From MadCap's Couch - Quantum Leap: "The Color of Truth"

I'm actually not gonna do my joke captions for this one.
The subject matter is a little too intense.

So, when we last left Sam Beckett, he was sitting in a diner and wearing the face of a black man around a bunch of angry white patrons. I'm sure you're as absolutely terrified as I am...

The Color of Truth picks up there, with Sam in a bit of trouble indeed. After a bit of monologuing about how fun Quantum Leaping is... Sam takes his seat at the counter and people react very poorly.  Looking into the mirror, Sam realizes the problem - he is now a black man. Two men are about to escort him out in a rather unpleasant manner when the lady behind the counter tells Sam to get the lunch of a Miss Melanie and get out. Outside, Sam finds himself in Hill Valley from Back to the Future!

I kid, but he's clearly somewhere in the South and it's clearly the 1950s. Sam is apparently "Jesse" and serves as the chauffeur for Melany (Susan French), an elderly woman who immediately berates him for leaving her out in the street. He manages to get her to tell him where they're going, and we get a healthy amount of racism as they make their way to the cemetery. She gets distressed about some weeds not having been cleared, but Sam earns a few points by clearing them for her. Charles, her husband, has been dead for some time.

Al appears and is hardly phased by the fact that Sam is now possessing the life of a black man save for the danger it can pose to Sam himself given that he's now a black man living in the 1950s in Alabama. Ziggy has predicted that Sam has been brought here to save the life of Melany tomorrow at 5:18 am on the railroad tracks. When Al waxes poetic about the Civil Rights movement and how he was involved in some of the rallies that took place (getting arrested and beaten along with others both white and black), Sam begins to think that he might have been leaped into the life of Jesse to help the Civil Rights movement. A loud train whistle in the distance, and Al, are convinced otherwise.

Scott Bakula's performance as Sam absolutely bleeds generosity.
Makes the scenes of him being berated hard to watch.

Back at Melany's house, a man named Clayton - Melany's son - has come to speak to Jesse. Apparently, the town was quite upset with Jesse sitting at the counter at the diner and he's come to talk some sense into him. Also, the guy ends up using the N-Word (hard R) twice within about three minutes. Melany, having overheard the conversation, doesn't seem to give a damn about the incident in question and avoids questions about it.

...still pretty racist, though, seeing as she avoids Sam's attempts to help her out, dismissing his doctoring as "colored voodoo".

As he goes to get Melany a cup of lemonade, a black woman - Nelle, Jesse's granddaughter - who is apparently quite proud of him and later takes him home. As they head home, two of the good ol' boys follow them in a truck.

Sam is then brought home for Jesse to cook chitlins. As someone from the South... yeah, I'm not a fan. Neither is Sam and the family ditches him for various reasons. Al, luckily, has a recipe for it so that Sam can muddle through. The father of the family comes in, revealing what Sam did to Al as well. It seems not everyone is as happy about what "Jesse" did as his granddaughter. This leads to an argument between Sam and Al about why he is here in Jesse's life... but this gets interrupted by an actual fucking cross burning!

Hoooooooooooooleee shit!

The sheriff later dismisses it as "mischievous" and Sam retaliates by drinking from a "Whites Only" fountain. The good ol' boys don't take it well.

After a mishap with trying to get her sink fixed, Sam attempts to sit down with Miss Melany to tea... which leads to a brief heated discussion that gets interrupted by a knock at the door, Nelle coming to speak to her grandfather. The discussion on race relations continues afterward, Melanie claiming to have never used the n word either to Jesse's face or behind his back, but she believes that things are the way that they are and that there's no real reason to change them as far as relations between white and black people has gone.

Melany thinks that Jesse is going a little too far, but Sam rightfully brings up the fact that he isn't burning crosses in people's lawns, which seems to terrify her.

Meanwhile, Nelle gets run off the road by the good old boys who were just going to scare Jesse... and they flee as we get a shot of her dead on the ground, bleeding from the neck.

Back at the house, the discussion isn't going anywhere and Sam manages to convince Melany to let him drive her on errands, wanting to avoid her eventual fate. They come across the wreck of Nell's car. Sam quickly goes into doctor mode upon finding her, she's still alive but has a severe laceration. They rush her to the hospital, but getting to it the staff refuses to take her until Melany intervenes in a very stern fashion. She promises Sam that she'll make sure that Nell is taken care of and we get a poignant shot of Jesse's face in the reflection of the hospital door as it shuts.

After a slight argument with Al over what he's been doing, the sheriff shows up... and Sam gets arrested for breaking Alabama's segregation laws (going peacefully if the sheriff keeps Melanie there at the hospital). Melany comes out to tell Sam that Nell will be fine... and promptly gets into her car after finding out that the man has been arrested and goes out after him, much to Al's panic. He gets recentered on her, trying to get her to go back... but she can't see or hear him due to him being a hologram.

"Hey, McFly! I thought I told you never to come in here!"
...okay, I got one. Eat me.

She gets closer and closer to the train as Al's panic reaches a fever pitch... and Melany stops just in time to avoid the train that would have claimed her life, thanking her deceased husband for it. Al, however, thinks that he reached her... and of course, uses this new ability to perv. Sam, sitting in jail, even calls him out on how sex-centric he is being. The question comes up as to why Sam hasn't leaped out yet, which neither of them know.

Sam gets released by the sheriff, learning about what happened to Jesse's granddaughter... and he's steamed as you might expect. The sheriff keeps being a defender of the status quo, but Sam tells him he'll have to change soon enough. Melany is not pleased with what happened, but immediately chews Clayton out for speaking his mind.  When Melany says that they can go back to how things were, Sam tells her that she was able to change how things were that day by saving Nell. She puts a stop to the conversation, telling him to go and get her egg salad from the diner.

Melany comes in and sits down at the counter for lunch and then, to the surprise of all... she invites Jesse to lunch, which sends more ripples through the community. Sam joins her, and a look at the mirror at the pair of them is the last sight he gets before he leaps away... and is racing another car beneath an overpass, finding a pimply teenage face staring back at him in the side mirror of the car when he comes to a stop...

... and that's the end of The Color of Truth. Despite my trepidation about covering this episode, I was surprised by how well that handled the subject matter. The episode surprisingly does not shy away from the more ugly and unpleasant aspects of race relations in the Deep South during the 1950s. For those not reading my reviews from America, the Civil Rights movement was a very dark era in American history. Granted, not all of that could be shown on network TV in the late 80s, but Al mentions the protests back then and how demonstrators black and white alike were beaten and worse by police and other law enforcement in the South.

The Color of Truth is the antithesis of How the Tess Was Won in that it actually handles its subject matter well without dropping into a bunch of clichés without ever actually getting around to saying anything. With this episode, the message is front and center and it's woven through the story in a way that is believable and resonates strongly because of it, whereas How the Tess Was Won brought up issues of gender politics but never really had anything to actually say about those issues. The Color of Truth meanwhile, not only tells us that racism in the 1950s was really, really bad, but also shows us why it was bad and we see Sam - being insofar in the series a noble individual who seeks to do the right thing - having a strong moral stance against the evil he sees in the world.

"Once you've seen the light, you can't go back into the darkness..."

The episode is realistic about the goal, however. Sam Beckett wasn't going to end racism in one 30 minute episode, but he did help bring about small changes in what is probably the worst perpetrators of that racism: those that are comfortable with the status quo. The ones who insist that a system is what it is and actively encourage the more predatory, inflammatory people within that system.

As Melany puts it, she isn't actively racist in that she doesn't use the N-Word. However, she still employs a black man that she clearly doesn't see as an equal, has the black staff use the back door, and maintains a strict belief that is how things have always been and how they should be. The sheriff of the town isn't actively racist, but claims that the status quo is what it is and that "causing trouble" isn't a preferable thing. In the former case, though, Melany has her eyes opened to that injustice in the world and Sam puts it perfectly when he says that it's impossible to go back to the darkness once you've seen the light.

So, her better nature shines as she invites Jesse to sit at a lunch counter with her... a small act of defiance against an unjust world that she can no longer turn her eyes away from.

Sam wasn't able to end racism, but he was able to open the mind and the heart of someone beloved and well-respected within the community, and that is definitely a start.

Next time, we'll get a little less heavy. Sam will be taking on the role of a high school nerd in 1961, drag racing and trying to save his sister from a bad marriage. Will Sam be able to set right what once went wrong? Tune in next time, as we take a peek into the life of the Camikazi Kid.

See you then!