Quantum Leap (2022)
Season 1, Episode 13:
Family Style
Written by Aadrita Mukerji
Directed by Deborah Pratt
Original air date: 2/27/2023
2009
Ben leaps into Kamini Prasad, a chef at an Indian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, who works alongside Kamini's mother Sonali and her sister Manisha. He's there to prevent their restaurant from being burned down by their landlord, leading to the Prasad family falling apart after Sonali dies of a stress-induced heart attack, and Kamini and Manisha becoming estranged.
Meanwhile back at the Project, Ian reels with the revelation that their future self is the reason behind Ben's leaps, and seeks out insight from their ex-partner.
Tropes:
- Angry Chef: Sonali takes charge over her daughters in the kitchen, saying that they're not doing things correctly or quickly enough. Her refusal to do a new menu also causes tension with Manisha, who walks out.
- Comfort Food: Ben is thrilled to have leaped into an Indian food restaurant, and sneaks several pakoras.
- Cooking Stories: The episode is about Ben leaping into a restaurant, and helping the restaurant's owners make Indian food.
- Cranky Landlord: And how. The Prasads' landlord, Kathy, shows up with a gun-toting hoodlum to threaten "Kamini" into giving her $30,000 of owed rent. Addison says that Kathy is almost certainly the reason why the restaurant burns down. When the restaurant burns down later, Ben confronts Kathy, who tells Ben that the authorities will believe her over the Prasads, and smugly adds that the Prasads still owe her $30k.
- Gender Bender: Ben leaps into cook Kamini Prasad.
- Genre Savvy: Ben very quickly gets his bearings in the kitchen. He's also able to quickly deduce his whereabouts, and Addison is impressed that he's guessed he's in the mid-2000s.
- In Spite of a Nail: The restaurant still burns down, even though Ziggy had predicted that Ben's actions had led to a 2% chance of that still happening. Addison glumly adds that 2% is still not 0%.
- Insurance Fraud: In the original timeline, Kathy burns down the restaurant to get a big windfall, and this still happens even after Ben changes history. But, after Ben manages to make sure the Prasads would be able to bounce back from it and stay together, Addison reveals Kathy gets busted by the cops shortly afterwards.
- It's Personal: Ben is determined to help Sonali because his own mother had dreamed of opening a restaurant, but put it off to pay for Ben's education.
- Not His Sled: A major plot point established at the top of the episode is that the restaurant burns down later in the evening, before the big dinner. So, it naturally comes as a surprise when the restaurant burns down earlier, when Ben and Sonali go find Manisha at the pizza place.
- Offscreen Karma: We don't see anything bad happen to Kathy on-screen but Addison mentioned she got arrested later on after the story's climax had been mostly resolved so the audience knows Kathy got what was coming to her.
- Plot Hole: Ian spends a good while angsting and trying to figure out what could possibly be so important that their future self would cause the present turmoil by telling Ben to leap, and by the end of the episode still hasn't figured it out, but Ben already remembered in a previous episode that he leaped to save Addison from dying in the future. Therefore the team effectively already knows that Addison's life being in danger must be what Ian told Ben that motivated him to leap, a fact that's never mentioned in the episode, and it shouldn't be mystifying that that would be an important enough reason for Future Ian to disrupt things. Possibly this is related to the episodes being reworked and reshuffled before the season aired.
- Product Placement: Ben's little spiel about using Groupon to get people in the restaurant is practically a commercial for the service.
- That's an Order!: Magic says this when he orders a frazzled Ian to take a day off.
- Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Addison tells Ben that an investor named Kevin Rasmussen invests in the property two weeks after it burns down. Ben decides to use this to his advantage to cold call Rasmussen and ask him to check out the restaurant before it burns down, while it's still in the hands of the Prasad family. Ultimately an aversion, however; Rasmussen doesn't show up to the opening because he gets food poisoning.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: One of Ian's struggles in this episode is figuring out how their future self's leap into Dottie has led to Ben's leaps, and whether the particular future that Ben is attempting to reach is even still in play.
- The Unfought: Kathy, to an extent. Although Ben accuses Kathy of burning down the resturant, she pointedly tells him he can't prove that, nor would he get the cops to listen to him. However, at the end of the episode, Addison reveals that shortly after the events of this leap, Kathy would get busted by the cops for insurance fraud.
