Welcome back to my episode-by-episode recap of and reaction to Quantum Leap. The spoilers ahead are only through this episode. I provide a short summary at the top, a long and much more thorough recap below that, and a reaction section at the bottom.
My previous episode recaps can be found HERE.
THE QUICK AND CLEAN SUMMARY:
Sam leaps into Eddie, the younger brother of Mac, a nuclear fallout shelter salesman in south Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sam’s mission is to prevent the panic-driven murder of his family’s neighbor on the night that false alarm attack sirens are sounded, related to the on-going crisis.
Sam fails throughout the episode to calm anyone. However, just as the murder is about to happen, he realizes tat the young boy in the family – driven to extreme fear by the behavior of all the adults in his life- is the shooter. He talks the boy down by convincing him to “duck and cover” – taking the gun from him as he does.
THE EXTRA DUSTY RECAP:
via https://quantumleap.fandom.com/wiki/Nuclear_Family
Sam leaps into Eddie Elroy in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sam was very young at the time and cannot understand everyone’s panic that the Russians are going to kill them all. Al remembers that time very well (he flew missions during that time) and tries to explain it but it is something that had to be lived through to be understood.
Eddie lives with his brother’s family and helps sell fallout shelters to put himself through school. Sam already dislikes the constant fear everyone lives in but it gets worse when he discovers that the brother “Mac” (played by Timothy Carhart) shoots and kills one of his neighbors during a false alarm when the man tries to break into his fallout shelter.
Sam tries to reassure at least the children that they’re not going to die but they get even more upset when he tries to say that the Russians don’t want to kill them. The daughter is convinced disagreeing with her father means that Sam is calling her father a liar and is hysterical. Sam has more luck with his sister-in-law in that she doesn’t burst into tears and run from him but she is still unconvinced that they will survive.
Because Sam knows that fallout shelters would be useless even if something were to happen, he does not have much luck selling them. He tries to get the neighbor destined to be shot Burt (played by Kurt Fuller) to not buy a shelter but Burt is adamant. He also manages to convince the children’s piano teacher not to buy one because she and her husband cannot afford one. As she is a Holocaust survivor, he cannot convince her that she is safe but that with so little time left there is no point in wasting her money.
Mac gets angry and threatens to kick Eddie out for sabotaging sales and for scaring his children. Sam decides to take matters into his own hands and buries the bullets from the fallout shelter so that Mac can’t shoot Burt. The family dog digs up the shells, however, and Mac and Sam narrowly manage to get them back. Mac knows that it was Eddie and tries to kick Sam out of the house but he won’t leave until he saves Burt.
Things come to a head as the family is watching a presidential bulletin when someone panics and initiates a blackout. Convinced that the end has come, the family goes down into the fall-out shelter. Since Burt’s shelter has yet to be built, he tries to break into the shelter and Mac holds him off with a gun (although he insists to his wife he is just scaring him). Al realizes that Mac has the wrong gun to have shot Burt and son Stevie took the right gun and snuck out the other exit to the bunker. He is so terrified that he sees his neighbor as an invading Russian and Al realizes that he must have always been the shooter and Mac felt so guilty that he took the blame. Sam climbs up and tries to talk Stevie down. Stevie recognizes his uncle but doesn’t listen. Desperately, Sam recalls one of the cartoons Stevie was watching about what to do when a nuclear bomb hits and gets Stevie to duck and cover so he can grab the gun.
When the crisis is over, Mac realizes that Sam was right and thanks him for stopping Stevie, allowing him to stay. Everyone cancels their fallout shelter orders and Mac is upset because he already has all the construction equipment. Sam suggests they go into the pool installation business. Al laughs that off but then checks and realizes that Mac and Eddie have a very successful pool company.
REACTION:
The intro theme for this show is absolutely top tier. Total banger.
When that key change hits…
Anyway. Sam leaps into an Oklahoma State grad, Eddie, who is selling nuclear fallout shelters for his brother Mac in south Florida. Sam’s job is to navigate the panic surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis and prevent a murder. The pervasive fear of the Russians, among the adults, leads a terrified boy to overreact to a tense situation and almost kill his neighbor. He almost shoots his neighbor because he is afraid the man is a Russian trying to break into their shelter.
I like this episode because it didn’t just ask the audience – most of whom will have remembered this event – to think hard about panic, but also to think about what happens when that panic is transferred into their listening children. Does that mean you shouldn’t be fearful? Not necessarily. However, I think the goal should be to keep the fear in check if you’re one of the adults.
Mac, the lead fallout shelter salesman / business owner does not peddle fear to strangers only. He peddles it at home, too. He keeps a loaded gun around his kids in the event that they face off with invading Russian soldiers, riotous looters, or even neighbors without their own shelter, desperate to get in (Mac believes that opening the door to the shelter, after a bomb, would expose his family to lethal radiation.) I really like Timothy Carhart’s performance as Mac because despite oozing with a calm false confidence, the fear beneath his reasoning, driving his reasoning, is visible, too.
I’m not sure I really understood the type of panic displayed in this episode until I lived through the COVID-19 panic. Now I get it, and just in time for the world to be moving back toward the possibility of nuclear war…so that’s something. It was really interesting to me that Mac’s reference point, and justification, for his fear and his behavior was the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. He knew apocalypses were possible because he had lived through one. He was highly motivated to apply the last apocalypse’s logic to the current situation and handle it better the next time. I can’t say enough about how good the performance here is from Timothy Carhart.
In general, the episode does a great job with the chaos of genuine panic. The rush into the bunker was almost hard to watch because it was so realistic. It made no sense in the moment not to let the neighbor Burt into the shelter, too, because nobody was under a belief that nuclear bombs had dropped yet (they even opened the hatch to yell at him to go away) but the illogic of group terror made sense of their behavior and it made for a great, tense scene.
The real weak point of this episode was Sam’s pointless (though accurate) moralizing about the Russians to the family he is with. Yes, of course, Russians are human beings with families, jobs, and pet dogs. No, the people worried about nukes parked only 200 miles away do not want to hear about how normal the Russians are nor will they be convinced that nothing is going to happen just because he continues to repeat that. To make that point abundantly clear, Sam meets with a Jewish woman who survived a concentration camp. She tells him that she, too, once heard “don’t worry, they’re not going to attack us.” Sam did not learn the lesson yet, though, and still wastes time and energy telling the family as the attack sirens are going off, and they are cowering in the bunker, that nothing is going to happen. Unless Sam is willing to confess that he’s a time traveler, saying stuff like that doesn’t really help. In that panic, everyone else needed to trust that Sam was taking their situation just as seriously as they were. Instead of doing that, he dismissed their situation and the reason for their fear. He looked like the illogical one to everyone else. Honestly, Sam should have known that and if not, then Al should have told him. He needed to match their intensity, as to their situation, and then offer logic. To the credit of the writers, this is the type of Leap mistake that Sam makes over and over. He has great instincts but his emotional intelligence is often lacking. Should Sam know better by now? Absolutely. Is his behavior here to be expected? Absolutely.
Sam doesn’t leap until he convinces Mac to give up the fallout shelter business and start a swimming pool install business. I like the implication of this leap. The job was not complete when he saved a life. He needed to start a business, too, or he stays there forever.
The leap teaser for the next episode is as intense as the Death Row episode teaser. Sam is bound to a gurney and an angry member of the hospital staff – not a doctor – is about to give him a lethal dose of shock therapy, over a nurse’s objections. Oh boy.
This is another episode I remember clearly, in this case because my sister came in while I was watching it and started making fun of me for being a nerd until I cried.
As the eldest of my siblings, I was probably the bully in those situations (though not likely over anyone being nerdy.) I unfortunately cannot relate.
Hopefully the tears did not impact your enjoyment of a nuclear holocaust themed episode of Quantum Leap. Maybe the bullying helped to put you in the right emotional space to feel the episode’s theme of pervasive panic.