Not to be personal, but I’m having a terrible week. The kind of week where you want to believe in miracles, and that every story can have a happy ending. The kind of week, in fact, where you’d love to think love could solve any problem. And it would be nice to believe a mysterious stranger could change the course of fate and change your life for the better. So you could imagine how much I was looking forward to Quantum Leap 2×08 “Nomad.”
Did the episode live up to expectations? Let’s dig in and find out.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Ben (Raymond Lee) has been a little bit of everything over the course of the show. This week, he gets to try his hand at spycraft, as he leaps into a new-to-the-business spy in Egypt. It’s really the kind of profession that has a hell of a learning curve for newbies.
Before I delve into the episode, I have to say that it really was a gorgeous episode, cinematically. They shot on location, and it shows. I’m sure it’s not the kind of thing this series – or even most series – could do often. It has to have been a logistical nightmare. But, man, it paid off.
Ben’s mission is to save an asset and get them (or, rather, her) out of the country. Typical spy stuff, right? However, while undergoing his mission, it’s clear that Ben is both the absolute best person and the absolute worst person for the job. On the one hand, he definitely has experience pretending to be someone else by now. I mean, he’s not always great at the details. But this isn’t his first Leap, either. On the other hand…well, he’s Ben. The very things we love about him would probably make him flunk out of Spy Academy on the first day.
They have some sort of school for spies, right? They can’t just wipe your identity and thrust you into the field to sink or swim, surely. Anyway, I digress.
While it seems like Ben has failed at one point in the episode, Ben is Ben and therefore has a greater impact on other people than he knows. In this instance, he unintentionally influenced his handler, Barnes (Lou Diamond Phillips). So, as promised every episode of this series, we get the happy ending we needed, and all is right in the world.
Well…unless you’re a shipper, maybe.
When Is The End The End?
Things between Ben and Addison (Caitlin Bassett) just keep getting messier. It turns out Tom (Peter Gadiot) might be considering a proposal. Or not. Maybe he had a diamond ring tucked away for some other reason. (A nefarious reason? Allow me my skepticism, I beg you.) He doesn’t quite get around to asking, but his question isn’t as important as her answer. And…honestly? It kinda feels like she might have been about to say yes.
I’ve been in the shipping game long enough to usually get a good sense for when shows break a couple up for good, versus when a breakup is temporary, for the sake of drama. When Kara (Melissa Benoist) swerved James (Mehcad Brooks) hard in the Supergirl second season premiere, I had absolutely no doubt that Karolsen was done. Some online fans argued the point, and I get why. It’s not exactly unusual for shows to break up their OTP for added drama, with every intention of getting the two back together. Hell, Smallville‘s Clark (Tom Welling) and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) broke up approximately eighty bajillion times, and every time was clearly not the last, until it pretty much had to be because the actress had left the show. In the presence of his canonical future wife, Lois (Erica Durance), no less!
It’s not just in the way a show breaks up a couple, but what they do afterwards. When an OTP breakup is temporary, shows go out of their way to remind you that the love is still there. Whatever the reason for the breakup, the love the two characters share is greater than that obstacle. Maybe even greater than they would wish. And it’ll all work out in the end.
A Messy Business
Quantum Leap is an unusual show in this respect. It isn’t uncommon for shows to break up an OTP, but it is usually a bit clearer which way it’s going to go. I can’t necessarily explain it, but sometimes I get the feeling they intend to get Ben and Addison back together, and sometimes I get the feeling they haven’t quite decided if they will.
There are regular reminders that there was something between the two of them. And it’s clear Addison didn’t immediately know how to respond to the proposal. At the same time…again, it’s more of a feeling than something that can easily be explained. Quantum Leap is pushing Ben and Hannah (Eliza Taylor) hard. In another show, I’d even argue they’re pushing them too hard. The two have met three times and are already supposedly deeply in love. Cosmically so. Quantum Leap get a bit of a pass from me on how quickly they’ve had Ben and Hannah catch feelings, simply because that’s just the kind of show this is. It’s the kind of show where everyone gets a happy ending. The kind of show where, sure, the accelerator could play matchmaker. I’ll roll with it. (I won’t necessarily be happy about it. But I’ll roll with it.)
Still, the way they’re pushing Ben and Hannah’s love story feels like they might intend it to supersede that of Ben and Addison. The way that they have Addison considering Peter’s proposal, and the way she’s taking Ben’s new romance – with bittersweet regret, but it doesn’t seem devastating to her…And, yes, I recognize that they have to be careful with how Addison reacts to Ben’s new romance, since she’s currently with Peter. At least without making her a hypocrite.
But still. As I wrote above, I can’t explain it. It’s hard for me to pinpoint in concrete terms why it feels like the show is trying to have its cake and eat it too, ship-wise. It just does.
Maybe it all comes down to the fact that you usually know it’s not the end because the writers project how they’re going to get their ship – and themselves – out of the situation they’ve written themselves into. In the way the longing looks make it clear that the OTP will realize that they never really moved on or loved anyone more. Or maybe in the way that, even when written with other people, there’s always something special held aside for the OTP. Shippers know what I mean.
When it comes down to it, it’s really not clear how the Quantum Leap writers will write their way out of this one. The longer the breakup, and the more serious the competing relationships prove to be, how do they make it clear without a doubt that Addison and Ben love each other more than anyone? How do they prove that these two could make it through anything together when they can’t really make it through Peter and Hannah? And if the justification for Ben and Hannah’s love is that the Quantum Accelerator knows they belong together…?
How will they convince the audience that they should root for Ben and Addison in the end when they’re spending all this time now telling us that Ben and Hannah are cosmically fated together?
Quantum Entanglement
Which isn’t to say that Ben and Hannah have smooth sailing, as a couple. To even progress their relationship gradually narrows the window of when Ben can Leap. Also, in the current day, Hannah would be…considerably older than he is. Assuming he one day makes it home, it would be an extremely May/December romance. Don’t get me wrong; I support ships with older women. But this would be much, much, much older.
There’s also the inherent creepiness of everything they do in the past being in non-consenting bodies (on his part). Which I’ve written about in the past. It icks me out. Even when I try to put my shipper status aside to give Ben and Hannah a chance, it icks me out. And I know the show tries not to dwell on it, but it also can’t help but remind me of it in small moments, like when Hannah establishes she’s approached a variety of strange men over the past six years because Ben is in a different body each time she sees him.
I know I’m a Ben/Addison shipper, so feel free to take my words with a grain of salt. I don’t dislike Hannah. I don’t dislike Peter, either; I also don’t trust him. I don’t particularly love love triangles, but I’m more or less resigned to them. Given that love triangles are almost an inevitability, I’m even open to the idea of Ben/Hannah and Addison/Peter in the short-term. I like Peter and Hannah as characters, and these interim ships aren’t terrible together. Ben and Hannah might be a little too rushed with a little too much of the heebie-jeebies for me to really get on-board. (There’s a middle ground between “long game that takes nine seasons to get together” and “they’re supposedly deeply in love after three episodes.”) But I genuinely don’t hate them together. If I didn’t have the reservations I’d expressed in previous reviews, I’d probably even enjoy them well enough as a short-term ship.
Long-term, though? Even if Ben and Addison had never been established as this super important thing, and even if Ben wasn’t making out with Hannah (or doing even more) with a body that isn’t his and has no ability to consent, the Ben and Hannah ship has some problems. Barring some sort of really outlandish deus ex machina, there’s a finite number of times that these two will be able to meet in the past before it stretches credulity, even by Quantum Leap standards. Bringing them together in the present doesn’t really work, either, even if Ben was able to temporarily take present day “shore leave.”
Any way you slice it, it seems like Ben and Hannah are destined to be a doomed ship. And I’m too old and jaded to enjoy ships that are doomed. I’ll be a non-shipper before I willingly become a doomed shipper. Hell, if it becomes clear that Ben and Addison are done, a non-shipper is probably what I’ll become in this show, in fact.
So was Quantum Leap just what I needed, after the week I’ve had. In terms of cinematography, drama, and action, sure. But in terms of helping me believe that love can be the miracle that solves every problem? If anything, it did the exact opposite. With respect to either putting Ben and Addison together or keeping Ben and Hannah together, I genuinely don’t know how the writers are going to manage it.
I suspect that the ring actually belongs to Tom’s deceased wife, nothing more. That look on Addison’s face when she checked back in on Ben, expecting an uncensored TMI moment, was hilarous.