Nerding Day: Quantum Leap: The Mummy Episode (Patreon)

Quantum Leap is a show about time travel, sort of. It’s about a man named Dr. Samuel Beckett, played by Scott Bakula, who vanishes during a time travel experiment called the Quantum Leap project, which casts him into the arms of an angry god. His consciousness is now stuck “leaping” into the bodies of other people across time and space, changing history for the better, until some unspecified penance is paid and Sam gets to return to his own time. Spoilers: This does not happen. He just leaps into oblivion at the end of the series. Whatever he did to anger the universe, it is holding a maximum grudge.

It took four seasons of Quantum Leap for Dr. Sam Beckett to leap into a mummy. Well, he leaps adjacent to a mummy, not directly into the mummy. It would’ve been difficult for him to change history while trapped in some dusty old mummoid. I meant “he leaps into a mummy” in the same way you’d say “he runs into a mummy” but I changed the verb because Sam Beckett is a man specifically known for leaping. By the end of the episode, the mummy has come to life and killed three people, and you might be saying, “Wait, the mummy springs to murderous life? I thought we were talkin’ time travel, what kind of show is this?” I’m glad you asked, because I’m rewatching all the scary episodes of Quantum Leap, and there’s nothing you can do about it!

It was weirdly common for hourlong dramas of the '70s, '80s, and '90s to have scary episodes. Episodes featuring spirits or ghosts or boogins of some kind, perhaps a werewolf, maybe a vampire! Pick a random show from the 1980s, and there’s a solid chance it has a supernatural episode. No, really, this is a legitimate exercise. Let’s play in real time! I’m going to think of a random show - let’s say The A-Team - and now I will check and see if there are any scary episodes! A quick search says there’s at least a Bigfoot episode, plus an episode about glowing tribal skulls, and that counts in my book. You can play this game at home! Pick any show from the '80s! Maybe L.A. Law! There could be a ghost in L.A. Law - I don’t know, because I’m not going to look, but my point is we can't definitively say without checking and that shouldn't be the case with a grounded drama about criminal attorneys.

Random supernatural episodes stopped being as common once The X-Files came out and television collectively realized you could just make an entire show of supernatural episodes. I am aware that procedural television dramas about the paranormal existed prior to the 1993 premiere of The X-Files, but also, no they didn’t. Kolchak the Night Hunter should've staked a few grunge vampires if he wanted to win my heart. Now let me tell you about Quantum Leap, a show that is not supernatural but is unusually complicated in its premise.

As we’ve covered, Dr. Sam Beckett leaps into other people’s bodies through time. Sam brings a pervert named Al to help him on his adventures. Al is a hologram beamed into Sam’s consciousness from their timeline in the future. He’s like a combination of Hobbes from Calvin & Hobbes and KITT the car from Knight Rider. Nobody else can see Al, he knows everything, and he is a bit of a fussy sociopath. But unlike Hobbes, who amuses himself by constantly undermining Calvin’s ambitions, or Kit, who is an irritating wet blanket, Al relentlessly ogles women. That’s all he does. The entirety of his character is a time traveling invisible pervert. He takes full advantage of his status as an incorporeal visitor to the past to leer without consequence. Al is the exact person the movie Hollow Man was about. He shouldn't be allowed anywhere near quantum technology because we know for a fact how he is going to use it.

In the episode titled “The Curse of Ptah-Hotep,” Sam leaps into an archaeologist named Dale during an Egyptian pyramid excavation in 1957. It’s not fair to have to do battle with a mummy while your name is Dale. That’s beginning with a disadvantage.

Sam reads an ominous curse written on the walls of the inner chamber and says, “Oh boy!” This is his catch phrase, which he utters each time he leaps and finds himself in a craaaaazy situation. Previous drafts of the catchphrase included:

“Fuck me!”

“Fuck me shitty!”

“Fuck me sideways!”

“Here’s another rodeo!”

“Fuck me back to the future, Admiral Daddy!”

“Golly!”

“Piiiissss!”

Al shows up at the dig site. He always dresses like the Mask, because he’s from the future.

Al cums in his zoot suit while ogling the lead archaeologist, Dr. Ginny Will, and starts ranting about women in shorts as though he is experiencing history’s first erection.

It always takes a little bit for Al and Ziggy to determine Sam’s mission for the episode. Ziggy is a supercomputer Sam built, for fun. Basically, she’s their JARVIS, and she’s constantly crunching numbers in the background to figure out what Sam needs to do. Al doesn’t ogle Ziggy because she doesn’t have a physical form; otherwise I assume he’d be all over that.

Ziggy eventually determines that everyone present at the excavation will vanish without a trace following a massive sandstorm that will arrive in less than two days. However, we also learn that Sam is a hardcore Egypt nerd who believes that his life’s true purpose, beyond inventing time travel, is to dig up a mummy. Possessed by the same self-indulgent hubris that made him step into the Quantum Leap device in the first place, Sam delays getting everyone at the dig to safety so he can continue the excavation himself. Meanwhile, Al is afraid of mummies and will not let Sam hear the end of it. It’s the perfect combination for adventure!

Sam genuinely forgets about changing history during this episode because he’s so excited about mummies. He’s convinced he can find the burial chamber of Ptah-Hotep, a famous pharaoh who was never discovered, and uncork its hidden rag doll. Furthermore, Sam argues that evacuating the dig site before discovering Ptah-Hotep and letting the tomb be lost in the sandstorm would also be a tragedy, of equal proportion to everyone dying. Al points out that Sam has already made quite a legacy for himself by inventing time travel and urges him to quit while he’s ahead, but Sam won’t hear it. It’s weird! He’s never mentioned studying Egypt, or anything about the pyramids or Egyptian history, and this is late in Season 4 of a five-season show. Sam is suddenly jeopardizing their mission here because he singlemindedly wants to find a mummy.

I can only conclude that Sam wants to eat the mummy.

If you view his behavior in the episode through this lens, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. We know for a fact he’s a mad scientist because that’s the entire premise of the show, and he is obsessed with finding Ptah-Hotep. I don’t have a problem believing Sam thinks he can consume the mummy to gain its powers. Maybe he thinks it’ll send him back to his own time. Anyway, Sam and Al have several versions of the same argument wherein Al says, “Sam you gotta get out of the desert,” and Sam says, “No, Al! We gotta stay and find this mummy!” Sam ultimately delays their escape until the last possible second. He leaps outta Dale’s body with the sandstorm imminent, while they’re still at the dig site. Sam never lets anyone leave the excavation which he knows is going to disappear in a sandstorm! Only the blind obsession of Mummy Hunger would drive a man to do that.

John Kapelos plays the villain in this episode. Quantum Leap usually has a villain, because the premise of the show is that Sam must correct some injustice, usually a murder or a conspiracy that must be solved and thereby prevented. It’s a show of nested mysteries! The point is, Leapheads are trained to watch for suspicious characters, and John Kapelos shows up looking like this:

You may recognize Kapelos as the janitor from The Breakfast Club, or not at all. He’s a Second City alumnus who has appeared in a billion things. Here he plays an Egyptian museum curator with a cartoonish accent. Don't worry; he gets killed by a mummy, so I think that makes it OK.

At one point, Al tells Sam a story about dating an Egyptian woman who thought she was the reincarnation of Celopatra, “but boy did she have a nice asp!” So I genuinely can’t tell whether this is a true story of Al’s or a dad joke. It could be true! Al is a notorious pervert!

The dig’s porters start dying in mysterious accidents and Sam gets caught up mansplaining the impossibility of curses to Dr. Ginny Will, as though a curse is the only explanation. Al has to point out that a murderer could be loose among them, considering they’re standing atop an unclaimed treasure vault in the middle of nowhere. But Sam is entirely possessed by his desire to chew a mummy apart in his teeth, so he convinces the group to delay reporting their discovery to the museum and help him open Ptah-Hotep’s sarcophagus instead. To recap, instead of getting everyone out of the way of the impending sandstorm, Sam has now stranded them all in the desert to help him find a mummy and keep it all a big secret. Are we sure Sam isn’t the murderer?

When they crack open the sarcophagus they see a diamond sitting in a clasp on the mummy’s chest. Eager to continue debunking this “curse” nonsense, Sam snatches the diamond from its resting place to prove that nothing bad will happen, because in his rush to forget about murderers, he has also forgotten about booby-traps. They become sealed inside the burial chamber and must escape before the sandstorm arrives in mere hours. Using nothing but logic and gumption, Sam comes to the conclusion that they need to open the mummy to look for a key which will reopen the trap door and set them free. In other words, the only way out is for Sam to unwrap the mummy. Rather convenient, if you ask me. He just wants to eat that mummy. At long last, he cuts open the mummy, and in his defense it looks delicious:

Alas, there’s no key! Except, upon further examination, Sam notices a riddle inscribed on the diamond, instructing the reader to press on a certain spot of the wall to reset the trap and open the burial chamber door. But surprise! John Kapelos double-crosses them for the diamond, like we knew he was going to. However, there’s an additional twist - he admits he had nothing to do with any of the accidents, and assumed it had been one of them bumping everyone off. The accidents were indeed merely accidents. So Kapelos just decided to become a murderer at the very end to steal the diamond. I get it, it’s a big honkin’ diamond.

Sam does a tae kwon do kick to knock the gun out of John Kapelos’ hand and it might be the funniest moment of scripted television. It’s so slow and awkward and nobody reacts to it. The show behaves as though Sam has skillfully disarmed Kapelos and then moves past it as quickly as possible, like a magician fast-talking through a blown trick. They have Sam do karate during the opening credits montage so you know he’s got some martial artistry in his back pocket, but boy did we think spin kicks were bulletproof in the '80s and '90s.

Sam and Dr. Ginny Will escape, but Kapelos is stuck in the tomb when Ptah-Hotep wakes up. We can hear him screaming hideously while the mummy pulls his nipples off, or whatever is going on in there.

Sam commands Al to walk through the wall using his hologram powers and see what’s happening, and Al runs back out almost immediately. “He’s killing him,” he whispers, forever changed. “Ptah-Hotep is killing him.”

Remember - Al is afraid of mummies, so this is a big deal for him. Then Dr. Ginny Will and Sam rush out just as the sandstorm hits. Sam leaps, unable to mask his fury over not getting to eat a mummy. Instead, he went through all that trouble and did all that archaeology just to sit there and listen to a mummy eat someone else. The mummy didn’t even get eaten. He should Quantum Leap back into this timeline to correct that injustice.

Again, they barely escape the sandstorm in time, because Sam made everyone stay to look for Ptah-Hotep. Then he leaps away and we are faced with the scariest moment of the episode:

Sam leaps onstage with Bob Sagat.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is currently nursing a mtummy-ache. Check out their Supernatural watchalong Him-Boos, and their improv mockumentary BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr, who once stole a cursed lizard hide from the British Natural History Museum and, unlike Sam Beckett, had the decency not to eat it.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM