Quantum Leap

This is an old one, something that’s been irking me for more than ten years (when I first saw this episode). Now is the perfect opportunity to get it off my chest.

The premise of Quantum Leap is that there is this scientist Sam who “leaps” into different people’s bodies and takes over their lives for a short time in order to fix something that went wrong in that person’s life. It’s neat because you see lots of different characters and people in a variety of situations. Sam has a sidekick, Al, someone from his own time who appears to only him as a hologram and helps guide him in what he’s trying to fix.

In one episode, Sam leaps into a Vietnam war vet who has just become a double above-the-knee amputee.

To start with something I like, he does develop a relationship with a nurse at the hospital and Al says that after they leave, he and the nurse get married and have a family (the nurse is played by Jennifer Aniston!).

But two things really disturbed me. First is that in order to catch the bad guy, Sam resorts to using his own able-bodied-ness. I don’t know how that was supposed to work, if he’s in this other person’s body and everyone sees him as the other person, but he just stands up and attacks the bad guy, which we see from the bad guy’s perspective as an amputee just floating over to him. Very weird.

The biggest thing, though, is a scene where Sam is complaining about something and Al says, “It could be worse.”
“Yeah? How?”
“You could spend the rest of your life in that thing.” [Al gesturing with disgust to the wheelchair].

Is that the worst thing you can imagine? Really? That’s lovely, way to support the notion that your life is necessarily miserable if you sustain an injury. It’s a slap in the face to people everywhere who are building good lives for themselves while using mobility devices.