Sam leaps into the body of a 13-year-old boy, Butchie, in the back seat of his family's station wagon as they are on a big vacation driving around the U.S. He has an annoying big sister beside him and their parents in the front seat. When he finally gets to talk to Al, he learns that the mother in the group, Emma, disappears later that day and is never seen again.
Sam sees her reading The Feminine Mystique and hears the parents arguing. He gets the notion that she will run away with an old high school friend they happen to encounter at one of their stops because she seems so friendly with the man. This red herring bogged down much of the episode because they kept bumping into him at different places and the script tried to mislead us into thinking he was the cause of her running away.
Butchie's dad, Hank, is a loving, good father and provider who loves his wife, but who cannot understand why in the world she'd want to take her idyllic life and start taking classes at the local junior college. This is the big argument that prompts Emma to literally run away from the family-not a planned, "I'm leaving forever" thing, but just an impromptu taking to her heels to get away from her frustrations right at that moment.
What Sam learns from Al is that she fell off a Colorado cliff and with Al's help is able to lead the family back to dramatically rescue her from where she was hanging on the mountainside.
It may have been a good dramatic story in general. I do believe that Sam could have solved the problem much more easily before Emma disappeared when he had a talk with Hank. Sam spoke like he had knowledge of the future, talking about women taking big strides and changing their lives, getting jobs, etc. to become fulfilled. None of this made any sense to Hank.
Sam should have just said something along these lines: "Look Dad, Mom loves all of us and we love her. Even if what she wants doesn't make sense to us, why not let her go try college for a while if it makes her happy? Look at all she's done for us over the years." Then Hank would have very likely agreed to approve of this college for Emma and she wouldn't have run away and fallen like she did.
So many Quantum Leaps happily blend some fun stuff with the drama, I was disappointed this one was almost all drama. Butchie's sister-one year older-seemed intent on being nothing but a brat to him-giving him noogies and wedgies just because-- and there was no hint of the family really having fun on this vacation. They lived in Florida and were passing through Wyoming and Colorado on the episode, with California later to come. About the only tourism thing mentioned was a place where Butchie got monkey poop on his shoes, as his sister complained about the smell.
From my memories of my family's first big trip far from home, as well as the later trips, these were truly some of the best parts of my childhood. They could have at least depicted the family playing some sort of road game and having fun on the trip. We played all sorts of games in the car-"Alphabet", where you look for signs with words beginning with each letter of the alphabet in order (skipping little used letters like Q, X, and Z), or versions of 20-questions, or the ever popular Car Bingo, which is still being sold in various souvenir shops around the country today, like is was in the 50s and 60s.
I cannot give this better than a 5.
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