This week’s episode puts the suspicion of the mole of Team Quantum Leap on supercomputer Ziggy. Is he even sentient?
This week’s episode of Quantum Leap continues to build momentum to the season finale in 2 weeks. When I thought the episode was about Magic, I was completely off and this episode is all about Ben.
Detective Ben’s one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Ben leaps into the body of Liam O’Connor, posing as a patient in a mental facility. The thing is, Ben is actually a detective who is undercover to free one of the patients in the mental facility whose sister is the one who hired Ben in the first place.
Ben notices several things with the patients when he enters the mental facility. Yes, some really do have mental illnesses but there are a few who just get experimented on by the doctor who treats them. A doctor who thinks the Hippocratic oath doesn’t count when it comes to mental patients.
When Ben sees that the doctor abuses his patients, he decides to ask Addison for help in order to expose the doctor and help the client, Judy, to get out of the mental facility.
Enter Leaper X
The first few attempts to escape fail. Even when supercomputer Ziggy predicted a 99% failure, they would still have a go. Eventually, Ben and Judy, and a few more get caught.
And just when the doctor is about to experiment on them, they get help from an unexpected visitor: Ramirez, also known as Leaper X. He helps Ben get out of his cell and his straightjacket and makes sure the guards are subdued.
You would think that Ramirez is one of the good guys after all the way he helped Ben and his friends. After all, Ramirez / Leaper X did inject the evil doctor with a heavy sedative. Got Ben out of a jam and made sure that Judy survived and escaped. And I really hoped that Ramirez was the good guy.
Ben, interrupted
But none of this is true. As they all escaped and Ben was optimistic about Ramirez after all the help. Ramirez stabbed him near the carotid artery leaving Ben to die. Addison, afraid to lose Ben, contacts Team Quantum Leap. It’s Magic who responds to her hails. And Magic reminds Addison that she has helped wounded people in the field before even when she wasn’t present.
Spurred on by his words, Addison urges Ben to get up and climb the stairs to the surface. Ben says he can’t but Addison makes him anyway. Determined that she can ensure Ben’s survival and Ben is encouraged by her words, he climbs the stairs and gets in the car. According to Ziggy, in order to leap to the next quest all Ben has to do is cross the nearest bridge to make sure he gets out alive.
When he finally crosses the bridge, Ben leaps the next. Liam, the person Ben lept into this episode, would survive and solve many more cases. Judy also survives and has a successful career.
Ziggy played guitar, or at least the strings
During the episode, Janis Calavicci was called back to Quantum Leap headquarters. Apparently, she managed to take off her ankle bracelet and violated her house arrest. But Magic tracks her down to her mother’s place.
Janis explains that there is a specific order to Ben’s leaps and that if Ramirez is there as well then the mission has to fail in order to keep Ben alive. But Team Quantum Leap can’t bear to do that. There are lives at stake here, even if it is Ben’s.
The fact that Ramirez tried to kill Ben is another indication that the people behind Leaper X aren’t the people who have the best interest of humanity at heart.
And I said it last week and I was correct: There will be something with Janis Calavicci and it happened. Janis talked to Ben about a mole in Team Quantum Leap. And it is not who you think.
Who is the mole of Team Quantum Leap?
I mean from the first time that it was mentioned by Janis way back, I have kept my eyes on all of the team members. At first, I thought it was Ian until his episode happened and that he was a future leaper but did very pacifistic things while he was inside someone else’s body.
Then I thought it could be Addison and that she knows more than she lets on. But then I figured it was too far-fetched, especially after the episode where she almost lost Ben had me convinced it’s not her.
Then there was Jen. Jen is the military brain of Team Quantum Leap and even though she was on the brink of a tiny bit of darkness in the last episode, she has a good heart and has the best interest of Team Quantum Leap and Ben at heart.
And last but not least, Magic. He has some shady connections to the Chinese and anonymous higher-ups in Washington D.C. But when he started to talk about his experience with Sam Beckett, I realized that it can’t be him either. The way he talks about his experience is so serene, it can’t be him.
Ziggy is the mole
So who is left? Exactly my thought as well. I mean we have had all of the living human beings that are on Team Quantum Leap, right? Yes, but how about a very advanced artificial intelligence….like a quantum computer? Something like Ziggy…and how is Ziggy the mole.
And it is exactly as Janis says, Ziggy is the only one who has access to every file at every point in history. Ben suspected Ziggy and that is why he leaped. The question is, if Ziggy is sentient then how long has he been sentient? And what happened to other leapers like Sam Beckett? Is Ziggy also behind the program that created Leaper X a.k.a. Ramirez?
The bigger question here is, IF Ziggy is the mole and Team Quantum Leap takes him down, then what is the future of the Quantum Leap project? Ziggy is the very backbone of the entire project and without the calculations how are they going to contact Ben?
My best guess at this point is that Ziggy’s been infected by a virus that sees no difference between right and wrong. Maybe with the help of the recent closures given to a few members of the team, they are able to fix Ziggy.
If Ziggy is the mole and reprogrammed then we are all screwed. Alas, worst case scenario: they just forgot to update Ziggy to the latest version of Windows 11… oh boy!
