Quantum Leap (continued)

The latter half of season 3 is mostly great stuff, and a good mix of the fun and the serious.  Episodes like "A Hunting We Will Go" and "Future Boy" and "Piano man" are great fun, in the style of the earlier episodes.  The more serious episodes actually work without being too preachy, like "Last Dance Before An Execution," "Nuclear Family" and "Shock Theater."  Amazingly Sam still panics sometimes when he leaps and despairs over what to do, despite having effortlessly solved countless leaps on and off screen.  I also find it hilarious every time Sam and Al go "oh for christ sakes," every time Al finds out how much the person they've leaped into help is screwed, like the dancer who Sam thinks will be easy to help before Al announces that she becomes a prostitute and dies of AIDS in a few years.

The next season is off to a slow start.  The opening episode has Al leap into a physical body while Sam appears as the hologram from the imaging chamber somehow.  Personalities are also partially switched around and hijinks ensue as whitebread Sam experiences Al's horniness and Al becomes stiff and awkward.  Dean Stockwell is kind of funny like this, but Scott Bakula just can't pull off Al.  It reminds me that without Al to lighten the mood this show would just fail, because Sam is a humourless wet blanket.  Finally seeing Ziggy, Guchi, Donna, Tina and Vermeena was a nice little novelty for a while.  The next couple of episodes are alright but not too interesting.  One episode sees Sam try to evacuate people during a hurricane, but what could have been a cool episode is reduced to stock footage and a plot about a jealous lover and a murder.  Then things pick up with "Justice" yet another anti-racism episode, which is hilarious because Sam leaps into a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  He also puts on a weird southern accent, inhabiting a role other than Sam Beckett and trying to be believable in it for the first time in the entire series, which is a little odd, but a nice change.  It gets funnier when once again, despite the necessity that people believe that he's the person he's leaped into, he struggles and gets deeply distressed when he simply has to say the N word.

In the next episode he leaps into a woman, and they actually decide to do something with this rather than just have Scott Bakula dress in drag and act indignant and embarrassed.  They actually play on this as well, as the episode opens he whines "oh no, not again" before finding out that he's just been raped.  Yes, it's a rape episode, and although it's quite tame, it is surprising and quite effective, although the  happy ending seems a bit tacked on (it's Quantum Leap, what do you expect).  Just when I thought this series was really running out of ideas.