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

• Ass Pull: Evil Leapers come closer to undoing Sam's hard work than just about anyone else. And towards the end, Alia had almost completely destroyed the LaMotta family, with Frank having an affair with a co-worker, Jimmy being falsely accused of rape, and almost no hopes of Sam being able to save the day. Despite all of that, however, Sam manages to give Alia a speech on duality and the two of them being counterparts and somehow manages to save the day and undo all the damage the the Evil Leapers have caused when Lothos gets angry and causes some kind of time warp that hits the Reset Button. Considering how Quantum Leap never relied upon such Deus ex Machina endings in the past and the fact that there was absolutely no realistic way for Sam to reverse all the damage Alia had done, Sam giving a rambling speech on duality to Alia hardly seems like a believable way to resolve everything and give the LaMottas their happy ending back.
• Broken Base: A lot of the fandom liked this episode, as it added a twist into the regular Quantum Leap formula and expanded the lore to an extent. The rest of the fandom hated this episode for the same reasons, finding Sam's regular leaps more compelling, and finding the evil leapers' motivations — seemingly evil for evil's sake — to be unrealistic.
• Fanon: Given Zoey's comments about her and Alia clawing their way out of hell, there was a theory going around that Zoey was actually the ghostly Ms. Stoltz from "A Portrait for Troian", recruited straight from Hell itself to help undo Sam's good work. When asked about this on The Quantum Leap Podcast, Carolyn Seymour (who played both characters) said she'd never considered it and always thought of the characters as separate, but admitted that it was a pretty cool theory.
• It Was His Sled: It's common knowledge that this is the episode that introduces the Evil Leapers, yet the way it's structured, it starts off looking like a sequel to the episode "Jimmy" (with an added mystery about the good history somehow being rewritten). Even Zoey's first appearance simply looks like Connie is talking to a friend or neighbor instead of a hologram. The Reveal is supposed to be a major twist.
• Squick: Alia begs Sam to make love to her, saying that it's okay because they can see each other as themselves, and he begins to go along with it. This puts aside the fact that their leapees are in-laws, one of whom has Down Syndrome, and aren't other people as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Worse, as Sam's narration states, the first leap into Jimmy was one of his favorites, and he loved the LaMotta family like his own.
• Tear Jerker: It is viscerally upsetting to watch Frank beat Sam, especially given Sam's previous experience with the LaMottas, his earlier narration about loving them like his own family, and the fact that Frank has been tricked into doing this to someone who he believes is his mentally-handicapped little brother.