#UHH AHA. THIS IS LIKE. OVER 1K WORDS?

[theloopus]

I finally watched mirror image a few minutes ago and I do not know what to say. Your sam in drag video got me to start watching QL a few months ago and by accident I'd also seen it mentioned that Sam never got home while looking up the show, but I didn't care at the time since I didn't know what that even meant. I got through 3 seasons in a month and then a started to slow down because I realized I was running out of episodes, so I slowly got through the fourth season. One I got to the fifth, I had to take a long break. I knew that the episode quality would decline since id seen you mention on Twitter once that you don't even consider them canon, but I was not expecting how difficult it would be to get though. I could only watch ten minutes of each trilogy episode a day, it was unbearable. But I bet you don't really care about all of this so let me get to the point. I had to pause the screen where it said Sam never got home. I don’t know how to feel and I'm so confused. I've looked through the episode wiki and the imdb episode trivia and I still want to know more. Whenever you mentioned stuff about Mirror image on here or on Twitter I always scrolled past it quickly to avoid spoilers, but now I can barely find anything regarding it, so I was wondering if I could hear your thoughts on the episode. Was the bartender God? Did you like Sam's choice to sacrifice his returning home for Al's happiness? Just, what are your thoughts on it? Thank you for introducing me to this wonderful show and these wonderful characters ❤

omg this is so much. i'm gonna put these under a read more because "what are your thoughts on Mirror Image" is a LOADED question with a controversial answer. i am so incredibly normal about Quantum Leap.

first of all i love that "binging the first three seasons like a starving lunatic then slowing down with the fourth because you realize you're gonna run out of episodes and then season 5 is just so bad on top of that you take ages to finish it" is such a universal experience. it truly is just a rough season to get through. which is a shame! and trilogy.... oh trilogy............. what the fuck was that.............

anyway, mirror image is an episode that makes me kind of insane. the thing is that. i don't know how to put this exactly. mirror image is complicated. in my eyes it's

a really, really good and interesting episode

not a at all a satisfying wrap-up for the show

really not a good series finale for the type of show they were trying to make at the time they were making it as tv functioned back then

a perfect finale for the quantum leap that exists in my mind that i've built from the subtext and character beats and unintentional lore/themes/motifs

because quantum leap the tv show from the 80s is a politically liberal, episodic science fiction adventure tv show from the 80s/90s, and the way these sort of tv shows works, there is an unspoken pact with the audience that they should have satisfying, relatively happy endings. romcoms should end with the leads getting together. superhero movies should end with the good guy defeating the bad guy. detective shows should end with the detective catching the criminal. and a tv show in which every episode ends with the good guy succeeding to put right what once went wrong, solving the conflict, and giving everyone a happy ending, should end with the good guy getting a happy ending himself.

but the quantum leap that exists in my mind and i've built from the subtext and character beats and unintentional lore, themes, and motifs is a Tragedy. it's a story about martyrdom, and saints, and sacrifice, and blind faith, and God, and trauma, and being stuck in the past because of that trauma.

Tragedy, as a genre, is characterized by this: the main character is doomed by the narrative from the beginning because of who they are inherently. whereas in another narrative their traits might've been assets, might've helped them succeed, in this narrative, it's what dooms them (ex. Hamlet's indecisiveness vs Juliet's impulsiveness). and, god, i ADORE Sam Beckett as a tragic hero: his defining characteristic is that he's "terminally good—if it was up to you, you'd save everyone!", and i'm obsessed with the use of "terminal" here, because it is that relentless goodness that ends up dooming him. Sam is Jesus, he's Saint Sebastian, he's Joan of Arc. God chose him to be sent on this divine journey, to help people, to save people from their own fates, to save humanity—at the cost of his own humanity, his own life. at the beginning, he says: "i can't have a life, all i do is live someone else's life!" and in Mirror Image he's still clinging to the hope of going home, at first, because he really does want to go home, more than anything. but then his arc is completed when he realizes it: he's never going home. this kind of journey doesn't have an ending. there are always more people to save. you might be able to take the weekends off, but you can't just quit the job of being God's chosen one. and in the end, he was never going to, because the reason why he was chosen is that he's terminally good. that if it was up to him, he'd save everyone. quitting would mean God knows how many people that needed saving won't be saved, and if everything we've been told about Sam is true, he wouldn't be able to live with himself. so he accepts his Celestial role, leaves Al behind with a parting gift, and disappears into the sands of time the way the Little Mermaid throws herself into the ocean and dissolves into seafoam.

the fascinating thing about Sam, actually, is that this terminal goodness perfectly coexists with the fact that he's also very selfish. in this way, Al is his perfect mirror: in his own words, Al looks out only for himself; he would not go out of his way to help a stranger at the cost of his own life because he's fought fucking hard and sacrificed too much for that life—and yet that's exactly what he's doing by helping Sam, by being the Sancho and Dulcinea to his Don Quixote, putting his own life aside to be there for Sam 24/7. because he loves him. romantically or platonically, however you choose to read their relationship, it's undeniable that Al loves Sam to a devotional degree. meanwhile Sam is riddled with guilt over not being there for his dad when he died, over "abandoning" him to pursue his own studies and interests—and then he proceeds to do exactly that to Al by stepping into the Accelerator, and then fucking again by doing what he does in Mirror Image.

i have so many frankly insane thoughts about what Sam does to Al in Mirror Image (hilarious unintentional wording sorry. unfortunately he does not fuck that old man quite the opposite.) and i am very much channeling them into a long, rambling, experimental post-canon fic, thank you very much. but the gist of it is that like... ok, taking your own words, it's very interesting that you said Sam is "sacrificing his returning home for Al's happiness", because that's not quite the way i see it. Sam was never going to return home. what he's doing for Al is, at least in his mind, setting him free and leaving him a parting gift.

ok so: Sam learns that his journey does not have an end, and he will never go home. throughout this entire journey thus far, Al has been his loyal companion, helper, and guardian angel. "i don't know if i can make it without you Al" "i don't wanna hear that you can't make it! of course you can. if you had to." but Al is just that, a companion (one that is 20 years older than Sam, worth mentioning)—someone who Sam unintentionally burdened with the role of helper. but where Sam is going, Al can't follow. he just can't keep following Sam around forever—Sam wouldn't want that for him. he wants Al to be happy, and for Al to be happy, he needs his own life back, and he needs the main wrong in his life righted—Beth.

...that's how Sam sees it, at least. because, as mentioned before, Sam may be good, but he's also selfish. it's very ironic, and juicy, to me, that he keeps repeating the same mistake over and over, with everyone he loves the most (his family and Al): consistently underestimating how much people love him, and leaving without saying goodbye. he's so obsessed with Saving Al that he fails to consider that maybe Al, who has a very specific and strong trauma about being abandoned by the people he loves the most, as much as he might be thrilled at having Beth back, might not appreciate 1. Sam not consulting him in the decision to completely turn his whole life and timeline upside down 2. Sam disappearing without a trace without saying goodbye or offering him any sort of closure in their very intense, very codependent relationship 3. having to sort of like... pay the price for having Beth by losing Sam, as if these two people, the two people he's loved the most in his entire life, were interchangeable.

and, to be fair, this part of the analysis does seem like a bit of a stretch if you've only seen the canonical ending of the show as it aired and not the original 'lost' ending that they ended up cutting for Reasons, but which i absolutely consider to be canon and the "real" ending of the show.

god, okay, i probably could have many more things to say about this if prompted, but that should be the gist of it, i believe. hopefully i'm not forgetting anything? did you know there's actually multiple alternate endings they wrote for different real-life scenarios Just In Case, including one where Sam and Al would go to space and Al would be a leaper and Sam would be a time traveler in his own body if they got picked up for a sixth season? i'm obsessed with it.

as for Al the Bartender? my fun little theory is that he's not God, or Time, or Fate, or an alien, or any of those things—in a way, in-universe, he's all of them at once.

he's The Narrative personified.