This Quantum Leap review contains spoilers.
Quantum Leap Episode 7
Quantum Leap episode 7 “O Ye of Little Faith,” is the episode diehard fans have been waiting for in the sequel series. The original show carried with it specific sensibilities of good versus evil, God and the Devil, the power of the subconscious versus the rational mind and the separation of science and religious belief. These tropes popped up from time to time through all the original five seasons, but certainly the Halloween episodes and a good deal of season 5 drove full throttle into the seemingly unscientific questions of faith.
As Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) leaps into the body of Fr. James Davenport in 1934 on Halloween night, creepy children stroll the streets in Depression-era costumes. The bleakness of the period is highlighted exquisitely by the trick-or-treat scenery. Our modern fears of sending our kids out into the street–alone–in homemade costumes created out of ill-fitting sheets, paper-mache masks and the old clothes of dead relatives set contemporary sensitivities to bone-chilling.
Back at the Quantum Leap project in the present, things are “getting hinky.” Addison’s hologram is glitching and she loses contact with Ben due to an unexplainable and untraceable interference in the imaging chamber. Dr. Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) and his tech teams are on the job running diagnostics, but for the better part of this episode, everyone at the Quantum Leap project is left in the dark and Ben must fly solo without Addison’s (Caitlin Bassett) moral support and without Ziggy’s data-based predictions. All Ben learns before Addison disappears completely is that there’s an 89% chance that he is there to perform an exorcism on eighteen-year-old Daisy Grey (Kerri Medders).
And Ben is terrified, not about the demon, but about his role as priest and an exorcist in the leap. He doesn’t believe in demonic possession…he believes in the scientific method. He is forced to play against his rational mind…or so he believes. The very science that he is fully immersed in as a time traveler is a grey area, which Addison aptly points out when she says to Ben “…you are literally possessing that guy’s body, right now.”
Everything, in fact, is not as it seems in “O Ye of Little Faith.” Just when we expect the afflicted young woman to start vomiting pea soup, the episode morphs into a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. The Quantum Leap creators peppered in moving wallpaper and all sorts of terrible things. Elements of homage are given to The Exorcist scribe, William Peter Blatty, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” in this first Halloween episode of a sequel series that has already been greenlit for a full eighteen-episode season.
According to Ian’s e-meow-gency evaluation, “something supernatural is not entirely impossible.” The episode tampers down certain aspects of Ben’s exorcist experience with the dosing of Devil’s Snare he and Daisy both receive unknowingly, but many things remain pretty hinky. First, all of the creepy stuff Ben witnesses before he is dosed with the hallucinogen. Then the demon in Daisy recognizes Ben as a “traveler” and Daisy, in her subdued state, looks at Fr. Davenport and sees not the aged, white-haired man in the mirror, but a younger man with dark hair and eyes. She sees Ben and thinks he is an angel.
One thing we finally know for sure that was not touched by the devil: the malfunctioning imaging chamber. Instead, Janis Calavicci (Georgina Reilly) shows up in hologram form and has a message for Ben, presumably from the imaging chamber of the future or by a different, Ziggy-adjacent system that Janis has constructed in 2022. What we still don’t know is whether Janis is working for good or evil…or something hinkier in between.
Ben leaps out of Halloween before Janis can fully share her warning to Ben. But, as security expert Jenn Chou (Nanrisa Lee) shares with Addison while she’s benched back at project headquarters: in Quantum Physics, “if you believe in something, it helps to make it true.” I believe we’re going to get more Janis in the episodes ahead.
“O Ye of Little Faith” nails the Quantum Leap feels in this episode and, for the first time, the vacillation between Ben in his leap and the team in the present, is seamless. Despite their malfunctioning disconnect, the leap and the present stories segued informatively and with precision. With Janis’ reemergence, we are sure to start learning more about what’s really going on with her, the reasons Ben rogue-leaped and, ultimately, how to bring Ben home again.
Quantum Leap airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC. The sequel’s episodes, as well as all five seasons of the original show, are available to stream on Peacock.