406 Raped

Raped


  • Total voters
    30

alsplacebartender

Al's Place Bartender
Staff member
Raped
June 20, 1980


Mill Valley, California


When Sam leaps into Katie, a rape victim, no one wants to believe it really happened because the accused person is the son of an upstanding citizen in the community. Sam, with the help of Al and the real Katie in the Waiting Room, tries to make the charges stick this time.


Written by: Beverly Bridges
Directed by: Michael Zinberg


Rate and comment on this episode!
 
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I love this episode. The best was when Sam beats the crap out of the rapist. My mom and my sister love that scene too. I wish that would happen to all rapists.
 
Very Good episode. It was nice seeing and hearing,for a change, Sam's host(I'm wondering if it's means that after this episode every one,that will be with Al in the Imaging room and touches Al will be able to hear and see,exactly what's going on in Sam's present,which is Al's past and Sam will be able to hear them).
A very strong and dramatic topic,and if you noticed - there were no little joke and no Comedy during this episode- Only Drama. Well done!
I would Probably vote it in my top 15(maybe even top 10) of QL.
 
I rate this as Excellent, because it takes a tough road with respect to rape, by depicting a date rape (from Katie's point of view) rather than a stranger rape. Then it throws a curve because the accused rapist's story sounds plausible, too (that it was a different guy). The family's reactions are awesome and real, from the mother's anguish over not being able to make everything right, to the father's embarrassment and inability to believe Katie right away. I also don't have a problem with the punch out ending, as I recall some viewers did, since Sam is reacting in a guy way to a girl situation.

BUT. In order to love this episode - which I really do - I have to ignore a HUGE writing mistake - timing. Less than a week elapses between the time the crime is committed to the time they go to trial; it's like, a weekend. Wha-??? This is wrong on so many levels. Suspend my disbelief? I have to wrestle disbelief to the ground, tie it up, and stuff it into a lock box. And then bury the box. In my mind, I fanwank an easy fix, then proceed to enjoy the very compelling story.

This is why it's hard for lawyers to watch Law and Order and for doctors to watch House.
 
bluedana said:
BUT. In order to love this episode - which I really do - I have to ignore a HUGE writing mistake - timing. Less than a week elapses between the time the crime is committed to the time they go to trial; it's like, a weekend. Wha-???

You've hit on the only problem I had with this otherwise excellent episode. Sometimes it seems they did have a bit of a "timing" problem in QL. I really have to suspend my disbelief when watching "Her Charm". All I can say is Sam must have really, really gotten lost for it to take hours for him to get from Boston to the Berkshires. You can drive across the whole state in just about 2 1/2 - 3 hours.
 
jmoniz said:
You've hit on the only problem I had with this otherwise excellent episode. Sometimes it seems they did have a bit of a "timing" problem in QL. I really have to suspend my disbelief when watching "Her Charm". All I can say is Sam must have really, really gotten lost for it to take hours for him to get from Boston to the Berkshires. You can drive across the whole state in just about 2 1/2 - 3 hours.
Snort. Especially since it's a straight shot on I-90, east to west. When hubby drives, it's 3 hours; when I drive, it's 2 1/2 - and that's with a pitstop at Framingham. :D

To be fair, other times they got it right. In So Help Me, God, Leonard is all ready to plead Lila guilty, but Sam screws that up and has to go to trial the next day - after staying up all night reading all the pre-trial stuff. That's plausible. And in Trilogy pt 3, the housekeeper does say that the judge wasn't going to delay the trial any longer, so Sam starts trial within a day or so. But in Raped, it's just . . . no. No grand jury indictment, no arraignment, no bail hearing, no discovery, no trial prep - the ADA doesn't even know what Katie's going to say on the stand, because Sam doesn't know. And no defense lawyer worth a dime would allow the victim to take the stand with all the bruises still on her face. Not to mention that it appears the defense put on its case first, which is unconstitutional in the extreme.

Sigh. It's just a show. It's just a show. It's just a show...
 
bluedana said:
But in Raped, it's just . . . no. No grand jury indictment, no arraignment, no bail hearing, no discovery, no trial prep - the ADA doesn't even know what Katie's going to say on the stand, because Sam doesn't know. And no defense lawyer worth a dime would allow the victim to take the stand with all the bruises still on her face. Not to mention that it appears the defense put on its case first, which is unconstitutional in the extreme.

Sigh. It's just a show. It's just a show. It's just a show...

You know, I love these nitpicks to bits. These are professional tv people we are talking about here, and they ignore such basic 'facts' to suit the drama - suspension of disbelief, dramatic licence, call it what you will. (To be fair, sometimes the constraints of a 45 minute show make such telescoping of events inevitable, done not from ignorance but simple necessity to get the story told in a limited slot.)
I'm coming around to thinking - If they can ignore things so blatantly, why the heck should I spend anything from days to months (10 years! in one case) whatever researching every tiny detail, every little fact - even down to checking that the hospital where I set one scene is actually in the same precinct as I've placed the policeman who goes to interview a victim, and things like that. Why should I worry? It's just a story. It's just a story.
I guess knowing me, I'll continue to write copious notes, to research locations and history, and medical symptoms (you all know how cruel I am to our hero!) and so on wherever I can. What I may not do so much is put a story on hold for ages if I can't get the answers I need to my queries. I'll make something up and hope it doesn't spoil it for readers 'in the know'.

So from here on, gentle readers, prepare to nitpick my stories!

Sorry, I'll stop hijacking this thread now, and say that I thought this was a very powerful episode, and all the better for not having a neat little conviction but going with the statistics and having it more realistic in terms of the guy getting away with it in court.
 
I hadn't watched this episode for quite a while, until last night. I had forgotten how good it was. Among the characters, the only false note came from Kevin, who seemed rather cardboard and one-sided. But they couldn't afford to make him look sympathetic at all. All the reactions from Katie's family are so believeable that it's painful to watch. Funny how nobody notices that the teenage Katie is suddenly talking like a mature adult, though. :)

There was one nearly funny moment in this episode--when Al tells Sam, "Swoon. Swoon!" And Sam does. (Hope they had some padding on the floor for Scott.)

I was very unhappy with the ending the first time I watched this, because I don't think beating people up is a way to solve problems. The thing is, the justice system has failed Katie and it seems like there's not much else Sam could do. Plus, Sam has the right to defend himself when he's been hit first. This could even be considered a failed leap--we don't know what happened as a result of Katie beating up Kevin because Sam leaps out before Al can get any information about it. It's possible that nothing changed in either Katie or Kevin's life, even though it looks like a feel-good moment for Katie. They say in a number of episodes that success has nothing to do with leaping, and this might be as close as they come to having a real example of that.

(To be fair, sometimes the constraints of a 45 minute show make such telescoping of events inevitable, done not from ignorance but simple necessity to get the story told in a limited slot.)

I think that's what's happening here. There's a lot of story to tell in one hour. They maybe could have done something to indicate that time passed so we could assume all the proper legal stuff was being done, though. I wonder if it's partly a holdover from the days when TV was considered a throwaway medium. People were expected to see an episode once and then move on to something else, not watch it again and again to notice all the details and pick it apart. (Of course, we have great fun doing those things. :) ) Maybe the lack of realism is because TV and film derive originally from stage plays, which were never very realistic. So whatever conveys drama to the audience is going to outweigh real-life procedure.

I guess knowing me, I'll continue to write copious notes, to research locations and history, and medical symptoms (you all know how cruel I am to our hero!) and so on wherever I can.

As a reader, I certainly appreciate that kind of attention to detail. And I think readers are more demanding than most TV watchers in that regard. When you don't have actors on the screen doing fun visual stuff, you have to have a solid, believeable story. When you have actors, settings, special effects, etc. to watch, you can gloss over quite a few things.
 
Snish said:
As a reader, I certainly appreciate that kind of attention to detail. And I think readers are more demanding than most TV watchers in that regard. When you don't have actors on the screen doing fun visual stuff, you have to have a solid, believeable story. When you have actors, settings, special effects, etc. to watch, you can gloss over quite a few things.

Thanks, Snish, it is good to know that effort is appreciated!
 
You know... one SIMPLE change could have made it seem like more time had passed and make the timeline more believable...

When Sam is on the stand and Al and Katie are in the waiting room, if they showed Katie without bruises... or at least making them look like they were almost healed... then obviously she had been in the waiting room for a while, meaning some time had passed...
 
naggindragon said:
You know... one SIMPLE change could have made it seem like more time had passed and make the timeline more believable...

When Sam is on the stand and Al and Katie are in the waiting room, if they showed Katie without bruises... or at least making them look like they were almost healed... then obviously she had been in the waiting room for a while, meaning some time had passed...

I would think they chose not to do that because the bruised face has more impact.
 
You know... one SIMPLE change could have made it seem like more time had passed and make the timeline more believable...
In order for the timeline to be believable, Sam would have to be Katie for at least several months. That's the minimum time it would take to go from commission of the crime to trial. More like a year, but this seemed like a small town, where cases would move faster.

A better fix, in my opinion, would have been to have a probable cause hearing (before a judge, no jury) and have the judge decide that the prosecutor does not have enough evidence to charge Kevin with the rape. Case dismissed; Kevin goes free. That could conceivably happen within a few days of the alleged rape.
 
I like to put the scene where Sam beats up that Kevin character on A-B repeat on the DVD. That was definetely one of the best parts out of the whole of the Quantum Leap series.
 
Great episode, quite confronting. I don't know anything about the US legal system and how different it is to ours, although I must admit at one point I did conciously think when they went to trial "Gee, that was quick' But I guess you do need to ignore a lot of little 'mistakes' and remember its a representation not a real story.
 
The idea of the serial is lighting out problems and showing ways how to slove them.
Authors of the screenplay show us that rape is the most disgusting one. We can see their and the stuff negative relatation to it. So the end is the culmination: it's right affair to defend the honor of unprotected woman.
The level of moral in every society is defined by how women treated.
 
The idea of the serial is lighting out problems and showing ways how to solve them.
Authors of the screenplay show us that rape is the most disgusting one. We can see their and the stuff negative relatation to it. So the end is the culmination: it's right affair to defend the honor of unprotected woman.
The level of moral in every society is defined by how women treated.
Yeah, I believe it is a socially relevant episode but i was still uncomfortable with it.
 
I find it interesting that the person Sam leapt into and was sexually abused happens to share the same name as his physically abused sister.

A really, really good episode. Probably one of my favorites. I haven't sat through this episode in years, but I was filled with rage the whole way through -- from beginning to end.

I like to think that at the end of it all that Kevin does go to jail for attempted rape after the gazebo incident. I sure hope that that was why Sam was sent there -- and not to just knock the hell out of him (though I felt a tinge of gratification watching him do it); maybe there was no way he could be prosecuted the first time for the rape, but maybe he could be the second time for the attempt.

And gigibean, if this episode made you uncomfortable, it succeeded in what it was intending to do.
 
Excellent episode in a lot of ways...They did a great job dealing with difficult subject matter. Getting to see Sam beat the crap out of the SOB who raped Katie is reason enough to watch it. Way to go. :smokin
 
I've thought of a fundamental flaw in this episode - Sam obviously leapt in to keep Katie's dignity throughout the ordeal and stop her from being raped the second time... Why did he not leap in before the first rape so that he could prevent it from happening entirely?

Obviously a rape needed to happen in order to have a story worth telling... Still, it seems to me that it goes against the fundamental principle of leaping, to put right what was once wrong, not to make things better after what once went wrong still goes wrong...
 
I get what you're saying, but Sam's job isn't necessarily to prevent bad stuff that has already happened by the time he leaps in. I think the main reason he was there this time was to help Katie through the trial (regardless of whether her rapist was convicted or not) and to keep Katie from being raped again.

I think at least part of the the purpose of the story was to point out some of the problems rape victims have when they press charges and how going out with someone doesn't give license.

Of course the show isn't going to be perfect. As was pointed out, the trial process likely would have taken a lot longer than the short time Sam was there. It wouldn't have been the same if it didn't have its little flaws; that was part of the charm of the show. :)
 
Honestly the fact that the bastard didn't get convicted had me thinking this episode would be more difficult to watch than it turned out to be tonight.
One thing that helped was the surprise to me of the forgotten slight humor provided by Al.

The scene where Al brings Katie McBane into the imagining chamber to testify and they gradually pull the camera away from Sam to focus on her speaking paired with Al's listening expression is probably one of the most brilliant scenes in Quantum Leap history.

The tragedy and how strongly Sam felt about it was beautifully portrayed. This was among the rare incidents where Sam's vile hatred of mistreatment/abuse is displayed very powerfully and to the point where he justified vengeful/hateful violence despite being heavily against it. There is such a fine line between what can and can not be called rape. Had Kevin been drunk would that be rape or had he not been aware enough to have judged properly? Had Katie not fought against his force on her but then was later shamed is it rape? Just to name a few examples.
Then there is the non-existence of a sure story as Al pointed out with his hypothetical scenario of Kevin's innocence which very well could have been the true occurrence. I felt that was a smart use of Al's character in this episode.

This may very well be becoming one of my favorite episodes.

I've thought of a fundamental flaw in this episode - Sam obviously leapt in to keep Katie's dignity throughout the ordeal and stop her from being raped the second time... Why did he not leap in before the first rape so that he could prevent it from happening entirely?

Obviously a rape needed to happen in order to have a story worth telling... Still, it seems to me that it goes against the fundamental principle of leaping, to put right what was once wrong, not to make things better after what once went wrong still goes wrong...

With all due respect I must disagree.
Sometimes a terrible event must occur for a greater purpose. Al the Bartender pointed out how Sam's results effect more than just the people he is directly involved with.

If it hadn't been Katie McBane it may have become someone else. Recall that Kevin had argued with his fiancee right before taking Katie out. If Katie hadn't given him a reason to walk away from that argument or had Katie gotten away from him sooner he may have raped the fiancee instead. Then others could have followed, in fact they might have anyway. Originally Katie had not pressed charges, she had fled town. Sam changed that the minute he leaped in.
Tamlyn of Temptation Eyes is another example of this. Sam had thought to go into hiding with her to escape her fated murder but Al pointed out in argument that four other victims had followed her. So in that episode Sam had actually saved five lives.

For a moment tonight I had questioned why Sam wouldn't have leaped into the lawyer to probably better accomplish the conviction. The most significant point being Katie McBane would have been there to give her testimony since Sam's not knowing what happened clearly created a conflict that threatened the success of the leap but it quickly made sense. Not only did Sam need to be the one to press charges since she wouldn't have but the poor thing had leaped into the the waiting room in what sounded like a state of shock. She probably would not have handled the proceedings well. She needed someone as strong and with such a thirst for justice for the wronged as Sam to give her a voice and ensure that she wouldn't have to feel ashamed. Which in turn prevented her from becoming estranged from her family. The fact that Sam portrayed her standing up for herself especially challenging a community who put her attacker up on a pedestal is what she needed. It's also what lead to the ending where Kevin tried to attack her again provoking Sam to give him that beating. Which we are made to assume put a stop to him.

in conclusion the host and time of the leap were set up as it needed to be for the ideal result. As a heavily religious person would tell you (though I myself am not), the lord always knows what He's doing. Something that is actually supported on this show in other instances.

Fact: Deborah Pratt unable to convince Don to convict Kevin for it's unrealism but determined to get justice for Katie was the one who added the ending where Sam got to beat the **** out of him.
In the personal opinion of my best friend and I the destruction to the gazebo was something of an exaggeration (though it makes more sense with Sam than the real Katie) but the emotion was perfect.
 
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I don't think I will be able to add this episode my rewatch list for a while because of the subject matter.It was very difficult to listen Katie's testimony =(

Al mentioned that they used so much power to make Sam hear Katie so this is what I wonder.At the beginning of season 2,the government guys were impatient and they were trying to shut down the project.Will it ever be addressed what's going on future world regarding QL?
 
I don't think I will be able to add this episode my rewatch list for a while because of the subject matter.It was very difficult to listen Katie's testimony =(

Al mentioned that they used so much power to make Sam hear Katie so this is what I wonder.At the beginning of season 2,the government guys were impatient and they were trying to shut down the project.Will it ever be addressed what's going on future world regarding QL?

It's assumed that with Diane McBride as the new head of the Committee, she keeps approving the funding for the project. I have a feeling that she subconsciously knows that Sam helped her, and that is proof enough of its existence in her eyes...
 
It's assumed that with Diane McBride as the new head of the Committee, she keeps approving the funding for the project. I have a feeling that she subconsciously knows that Sam helped her, and that is proof enough of its existence in her eyes...
Oh,I see.
The show reminds me of Person of Interest in that way.
 
I thought this episode would be harder to watch than it was. It was a tough subject to tackle and it was well handled, hitting all the emotional beats just right. Also a bit of a mystery story, in that it's a case of "he said, she said."

But I'm not sure it was a very well constructed episode. We're missing what we need most - the usual exposition from Al explaining what happened to Katie and Kevin afterwards, which leaves the whole purpose of the Leap somewhat up in the air. In the original history, Katie never pressed charges, so it's unlikely that Kevin would have attacked her a second time. In the revised history, "Katie" brings the case the trial which is what provokes Kevin to attack her again - this time he gets punched out and Katie's parents call the police. So does Kevin end up in jail after all for assault and battery? I'd like to think that was the point of the Leap, to make sure Kevin got arrested even if he was found innocent of the rape.

The problem is, I find it highly unlikely Kevin would try to attack Katie mere steps from her own front door when anyone could see him and catch him. If he were that much of a psychopath he would have been arrested years earlier. So the resolution didn't quite ring true - the second attack should have taken place somewhere more remote, with witnesses happening upon the scene and being able to verify Katie's version of the story.

And I didn't even bring up the obvious impossibility of the case going to trial just a few days after charges are brought.

So, emotionally, it was very, very good. Structurally, it was a bit of a mess.
 
The problem is, I find it highly unlikely Kevin would try to attack Katie mere steps from her own front door when anyone could see him and catch him. If he were that much of a psychopath he would have been arrested years earlier. So the resolution didn't quite ring true - the second attack should have taken place somewhere more remote, with witnesses happening upon the scene and being able to verify Katie's version of the story.
I thought he didn't plan on attacking Katie.I think he just wanted to intimidate her but when he saw she didn't back off,he snapped.He was already unstable and violent.
The issue was how fast the trial went on as you guys have already mentioned.
Btw what is the longest leap of Sam? or do they usually have a time period between 2 or 3 days?
 
I thought he didn't plan on attacking Katie.I think he just wanted to intimidate her but when he saw she didn't back off,he snapped.He was already unstable and violent.
The issue was how fast the trial went on as you guys have already mentioned.
Btw what is the longest leap of Sam? or do they usually have a time period between 2 or 3 days?

One of the longest leaps Sam had to take was Temptation Eyes, he was there for over two weeks... I'm not sure how long this particular leap was expected to take...
 
Something I forgot to clarify in my previous post is that although this episode is becoming a favorite it's still difficult enough to watch that it doesn't make my frequent watch list.

blue dana said:
Less than a week elapses between the time the crime is committed to the time they go to trial; it's like, a weekend. Wha-??? This is wrong on so many levels. -- In order for the timeline to be believable, Sam would have to be Katie for at least several months. That's the minimum time it would take to go from commission of the crime to trial. More like a year, but this seemed like a small town, where cases would move faster.

Though it's true that the duration of the incident was unrealistic do keep in mind that this is an hour per episode TV show. in order for it to have been portrayed with that much time passing they would have had to leap Sam ahead after he pressed charges. Which probably would not have worked as the real Katie McBane may not have continued with it. Had it though I'd say they probably would have needed to make it a two part episode.

It's assumed that with Diane McBride as the new head of the Committee, she keeps approving the funding for the project. I have a feeling that she subconsciously knows that Sam helped her, and that is proof enough of its existence in her eyes...

Agreed here. It's stated that she found Sam's name familiar when she read it in the file though she couldn't place it. It's quite possible that she eventually put it together and realized that her "husband" had not been roleplaying that night on the train.
 
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