Recap / Quantum Leap S 5 E 07 Deliver Us From Evil

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Quantum Leap
Season 5, Episode 7:

Deliver Us From Evil

Alia: Who are you?
Sam: Who are you?

Written by Deborah Pratt and Robin Jill Bernheim

Directed by Bob Hulme

Airdate: November 10, 1992.

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March 19, 1966

Sam is overjoyed to find himself having leapt back into Jimmy LaMotta two years after his original leap, but slightly confused why he's there since his previous leap was successful. Al confirms that Sam had indeed helped the LaMottas have a happy future, but now history is somehow changing again: Frank and Connie are fighting, Frank is now about to cheat on Connie, and Jimmy is at extreme risk of being institutionalized. Ziggy can't make heads or tails of Sam's seeming innocuous actions somehow causing a bad future.

The game then changes when Sam makes physical contact with Connie, finding out that she's not who she appears to be...

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Tropes:

• Bedroom Adultery Scene: Frank very nearly walks in on Sam and Alia, who (to him) would look like Jimmy and Connie. It's very intentional on Alia's part, and she shifts it into a Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
• Body Horror: Something unpleasant happens to Alia when she leaps out at the end of "Deliver Us from Evil," but it's unclear exactly what. Upon failing to kill Sam, Alia's image gets distorted and she screams in pain, then there is a flash as she leaps out and the Reset Button is pressed (thereby undoing her damage to the LaMotta family).
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Sam's elation to be back with the LaMottas prompts Frank to let out an uneasy, "Oh, boy..."
• The Bus Came Back: This is the first Quantum Leap episode to revisit a prior episode, bringing back the LaMotta family.
• Butterfly of Doom: While Jimmy is helping Frank with Shirley's move, Al says that history is changing to include "four airline crashes, an outbreak of rangoon flu, three earthquakes, and seventeen floods."
• Cassandra Truth: Sam makes an attempt to break The Masquerade (like in "Killin' Time"). Between the insanity of the statement and Alia's sobbing, Frank doesn't believe him.
  Sam: Listen to me. I'm not Jimmy. Okay? And this? This is not Connie!
  Frank: What? What did you say?
  Sam: She's not your wife!
  Frank: [scoffs] This ain't happening! This is insane! Keeping you here was supposed to make a difference! It was supposed to be a good thing!
  Sam: I'm telling you the truth, Frank, please...
  Frank: NO, YOU STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! [beats Sam] I WON'T LET YOU LIE TO ME, JIMMY!
• Commonality Connection: Sam is overjoyed to meet a fellow time traveler that suffers from memory problems and must complete missions before moving on. When the truth comes out, he just can't believe Alia is evil, due to feeling that same sense of loneliness and fear of never getting home. Him talking about these things end up getting through to her.
• Devil in Plain Sight: Sam and Al don't immediately catch on that Alia is probably the one altering the LaMotta family's history, though Al does get an initial bad vibe about it.
• Distaff Counterpart: Alia for Sam, and Zoey for Al.
• Emergency Temporal Shift: When Sam successfully talks Alia down, Lothos extracts her from the leap so forcefully that her presence in the LaMottas' lives is effectively Ret-Gone; an additional side effect of this is that Sam is blasted back in time by a couple of days.
• The End... Or Is It?: After Alia is forcibly leapt out, Sam and Al find themselves a few days earlier as if this leap didn't happen. Al says Ziggy has no trace on Alia and says she's just gone, but Sam knows she and her master are still out there.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Alia for Sam, and Al even explicitly points out that she's clearly Sam's evil counterpart. But it's also a bit of a subversion, since Alia's clear unhappiness, combined with her hesitancy to kill Sam, as well as her kindness towards Jimmy, shows that she probably dislikes her role and only does it so she can get home.
  • Definitely Zoey for Al, as she is also a snarky horndog, but without Al's compassion or sense of honor.
• Explosive Instrumentation: Al says that Ziggy is so freaked out by the changes to the timeline that "Dr. Beeks got such a shock from her it knocked her halfway across the room."
• Game Changer: This episode immediately changes the Quantum Leap status quo, in that it throws a malevolent leaping organization into the mix.
• Glamour Failure: When Sam comes into physical contact with another leaper — in this case, Alia — this causes them to see each other's true forms.
• Going Home Again: Played with. Sam's narration remarks that he absolutely loved Jimmy LaMotta and the rest of the LaMotta family, explaining why he's so happy to find himself back in their lives again.
  Sam: [narrating] Leaping is a lonesome business. Just when you start to feel comfortable, to fit in somewhere, you're gone. But today I was back with people I knew and cared about, people who cared about me.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Sam is absolutely gobsmacked when Al says that Alia is his Evil Counterpart, and has trouble accepting it.
  Sam: No, I don't believe that there's some force leaping her around, ruining people's live for the pleasure of it.
  Zoey: How deliciously naive.
  Alia: Then you're a fool.
• Hope Spot: Sam is initially quite thrilled to be back among the LaMottas since he knows and cares about them. He quickly sees how things have gotten worse for them recently.
• Idiot Ball: Oh boy, does Sam carry it here. He's so overjoyed to meet a second leaper that he doesn't once consider that Alia could be actively causing the LaMottas' good history to go belly-up. And later he lets himself get seduced by Alia — letting himself get talked out of the gross implications of their leapees having an affair — and it comes back to bite him very, very hard.
• Indy Ploy: Faced with being shot by Alia, Sam talks about the Balance Between Good and Evil and how his death would therefore cancel out her life. He doesn't appear to actually believe this, given his stammered delivery, but he knows from when they touched that she has a fear of never getting home. This is just the best way to play to it at the last-minute.
• Just Following Orders: "[Al] says you're going to shoot Jimmy. Why?" "I've got my orders."
• Literary Allusion Title: "Deliver Us from Evil" comes from the Lord's Prayer, specifically Matthew 6:13.
  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
• Lonely Together: Sam and Alia have a conversation about loneliness. Alia uses this against Sam to entice him to make love to her, and Sam later turns it right back around on her with his "Not So Different" Remark at the end.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Alia's purpose, with Zoey and Lothos backing her up.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Zoey reminds Alia that "We clawed our way out of hell" to get their evil leaping jobs. It's extremely vague on whether Zoey was using hyperbole or they were literally from Hell, but given the presence of other paranormal stuff in the series, the literal meaning is disturbingly plausible.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When talking Alia down from shooting him, Sam tells her he knows she feels the same loneliness and fear of never getting home that he feels every day.
  Sam: You can't kill me, Alia, because I know that somewhere inside of you there's a woman who feels the same things I do — the same loneliness, the same fear. I felt it the first time we touched; you felt it, too.
• Oh, Crap!: According to Al, Ziggy had this reaction to Sam leaping into Jimmy for the second time.
• Pet the Dog: Alia gets a very subtle moment where she kindly gives Jimmy an Arabian Nights storybook to read.
• The Psycho Rangers: The Evil Leaper project is this for the main characters. This episode gives us Alia for Sam^note Leaper, Zoey for Al ^note Snarky horndog holographic observer, and Lothos for Ziggy^note Omniscient Database that runs the project.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: To play up the whole Evil Counterpart thing, NBC's promos for the episode show Alia looking at the camera with glowing red eyes (although she never once does this on the show itself).
• Reset Button: Pressed hard at the end of the episode. Somehow Lothos forcibly extracts Alia out of the leap when she fails to kill Sam, and this sends Sam back in time two days. He finds that Alia's actions have somehow been fully undone, and the LaMotta family's good fates are back on track.
• The Reveal: Sam, Al, and Ziggy can't make heads or tails of how history is being changed for the worse. Then Sam touches Connie during a discussion about Frank, and all of a sudden a second leaper is revealed.
• Revised Ending: The episode's ending was edited down from the original filmed ending, which is a bit longer but with a radically darker tone: after retrieving the gun from Alia, Al nervously relays that Ziggy wants Sam to kill Alia. Sam starts to raise the gun while second-guessing the order; Alia then angrily deduces that Sam deceived her, and attempts to wrestle the gun away from him. When the gun accidentally discharges in the air, Lothos leaps Alia out.
• Riddle for the Ages: When urging Alia to kill Sam and be done with it, Zoey reminds her that they practically crawled out of Hell and experienced all kinds of horrors before getting far more mundane assignments. Whether it's literal or figurative, these leaps are not something she wants to experience again and are best left to the viewers' imaginations.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Ziggy keeps detecting various changes to the LaMottas' futures, but all Sam and Al have to go on are mundane tasks being performed by the former. Sam is incredulous that, say, moving some furniture upstairs is somehow adversely affecting people's lives. It turns out that Ziggy has been picking up Alia's subtle actions throughout the episode.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: After Alia is extracted, Sam is knocked back in time two days, and Alia's actions are wiped out, Sam and Al are the only people who remember what happened.
• Sequel Hook: After everything is undone, Sam grimly tells Al that Alia is still out there somewhere. Then he leaps.
• Serial Homewrecker: Zoey states that one of Alia's typical leaping tasks is to be a homewrecker.
• Terminator Twosome: Both Alia and Sam's respective missions are ostensibly this, although neither one realizes it at first. Alia's mission is to effectively undo Sam's good work with the LaMottas from two years prior, and Sam's mission is to undo her damage.
• Tomato Surprise: Happens mid-episode. When Zoey is introduced, it looks like Connie is talking to a friend or neighbor. When Alia's cover is blown, it's made clear to the audience that Zoey was in fact Alia's hologram the whole time.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The way the episode is structured, there are supposed to be two big twists: the first is The Reveal that there is a second leaper, and the second is the reveal that she's trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right. Every single promo for the episode spoiled both of these twists.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: Though it did involve ableism and an attempted murder, "Jimmy" was mostly about Sam helping convince others that Jimmy was a capable person and valued member of the LaMotta family. This episode is far, far darker, as it deals with infidelity, a false and disturbing accusation of rape, domestic violence against a disabled person, threatened fratricide, attempted murder, and an implied Eldritch Abomination messing up people's lives For the Evulz.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Sam talks Alia down from killing him/Jimmy, so she is forcably extracted from the leap, which somehow undoes everything and sends Sam back in time two days. Sam tells Al that even though things are back to normal for the LaMottas, Alia and her organization are still out there.
• We Will Meet Again: As Alia is being forcibly leaped out, Zoey vows they will find Sam again one day.
• Wham Shot: Sam touching Connie is what reveals Alia and the true plot of the episode.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Alia seduces Sam, and they are about to do the deed when Frank gets home unexpectedly. While Sam scrambles to get himself back in order, Alia calmly rips her slip, claws her own face, and begins screaming that Jimmy attacked her and tried to rape her.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The last time Sam met a woman who saw him as himself and not as his leapee, he had a romance with that woman. He's clearly thinking that he'll get that again with Alia, and assumes that Alia feels the same. However, he doesn't take into account literally everything else going on with the leap, and it very nearly gets him and Jimmy killed.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Alia's initial mission is simply to tear apart the LaMotta family and put Jimmy in an institution. When she, Zoey, and Lothos discover Sam's existence, they immediately shift this into accusing Jimmy of a violent attempted rape. Lothos and Zoey then order Alia to kill Sam under the auspices of "Connie" killing "Jimmy" in self-defense.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Sam concludes his Indy Ploy with this.
  Sam: You're not evil, Alia. Whatever trapped you in time is.
• You Keep Telling Yourself That: Alia keeps insisting that she is Sam's Evil Counterpart and fully prepared to shoot him. Sam openly doubts this, saying he knows her true thoughts from when they touched and that she felt a longing to go home rather than a desire to harm others.