Recap / Quantum Leap 2022 S 1 E 18 Judgment Day

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Quantum Leap (2022)
Season 1, Episode 18:

Judgment Day

Written by Margarita Matthews

Directed by Chris Grismer

Original air date: 4/3/2023

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2051

Ben leaps into the future, where he finds the scorched remains of Project Quantum Leap, with snow falling through its collapsed roof. He meets a future version of Ian, who gives him some advanced calculations and codes, as well as a warning...

...but the accelerator can't handle Ben being in the future, so he gets yanked back in time.

2018

Ben leaps into his past self on the evening of his and Addison's first date. He's there to stop Martinez from killing her in the past.

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Tropes:

• Back for the Finale: This episode brings back Janis, Martinez, the Montana bridge crew from "S.O.S.", and Frankie from "Salvation or Bust."
• Back to the Early Installment: When Ben and Martinez tumble into the accelerator in 2018, they are thrust back into their previous encounters.
  • First, they end up back at George's Island Asylum in 1954 as Liam and Lawrence. Martinez beats Ben severely before they leap.
  • Next, they end up back on the bridge of the Montana in 1989 as Commander Rossi and Lieutenant Walker. Ben orders the bridge staff to apprehend Martinez, but Martinez easily fights them off. They trade a few more blows before leaping.
  • Finally, they end back up as their leapees in Salvation in 1879. A scuffle ensues for Martinez's leapee's pistol, which Martinez gets ahold of. However, Martinez monologues long enough for Frankie to shoot him in the back, saving Ben, who then gets sent back to 2018 with Ian's code.
• Bad Future: Los Angeles in 2051 has been thrust into nuclear winter, and Project Quantum Leap is in ruins.
• Bag of Spilling: Downplayed. In "Mirror Image," Gushie, Ziggy, and Al are able to scan all of Sam's birthdays from 1954 to the end of the 21st Century, meaning that the old project had the ability to scan the future. That's apparently not possible at the new project; the team completely loses track of Ben when he lands in the future, and they only briefly catch his signal whenever his leap tries to initiate.
• Bait-and-Switch: After Ben finds himself back at the start of the 2018 leap, he runs into his Addison, and asks if everything has been fixed. She then proceeds to ask who he is... only to then laugh the moment Ben gets concerned.
• Because Destiny Says So: Played with. Ben is so assured that he and Addison are meant to be, that he breaks The Masquerade to Past Addison. Problem is, they aren't in love yet, and Past Addison doesn't have the same relationship of trust that Present Addison does. Still, Past Addison doesn't outright shoot him when given the opportunity, and later expresses remorse for not believing him. They still end up together when the Reset Button is pressed, though.
• Big Damn Heroes: Frankie shoots Martinez just before he is about to shoot Ben.
• Big Damn Kiss: As soon as the Reset Button is hit, and Ben winds up back at the start of the 2018 leap, he finds himself with just enough time to scoop Past Addison up into one hell of a kiss, much to the delight of everyone in the room.
• Call-Back:
  • When Ben and Martinez end up back on the Montana, Ben-as-Rossi uses the chain of command — which he learned about in "S.O.S." — and orders the naval personnel to apprehend Martinez-as-Walker, which they begin to do without question. Martinez defeats them all with little issue.
  • Immediately after, while fighting Martinez, Ben remembers Darryl Hill's advice on boxing, dodges a few of Martinez's punches, and gets a couple more punches in for good measure.
• Caught Monologuing: Martinez aims his leapee's six-shooter at Ben, and does some Evil Gloating...just long enough for Frankie to sneak up behind him and shoot him.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Almost literally with Frankie in Salvation, who shows up again to shoot Martinez and save "Diego's" life.
• Cliffhanger: The episode (and season) ends just as it appears that Ben is finally leaping home (though the preview for Season 2 confirms he does not).
• Close-Enough Timeline: After the Reset Button is pressed at the end, the last thing Ben has to do is make sure his first date with Addison is back on track. With Present Addison's blessing, though, Ben does something he didn't do in the original history: he plants a Big Damn Kiss on Past Addison.
• Continuity Nod: Past Addison mentions "Al's place." She's referring to Al Calavicci's house, but it's also the name of the bar in another Quantum Leap finale, "Mirror Image."
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Martinez is the superior fighter to Ben (and even to ordinary Navy servicemen) and is able to beat up Ben for the most part. But as they battle across leaps, Ben recalls some boxing instructions from his coach in a previous leap and manages to get in more hits against Martinez, stagger him multiple times, and even beat him down some before Martinez eventually overwhelms Ben during their final leap into the Wild West and has Ben at gunpoint.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: After messing up the leap in 2018, getting himself locked up, and giving Martinez free reign to change history, Ben has a breakdown about it.
  Ben: I just don't get it. What's the point of leaping through time, helping all these people I don't know? What about me? What about when I want the machine to help me save the one person I need?
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Just like before, the 2020s Project gets a notification that Martinez has leaped in. However, they don't know who he's leaped into until it's too late — he has leaped into Past Magic, and is trapped in the locked-down 2018 Project with everyone else.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: This is the first Quantum Leap story to show a leap into the future^note to 2051, a leap into a past version of the Project^note in 2018, the most leaps across multiple leapees ^note Ben leaps to 2051, 2018, 1954, 1989, 1879, and back to 2018, and a leapee who has had two different leapers^note Magic, who was leaped into by Sam in 1970 and Martinez in 2018, although the latter leap is undone.
• The Ghost: Al Calavicci is still alive in 2018, and Past Magic talks about going to visit him and take him some cigars, but Al is never seen.
• Glitch Entity: Despite managing to leap to the past outside of his lifetime without issue, Ben leaping into 2051 causes him to repeatedly flash with blue energy as the accelerator tries yanking him back into the past.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • It doesn't take Ben long into his date with Past Addison to decide to break character and reveal he's from the future and has to protect her.
  • After Martinez activates the accelerator, Ben forces him into it, causing the two of them to fight across time and space.
• Hand Wave: When Magic comments that, contrary to past leaps, they are not noticing any changes to the timeline as Ben alters history in 2018, Janis claims that Ben interfering with their own lifetimes has set up a "quantum bubble" in which history remains in flux until Ben leaps again.
• I Hate Past Me: Ian is not particularly happy about the leap involving Past Ian, claiming that they were in a darker place at the time.
• Indy Ploy: Ben's way of keeping Addison safe isn't to stick to their original history, but rather to break The Masquerade, tell her that he's from the future and trying to protect her, and send her home so he can get back to the Project and draw Martinez out. Since Past Addison hasn't fallen in love with him yet, she doesn't believe him, and confronts him when he returns to the Project.
• Internal Homage: To the Evil Leaper trilogy:
  • To "Return of the Evil Leaper", in that the ending deals with two leapers leaping together.
  • To "Revenge of the Evil Leaper", in that an antagonistic leaper dies after being shot through the torso.
  • To "Deliver Us From Evil," in that the Reset Button is pressed to undo the antagonist's actions and send the protagonist back to the start of their leap.
• Just in Time: Ben and Martinez's leap out of 1954, where Martinez has taken the upper hand, and into 1989, where Ben is healed and his leapee outranks Martinez's.
  Martinez: [beating Ben] You still think the accelerator's on your side?
  [They leap out and onto the Montana in 1989]
  Ben: [seeing that he's Commander Rossi] Yeah, I do. Detain that man!
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Due to the Swiss-cheesed memory effect, Ben is only able to remember things that he learns (or regains memories of) during his leaps. This helps him when he uses his Photographic Memory to memorize Future Ian's code, but not so much when the 2018 team quizzes him on their Trust Passwords.
• Leave No Survivors: During Martinez's Motive Rant, he reveals that he intends to wipe the entire Project out in one fell swoop.
  Martinez: I had Ziggy run the probabilities. Every scenario in which Addison dies, one of you — Magic, Ian, Jenn, you — one of you always manages to keep the program alive. My mission was to neutralize the threat that time travel poses to the future of humanity. According to Ziggy, all of you have to die.
• Love Is a Weakness: Discussed, played with, and defied during Magic's holographic conversation with Ben.
  Magic: Well, apparently, the entire fabric of the universe is at risk, which probably means less to you than Addison does. I bet you're starting to believe the people we love are our biggest weakness.
  Ben: Are you here to tell me they're our greatest strength?
  Magic: [chuckling] No. They are without a doubt our weakness. I risked everything to bring Sam home. But there's nothing wrong with having a weakness for people. I think that's what makes you the kind of leaper the quantum accelerator can depend on.
• Mission Control: Addison as the hologram per the norm, but Jenn also briefly steps back in to help Ben escape her past self's security protocols, and Magic steps in to offer Ben advice, give Ben Jenn's Trust Password, and tell Ben about the pen in his past self's jacket pocket.
• Oh, Crap!: Things become considerably dicey when it turns out that Martinez leapt into Magic.
• Our Time Travel Is Different: The accelerator can not handle Ben being in the future, and makes repeated attempts to snap him back in time to his next leap. Future Ian has to tell Ben to fight it as much as possible so they can give him the code to memorize.
• Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: Past Ian and Present Ian are able to sync up and use the reset code because they have "experienced a shared state."
• Reset Button: The code that Future Ian wrote acts as this once fully implemented, sending Ben back to the beginning of his 2018 leap — though with Martinez dead, the danger to Addison is over.
• The Reveal: Martinez is not simply out to kill Addison. He is out to destroy Project Quantum Leap entirely.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory:
  • Future Ian remembers the original timeline where Addison leaped, which was undone by Ben stepping into the accelerator at the start of the series.
  • Played with in the present day, where the team is worried about the ramifications of Ben messing with their own personal timeline. Janis says that they're temporarily protected by a "quantum bubble" that will be popped when Ben leaps.
• San Dimas Time: Played with at the end, and it's a doozy. Because Present Ben is synced 1:1 with the Project in 2023 (per the norm so they can use the Imaging Chamber and monitor his vitals), Past Ian is therefore 1:1 in sync with Present Ian. Both of them are, in turn, 1:1 in sync with Ben leapfrogging through his and Martinez's past leaps after Ben and Martinez use the 2018 accelerator. Both Ians have to enter the code at the exact same moment during this sync to hit the Reset Button.
• The Scapegoat: According to Future Ian, Project Quantum Leap became the government's scapegoat for everything going wrong in the world, leading to Martinez's mission and the accelerator's destruction.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Quoted by Martinez to Past Addison, after he sets the accelerator to implode.
  Past Addison: What are you doing with our accelerator?
  Martinez: Putting right what was wrong.
  Ben: [rushing him] That's sort of my thing.
• Shout-Out:
  • Past Ian mentions that they have been playing Dark Souls 1.
  • Past Addison, first thinking that Ben is joking about having traveled from the future to protect her from Martinez, references The Terminator. When Martinez proves to be The Determinator, Ben muses that the comparison was apt.
• The Slow Path: After leaping back to warn Ben, Future Ian spent the next several years working on the "cheat code" while waiting to catch up with Ben in 2051.
• Sole Survivor: Future Ian says that they're the only person from the Project who survived the nuclear catastrophe.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Past Addison realizes Past Magic was replaced when she sees the cigars he was supposed to give to Al.
  • If not for Ben unknowingly standing right in front of a security camera as he wrote out Future Ian's code, Past Ian would never have found out about it while combing through the security footage, and the conclusion to the episode would have taken a much different path.
• Suicide Mission: Ben tries to convince Martinez that he has been sent on one of these to dissuade him. It doesn't work because Martinez already knows — it was his idea.
• Techno Babble: Magic makes a few guesses as to the phenomenon that prevents the team from noticing Ben's changes to the timeline until Janis identifies it as a "quantum bubble".
• Terminator Twosome: The government in the future blamed Project Quantum Leap for causing the Bad Future, so Martinez came up with the idea to use the accelerator to go back in time and stop the Project. Problem is, the future Ziggy projected that the Project team would work to undo this, so Martinez turned it into a one-way mission to not only kill the Project team in the past, but destroy the accelerator as well. In order to stop this, Future Ian leaped into Dottie to warn Ben, setting off the events of the season. It's even lampshaded; Past Addison chides Ben for recounting the plot of The Terminator, and Ben later grimly muses that Martinez practically is a Terminator.
• Trust Password:
  • The 2018 team attempts to invoke this with Ben-as-Past Ben, but his Swiss-cheesed memory can't recall any of the details they ask him for. Martinez-as-Past Magic doesn't have this problem.
  • Jenn has one for herself which Ben uses to convince her 2018 self (and thus also everyone else) that he really is Ben from the future.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Martinez leaps into Magic and answers the team's Trust Passwords, keeping himself in their good graces.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Ben and Martinez leaping back to 1954, 1989 and 1879 and engaging in physical combat in front of numerous witnesses should probably have had implications for their leap hosts — especially with Martinez being shot in 1879 — but this is never addressed. Ian's Reset Button code might have undone these events just as they reset Ben's leap in 2018 but this is not explicitly stated.
• What Is Evil?: Martinez gives Ben a line about moral relativism. Ben doesn't buy it.
  Ben: Maybe the quantum accelerator is on my side.
  Martinez: Everyone that goes to war thinks the universe, God is on their side.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Although the episode ends before clarifying who has appeared in the accelerator in 2023, the promo for Season 2 that immediately followed confirms that it wasn't Ben.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Ben uses this on Addison when telling her that he traveled back in time to protect her. Given that she is already part of Project Quantum Leap, she is not completely dismissive of the idea.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Done with a twist as Ben says this to his hologram Addison when Past Addison is pointing a gun at him. A second later, Past Addison does shoot, but misses, and — as she later confirms — Ben reasons that she would not have missed unintentionally.

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