While we at HorrorCultFilms love our films we also acknowledge the world of television, where at times that widescreen box that has all your furniture pointing at it, offers a variety of programmes that you can only marvel that. In our weekly Cult TV section we be taking a look at recent episodes of your favourite shows and at times look back at old classics that have stood the test of time! This week our Queen Bee Bat will be airing her own views on the V Re-make and its season 2 finale episode, while Ross Hughes will take a gander at the 90’s classic and much loved Quantum Leap.
Its time to get Ziggy!!!
V – Season 2 Finale – S02 E10 ‘Mother’s Day’
REVIEWED BY Bat Official HCF Critic
That was some finale! I’m of course talking about V, the remake of the 80?s show where a reptilian (disguised as human) alien race come to Earth to take over.
For the last 2 seasons, it’s been the same tale of Agent Erica Evans (a brill Elizabeth Mitchell) losing her son, Tyler, to the evil, manipulative Visitor (V) Queen, Anna, who has plans for Tyler and uses her daughter, Lisa, to lure him in. After embracing human emotion and growing to love the human race, Lisa teams up with Erica and the rest of the the anti-V group, the Fifth Column. With Lisa on their side, as well as a few ‘good’ Vs (Joshua and Ryan), they stand a great chance of destroying Anna, especially when Diana (Jane Badler), the imprisoned mother of Anna, also wants rid of her deceptive daughter.
You just about keeping up? Good.
In this explosive finale, we finally see some jaw dropping action. Erica and the team hatch a plan to ‘kidnap’ Lisa, which will force her mother to rescue her. When her mother does come to her rescue, Lisa will shoot her mother with an annihilator gun. With Anna dead, Lisa’s grandmother and rightful Queen, Diana, can take control of the V’s and lead them to co-exist peacefully with humans. Lisa agrees to the plan but it backfires when her mother accidentally uncovers it. To avoid facing certain death, Anna pretends to have developed human emotion and says she wants to live in peace with human race. Anna’s convincing display changes Lisa’s mind and she discreetly disarms herself. The Fifth Columns one. last, sure fire chance against Anna has failed and things go downhill from here on.
Aware of the unsuccessful assassination, Diana, with the help of Joshua and Ryan, addresses her children and declares how Anna is detroying the V race and how they should embrace emotions and live side by side with humans. As her subjects bow before her, Diana is impaled through the heart by daughter Anna’s tail. Anna watches with glee as her mother dies and reinforces the fact that she is Queen and the humans will be eradicated.
Ryan quickly decides to get off the ship as fast as possible and goes to get his daughter, Amy. However the hybrid child, poisoned by Anna’s lies, dislikes her father and his actions and quickly puts an end to his plans by snapping his neck with her reptilian tail. OUCH! That’s 2 good V’s down!
( “This is much worse than being stuck on that Island”)
Back on Earth, Erica panics and calls Tyler and tells him everything about the V’s. Skeptical, he says he needs to hear it from Lisa himself. After ending the call, she has a hood put over her head and is abducted. She is tied in a dark room where a man named Lars Tremont reveals himself as the Head of the Project Ares. He shows her around an underground centre where the world’s leading army and security people are tracking the V’s, as like Erica, they know they are not of peace, always. Erica spots her FBI colleagues and is at peace knowing there is still a chance to defeat the V’s. However, all is not well on the New York mothership…
After betraying her mother, Lisa is imprisoned in the dungeon her grandmother Diana was kept, and made to watch a screen showing live footage of Anna’s newly hatched offspring in identical skin to Lisa. Wearing a silk dressing gown, Lisa-Clone welcomes a concerned Tyler into her room. Tyler voices his concerns but she dispels them. Lisa-Clone gets hot and steamy with Tyler, as they consummate their relationship as the Real Lisa is painfully forced to watch the guy she loves having sex with an imposter. Post-coitus, Lisa is horrified as she witnesses Lisa-Clone reveal her reptilian jaws and takes a chunk out of Tyler’s neck, killing him almost instantly. Hit 3!
The finale ends as Ryan’s daughter Amy helps Anna bliss the whole of humanity, with an untouched Project Ares team and Erica, unaware of the fate of her son. Blessing humanity, giving them peace and happiness, is the ultimate of mind control techniques, so how will Project Ares battle against Anna now that she can turn all of humanity onto her side?
Having these deaths of 3 main characters really blows this series to new levels. We also have the problem of a missing Kyle Hobbs, Chad Decker who has been summoned by Anna after discovering he was part of the Lisa kidnapping and Father Jack Landry being blessed. This episode is the drive we’ve needed as tv viewing public.
My guess for season 3 is that hybrid kid, Amy, will become a more powerful force than Anna herself. It would be destroying for whichever side Amy is opposed to. If Amy fights for the V’s, humanity has no chance. Anna’s newborn daughter, Clone-Lisa, may or may not produce eggs from mating with Tyler but if she does, they may be powerful like Amy. Being the hybrid kids grandmother, will Erica be able to rescue them and use them to her advantage? Will Lisa escape the dungeon? With Joshua’s memories regained and having rejoined Fifth Column, hopefully he could have a hand in her rescue. What will happen when Erica finds out about Tyler? All sorts of crazy stuff is gonna happen. What do you think?
Roll on Season 3!!
culttv Look Back:
QUANTUM LEAP
TV Series : Quantum Leap
Created By: Donald Bellisario
Starring: Scott Bakula, Dean Stockwell
Debut: March 26th 1989
Reviewed By Ross Hughes Offical HCF Critic
“Theorizing that one could time travel within his own life time, Dr Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his
own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on the journey is AL, an observer from his own time, that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap home….”
I don’t think I will ever see another TV show in my lifetime that I will find myself deeply in love with like I do with Quantum Leap. Growing up in the early 90’s watching Dr Sam Beckett leaping through time on BBC 2 played such a part in my childhood that certain things to this day brings back memories of episodes long forgotten in the back of my mind.
There was just something so simple but brilliant about the concept created by Donald Bellisario, which looking back now, it was just a Sci-Fi version of The Little Hobo, with a man replacing the dog, who would enter peoples lives and change them for the better. Its never easy to sell a Time Travel show, especially on the American Network but somehow Quantum Leap instantly created a massive following which repeated when it crossed over to these shores. Sam would leap into a certain someone at the start of each episode (followed by the shows catchphrase “Oh Boy!”) and needed to find out what bad incident was going to happen and how he could stop it. This information was given by Al and the help of Ziggy a futuristic computer with a huge databank. The concept changed each week from stopping a divorce, to making a Japanese wife expected by an American Family, Racism in the 50’s, to more darker vibes like murder and conspiracies.
Helped by the fact that the show had two stars that were born for the roles. Sam was played with fantastic acting range by the quite brilliant Scott Bakula who in five memorable seasons portrayed everything and everyone from sexually harassed women, to chimpanzees, on to Lee Harvey Oswald and would you believe Elvis himself. His partner or as Sam refers to him in the Season One opener as his Tonto to his Lone Ranger, US Navy Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci played with relish by Dean Stockwell. His Al, a hologram that only Sam could see and hear, and who would appear from a door that would shoot up and down, was a sex mad loner, who failed many times with marriage and relationships. Al had never quite got over the loss of his first wife Beth who remarried after wrongly being told that Al had died when in fact he was a POW in a Vietnam Base camp!. It was this story arc that would play two major parts in the shows run that resulted in a sad ending that stunned and shocked the fans after the showing!
Memorable episodes included “Jimmy” a Down Syndrome child that would be put into a Mental home if Sam could not get him a job. This episode helped me personally as just before this was aired, my brother was born with Down Syndrome and being a young lad, it helped me understand the condition more than any words or books could have. Jimmy was such a popular episode that Sam leaped in to him twice, the second time though led to the stunning revelation of an Evil Leaper that puts wrong what Sam puts right. Other episodes included the three-part stunner Trinity about the disappearance of a young girl that spanned across two decades, Sam losing it in a Mental home, Al and Sam swapping roles after a lightening strike, to the jaw dropping JFK two parter which had Sam become Lee himself.
We also saw Sam create famous landmarks of this earth. His telling of horror stories to a young lad Steve who at the end had the surname King. His singing of “Peggy Sue!” to a young Buddy Holly. His moonwalk dance to a young Mikey, Telling the story of Rocky to a boy called Sly, advising a young Donald Trump to invest in the New York real estate, and many more including Watergate and Woody Allen.
My favourite though was the episode when Sam who had leaped into a Cop and was told by Al that he was there to stop a woman from remarrying. Each and every time Sam saw Al in this episode he became and looked stressed and nervous, the clean cut image replaced with stubble and a look that lacked of sleep. Its only when it was coming to the end of the episode Sam worked out that he was actually there to stop his partner from being gunned down in duty and the woman that Al had told him to stop from dating was in fact his wife Beth. Sam who only played by the rules refused to let Beth know that Al was alive and in the end we saw Beth dancing alone to Ray Charles Georgia with Al looking at her and then dancing slowly with her. He whispers he loves her then vanishes but as soon as he has gone, Beth somehow hears his words, and is left heartbroken when she realises she could not have and breaks down and cries. To this day, I still can not hear Georgia without thinking of that scene…..its also that scene that gets replayed in the final ever episode of the show, that unlike LOST manages to create a finale so out of this world that you can not help but get a tear in your eye.
SPOILERS!!!!
The finale had Sam telling Beth that Al had never died and this resulted in Al and Beth never divorcing which gave AL the life he had always wanted. But this came to a cost for poor Sam, who meant he and his best friend had never met, and Sam was now somehow alone, leaping through time forever, which the caption at the end of the show tells us…….”Dr Sam Beckett never returned home”…..
The original ending actually had a wonderful cliff-hanger with somehow Al remembering Sam even though he was still with Beth, and they had lost contact with the brilliant Scientist. The only way Sam could be found was if Al himself went into the Quantum Leap Accelerator, and has he did, he too leaped! The final image of Season 5 would have been Al looking at himself in a mirror and seeing this blonde stunner looking back with Al then muttering the words “Oh boy!” and Season 6 would have been quite a wonderful ride!!!!
SPOILERS OVER!!!!
Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell are throughout totally outstanding. Scott singing and dancing, being required to do roles that you would not beilieve, its to his credit that you always believe in him no matter who he is, and I have never seen another actor tested in such a demanding role. Its them two just on their own that should have given the studio some patience by awarding another season but sadly we never got to that, dipped ratings meant that the writers went with the rewritten draft and Quantum Leap was officially cancelled, leaving behind a horde of despairing fans. There is talk these days of this show being remade, but I very much doubt that they could capture the feel and mood of this. Everything seems right, a chemistry that can no
t be matched and despite finishing 17 years ago, it is still popular and creating new fans has we speak.
For me, I am safe in the knowledge that Sam is still out there, putting right from wrong, and hoping one day soon, he will finally get his wish and return home……..
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