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stargazer1682 · 2 years ago

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Quantum Leap Revival Review – “July 13th, 1985”

Finally deciding to sit down and watch the first episode of the new Quantum Leap series, I find I’ve got the first three episodes saved to my DVR; so I guess I’m in for a mini-marathon.

Right off the bat, I’m a little disappointed to see the first episode is only an hour long with commercials. It actually makes me realize that, I guess they just don’t make two part series premieres anymore; and that’s a little disappointing. Just diving into a bigger than life concept, like someone bouncing around in time, much less going back to such a story, you should arguably plan on doing some world building; and for that, you need time, so to speak.

But let’s see how it goes.

The engagement party for Ben and Addison is… okay It feels a little cliched, but it works to the extent of introducing the main cast of characters all at once; even if a little convenient. One effective thing about this, and I’m not sure if it’s a credit to the writers, the director Ernie Hudson himself, but from his first line as Magic, I like him more than I expected to based on some promotional material; where I got the impression he was going to play more the gruff military type - barking orders, wanting results and always at odds with the main characters. The casual mention of them working on a top secret time travel project seems… casual. But I guess if you’re working on a top secret time travel project, that’s just sort of the reality you live in.

I will give the show credit for not dragging out Ben leaping. Plenty of shows probably would have spent half the episode teasing the project before Ben even stepped foot in the accelerator, but they’re cutting to the chase.

I have mixed feelings about the accelerator chamber, because on the one hand, the original did kind of give the impression of it being this big mechanical chamber; and it stands to reason there’d be a lot of moving parts for a device that can send someone back in time. But on the other hand, this kind of seems like big shiny effects for the sake of showing some big shiny effects.

And then Ben leaps and it’s very mundane – the transition, that is. The circumstances are anything but, because Ben has leaped into a getaway driver mid-heist. But in terms of the leap, he just sort of sneezes and he's sitting in a car.

Okay, I get it, Sam often leaped into the most awkward situations. He even leaped into a bank robbery in his own hometown once, but this seems a little much. Especially for a first episode, because they still haven't had the chance to bring the audience completely into the know; and Addison finds him very quickly, and we’re already off to the races – literally, with Ben driving the getaway van, while avoiding police and having no idea how to drive a manual.

But once they’re safe and sound, we’re going to get a better explanation for Ben about what’s happened, other than his name and that he’s from the future, right? The show's not going to lean too heavily into the audience knowing all the ins and outs of the previous series? We’ll get a new take on the “string theory” of time travel – the string representing one’s own lifetime, one end representing your birth, the other your death; and the two ends touch and your life is a loop. Ball the loop and the different points of your life touch out of sequence, allowing the leaper to travel between those points within their lifetime?

No? (Sigh) Alright. We’re at least going to learn about the people Ben’s interacting with, right? No? How about some exposition from Ziggy, by way of Addison on these people planning this heist to… (sigh) steal the Hope Diamond, using a shit ton of C4…(sigh) Fucking hell. Alright, we’re going to learn anything at all about these antagonists other than, they’re stereotypical bad guys lifted from I’m assuming a Peirce Brosnan Bond movie; and something about their motivations or their weaknesses that might be exploited later? No???

What are we going to learn about? Oh, Addison learns from Ziggy that diamond smuggler’s going to get arrested in a couple of years for his Cayman Island accounts; which the smuggler is dumbfounded Ben(-ish) knows about, because who could have guessed a shady double crossing diamond smuggler would have an offshore account in the Cayman Islands…?? (sigh)

How about the reason Ben’s there? Oh, this guy he meets, who’s part of the heist is doing it because wife needs dialysis. And we get to meet the wife and their daughter exactly once to drive the single most important part of the plot; and it was done in such a casual way, I honestly didn’t realize it was the wife who was coming back from dialysis, rather than their daughter; until later in the episode when they mention the guy and the wife dying and the daughter losing both of her parents. But then surprise, the person Ben leaped into turned out to be an undercover cop – which, okay, that could have been a great twist, if it meant anything more to the plot than a reason for the bad guys to tie him up. There was no implication of this beforehand, other than MAYBE an offhand mention that they couldn’t find anything on the alias the cop using. No handler or partner trying to make contact with Ben. What's more, the guy Ben leaped into should be in the present day in the Waiting Room; so why isn't the team talking to him?

Maybe the guy Ben was supposed to save could have been his partner, adding another layer to that aspect of the plot and would better explain why he gets killed in the original history. But Ben gets zip tied in a storage room or something, and it takes him like a minute to escape, because for some reason the bad guys don’t just kill him (which they note later they should have done, as a Bond villain always says...) it’s the epitome of “super easy, barely an inconvenience,” and mostly serves as an excuse for Addison to say she was the one who was supposed to leap.

Ben escapes and makes it to the gala or whatever it is where they plan to steal the Hope Diamond – with a fuck ton of C4… and they’re okay if they don’t kill anyone, so long as they get the diamond, but they don’t care if they do kill anyone, because again, generic bad guys stealing the Hope fucking Diamond, somehow using explosive. And they never get caught.

And, oh, yeah, actually it was successfully stolen back then in the original history and covered up; thanks Magic.

So then Ben finds… “Guy” – I don’t remember what his name was. I don’t feel like looking it up. The show didn’t care enough to make me care enough about him to remember his name; and gave him such a generic personality, they might as well have named him Guy. So Ben finds… him.. and begs him not to go through with… it. What this guy is supposed to do or how he’s apart of this crack team of criminals, when he’s just a guy that owned a restaurant and is wracked with medical bills, is not even sort of clear. Or, you know, why the restaurant wasn't doing well enough to be a solution, but was good enough to mortgage... who the fuck knows what this guy's deal is, because they don't bother to do more than skim the surface. But Ben’s here to tell him not to do, and there’s got to be another way.

He doesn’t have an alternative to offer him, mind you. Objectively, Ben is probably right, that…crime is not the answer, but Ben’s not real forthcoming with what the answer should be. Keep in mind that this guy doesn’t even know the person Ben leaped into, seeing he was apparently an undercover cop, who orchestrated things to get in on the job at the last minute. We also haven’t spent enough time with these two characters to develop any sort of rapport, other than Ben meeting Guy's wife and daughter once.

That’s something the original series did best, and was arguably the core essence of the show. Sam would leap into these people's lives, have to figure out the nature of the relationships he had with the people around him; and then make these deep rooted connections with the people he was there to help, all within the timeframe of a single episode. And he did.

One of the chief hurdles with this is the team back at Project Quantum Leap. I don’t hate that we get to see more of them and that they’re fleshing out this background. But long before this series was even developed, being not only a fan, but a wannabe writer myself, I gave the potential premise a lot of thought. I was inclined to give the present day its share of focus, but I was also cognizant of the fact that doing so would mean less time for the core plot; and a balance would have to be found to ensure that neither suffered. That didn’t happen here. The plot of who Ben leaped into, the time period and circumstances and what he was there to do was not nearly fleshed out enough; and neither was the scenes at Project Quantum Leap. Of course the latter has time, so to speak, to gradually build up that world. But the only name I remembered, besides Ben’s, was Magic’s; and only because it’s clear that this is the same guy that Sam leaped into in “The Leap Home Part 2”. I even had to look up Addison’s name.

The plot in the past wraps up with only a little fanfare. One of the bad guys (who “knew they should have killed him” when they saw Ben had escaped) fires a gun into the crowd/ceiling, just for the sake of causing a panic and making everyone flee, while putting them at greater risk of the bomb going off.

But for all of that C4, they only put it in one place… But no worries, Ben’s going to throw it down a manhole; just in time for it to go off and Ben and Guy can fling themselves at the camera with a cool explosion behind them.

And then Ben leaps. The effect was… fine. Even the original series didn’t get the leaping effect down to what it eventually would be in the early episodes, but knowing what it did become, this doesn’t quite do it justice. The leaping effect in the original series always made me think of that warm electric thrill that runs through your body after something particularly heartwarming or endearing. This looked like he was regenerating... Into a demon...

The same can be said for some of the other effects and nods, or lack of same, to the original. I’m ambivalent if we should have heard the sound effect each time Ben looked at his reflection and we saw the person he leaped into. Would that be outdated now? I don’t know. Maybe. But I was still hoping to hear it at least the first time, as an homage to the original.

Then we have Addison as the hologram. I kind of liked seeing the dissolution of the hologram from Addison’s perspective, but beyond that, I do miss her going through the door like Al. When they showed the imaging chamber, it seemed like another one of those dumb effects gimmicks; because why would this long distance holodeck be just a 3’ wide pedestal a the end of a catwalk, with no railing; which appears to drop off into the bowels of the Death Star? When the holographic projection is engaged, she can't see the floor or where that drop off is. How does she avoid plummeting to her death? Seriously, did they just borrow the Cerebro set from the X-Men movies…?

The hologram effect is ho-hum. The matting effect of Dean Stockwell in the original wasn’t always perfect. There was often a telltale look when they were about to him go through something or vice versa, where the color balance was off, but they always tried to make it fairly seamless and not “glitchy” like this one.

One kind of minor gripe with Addison as a hologram was how it appeared Addison was sitting in the car during the getaway sequence, when obviously she can’t. The conceit was always that Ziggy could keep Al locked on Sam’s position and he was essentially floating/standing and keeping pace and relative position to Sam and any vehicle he was in. But it also stood out to me, over the various re-watches of the original series, that they always had Al positioned in a certain way so it wouldn’t look like he was seated, presumably as some sort of visual cue that he wasn't interacting with the physical world in a conventional way. I could be wrong, but Addison looked like she was sitting in the passenger seat.

And then Ben leaps… into an astronaut, at a shuttle launch… Oh, boy.

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keithdcourtney · 6 years ago

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The Best Way To String A Guitar, According To Tommy Emmanuel (AKA: An Unorthodox Theory on String Brands)

Last week, Reverb.com put up a great video piece with Tommy Emmanuel, where he discusses how he changes strings on acoustic guitar. He also gets into a bit of a conspiracy theory about how the brand of strings you use influences your guitar.

First, Tommy’s advice on changing strings:

PRE-STEPS

Tommy doesn’t really cover it, but the first steps of changing strings on your guitar are to:

Remove the old string (either one at a time as you change them, or as I do, in groups of three)

Select the appropriate string from your new pack of strings and seat the base of it in the peg hole in the bridge.

Then…

STEP 1

Put the string through the guitar, over the nut, and through the hole of the peg.

Bend up the string after it passes through the tuning peg hole, so that it doesn’t slide back out.

But make sure you press down on the string just after the nut as you wind the tuning peg. This will make sure the string goes DOWN after the nut, instead of straight out

STEP 2

One all the strings are on, bring them up to pitch. This is simply a matter of winding all the tuning pegs.

If you have really good internal pitch, you may be able to do this by ear. Most of us, however, need to use a tuner.

Tommy himself uses a Korg tuner like this one, but more about that below.

STEP 3

Stretch the strings to get the initial elasticity out of them. Otherwise, the first time you play them you’ll be falling out of tune immediately.

Tommy recommends stretching them in three places:

Around the 1st fret, just before the nut.

Around the 10th fret.

Just over the sound hole.

Stretching it just means pulling gently on the string away from the guitar body.

STEP 4

Now that the guitar is freshly out of tune again, tune it back up.

Repeat STEP 3 two or three times, retuning after each stretch.

STEP 5

Now we’re going to do one more round of stretching. Pull on the string over the sound hole, stretching it to continue working out the elasticity. Do this a string at a time, continously bringing the string back into pitch.

The goal here is that you’re listening and getting comfortable with the guitar’s tuning, hearing it stay in tune.

STEP 6

Now that the guitar is in tune, test it using some important chord positions.

Tommy gives an example of an A chord (1st inversion), so he’s playing it with his fingering between the 5th and 9th fret, and voicing the third (a C#) in the bass.

He gives some other examples, but the idea is that you’re combining open strings with fretted notes high on the neck. If you’re guitar is set up well, and the string’s are tuned well, all these notes will be in tune correctly.

FINAL STEP

Now that you’re in tune, play through some songs, varying the style and challenge of them.

As you play, keep making adjustments to the tuning until you’re comfortable that the guitar is really settled in.

About Tuners

Tommy recommends that you keep a few tuners around. Specifically, he uses one of those popular clip-on tuners, like this one from T.C. Electronics. This makes it easy to always do a quick double-check of your tuning while you’re playing.

Before performing a live show, though, Tommy uses a bigger model, like this Korg, to tune up. Specifically, he:

Plugs in with a cable

Spikes the mid-range in his on-board EQ

And then does a thorough tuning of the guitar.

Changing Brands

Tommy has a theory. It sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory…hard to verify, but compelling to consider. It is this:

Guitars “get used” to a certain type of strings after a while, and begin to sound worse as they acclimate to a certain brand.

The fix? Change the brand of your strings every once in a while to avoid this.

Watch the first couple minutes of the video to hear his whole explanation:

Strings

In the video, Tommy recommends several string brands. All are good, and he recommends varying brands over time. Interestingly, he does not use “coated” strings, like a certain well-known brand we’ve all encountered.

Martin (typically phosphor bronze): .12-.54 – View on Amazon >>

D’Addario (they have a similar bronze set): .12 – .54 – View on Amazon >>

Ernie Ball (an aluminum bronze set is “Amazon’s Choice”) – .12 – .54 – View on Amazon >>

Got more string suggestions? Put them in the comments below!

The post The Best Way To String A Guitar, According To Tommy Emmanuel (AKA: An Unorthodox Theory on String Brands) appeared first on The Guitar Journal.

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