connection to every leap (it would become hilarious very quickly: “Al, my second cousin lost a Bingo game once!”), it fits in nicely with the more personal feel of the episode. We’re not changing the world this week, we’re just helping a nice lady out of the kind of shitty fate that so often is in store for nice ladies. Oh, and Sam helps the tomboy get her first kiss. It’s cute.
In this week’s “Sam meets a famous person before they were famous and perhaps changes their life forever,” we get Sam running into a young Michael Jackson in a bathroom and having a dance-off with him. The sequence is more than a little bizarre without even getting into Jackson’s troubled childhood, but it’s fun to watch—we could get into a whole “is this like Back To The Future suggesting a white guy taught Chuck Berry how to rock?” discussion, but it’s hard for me to be too mad about it.
In the end, the whole thing comes down to a drag race. There’s a great bit where Sam slides over the hood of a car and decks the abusive fiancee, and you have to wonder if Cam spent the rest of his life trying to live up to the week or so when an adult man made him look more confident and badass than he could ever be for real. But, again, maybe that’s thinking too hard. We’ve talked before about Quantum Leap’s role as a Boomer fantasy, and I think “Kid” is the purest expression of that fantasy; one that doesn’t ignore the warts of history, but suggests that, every once in a while, the good guys win out over the creeps. There are worse fantasies to believe in.
Stray observations
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• Jason Priestley makes an appearance here as one of the jerk fiancee’s thugs. This is the year before Beverly Hills 90210 would make Priestley famous, and it’s fun to see him wallowing in the trenches with the rest of the grunts.
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• I don’t think it colored my appreciation for the episode too much, but Romy Windsor (the actor who plays Cheryl) reminded me a lot of a person I miss very much; it gave the whole hour an extra patina of bittersweetness for me, which I quite liked, even if it makes me sad to think about now.
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