Ben leaps into a young talent agent whose client’s main talent at the moment is shooting himself in the foot. An aging former superstar, the actor longs to reconcile with his ex-wife far more than he desires to revive his career.

Quantum Leap remains on track as the ‘main’ plot serves as a parallel to what Ben and Addison must deal with.

Full disclosure: I dislike angst, and the martyr syndrome, and love triangles, and tragedy. They rarely entertain me. Which does not mean they can’t be well done; merely that they are not my favorite tropes. Therefore, the fact that I’m still greatly enjoying Quantum Leap speaks volumes about the deftness of the scripts and skill of the cast as they focused on all of the above.

The aging actor, but most especially Addison and Ben, all address this week’s theme of ‘when to let go and move on’. Ben and Addison still feel a great deal of love, but also guilt and anger with respect to one another. Ben can’t get past his sense of abandonment, because knowing three years passed by no means equals living through those three years. Addison can’t simply shed the grief she experienced. Nor can she simply ignore or turn off her feelings for Thomas – or even wants to. Plus, she tosses the accusation of abandonment back at Ben, as he originally left her without so much as a word as to why.

Which brings us to a second theme of the episode: the martyr complex and whom to trust when. When is taking the initiative making a choice that really isn’t up to that person to make? When does it cross the line and take away a choice that someone else should decide for themself? This applies not just to Ben and Addison, but also to Ian and their old-perhaps-current flame.

Ian meets her for lunch because they are torn over what they did to find Ben. Although their actions remain a mystery, this episode does allude to them several times, so perhaps that particular subplot will soon come to a head. Ian’s on-again love chastises them for falling into the same old pattern: walling everyone else out, not sharing, and taking everything on themself. With apparent finality this time, she breaks it off. Viewers learn nothing else about what they’ve done except that it draws huge amounts of power from the grid.

The power grid revelation comes courtesy of Thomas, in another appearance by Peter Gadiot. Although small – at least for the time being – his character remains pivotal. After saving the whole project in a previous episode (with a single phone call; talk about clout) he now is in charge of oversight. Yet Thomas never becomes the government ‘heavy’, but rather, their steadfast ally. Gadiot does a lovely job with the normally thankless role of nice guy and – for the moment, at least – third wheel. That latter remains to be seen, however. Clearly with the series’ history, viewers are pulling for Ben and Addison. However, Thomas shows nothing but loyalty to Addison and – by extension – to the whole team as well. He remains sweet and strong and supportive while never fading to a nonentity. In one particularly telling exchange, when Thomas believes Magic is about to ask him about Addison, Thomas’s reply shows not only his devotion to her, but also that he would never presume to make a decision on her behalf that should be up to her.

This week skirted dangerously close to the line between drama and melodrama. I hope the show continues to avoiding sinking to the later. This episode also included a pointed conversation about sacrifice with the implication that some people (such as Ben and Sam) don’t get a happy ending. Time will tell if that is the conflict they are working to overcome, or if it ends up being the underlying tragic theme of the whole series. Needless to say, in my heavily biased opinion, only one of those outcomes is acceptable.

Verdict: The writing slacks just a tad with the whole brush with soap opera, but the cast remains superlative as ever. 7/10

Rigel Ailur

http://www.BluetrixBooks.com