Geek Intersect: Scott Bakula

A Geek Intersect is an entertainer - often an actor - who has portrayed more than one seminal role associated with genre television or movies. Someone who has come to MEAN something to fans of genre fiction, and consequently, whose every new appearance takes on a double meaning. To geeks, they've become a connection to important geekery real estate and immediately create a reference or allusion back into the Intersect of All Things Geek. This new series means to celebrate those men and women and what they've meant to us.Scott Bakula: The nicest man in geekdom.

Sam Beckett. Scott Bakula will always best be known for his role as a time-lost physicist in Quantum Leap. There was something so wholesome about Sam, apparently informed by Bakula's own personality. This guy was DECENT, and even if he had spent the rest of his career playing villains, it's still how we would remember him. Quantum Leap was a crossover show. Something my mom enjoyed as much as we kids did. Something I trotted out more than a decade later to much younger friends who also fell in love with it. It was science fiction that nonetheless attracted Emmy nods. It had a great premise, sure, but at the heart of it, it's all about hearing Sam say "Oh boy" after every leap, isn' it? Oh, and those quantum kicks. Definitely.

Captain Archer. We didn't hear from Bakula for a long time, it seems, after Quantum Leap. And then, out of the blue, he turns up as nothing less than the CAPTAIN OF THE ENTERPRISE on Star Trek's last series. After 7 tedious years of Voyager, I might have been willing to give up on Trek, but Bakula being in the cast made that impossible. Archer was imbued with the same decency and gentle humor as Sam Beckett (but again, that's all Bakula), but with a harder, more impatient edge. And I was more than willing to follow him on a tour of early Federation history, no matter how revisionist it would become. Archer was a great captain even if his star never rose as high as Kirk's, Picard's or Sisko's, but he's not far off. Before Chris Pine, he was the last captain of the Enterprise, but he was also the first (and still is).

Stephen Bartowski AKA Orion. Chuck is a show that's great at paying its dues to all the geekery the writers and producers grew up on. Is it any wonder that Chuck's dad would turn out to be Scott Bakula? Bartowski the elder came into the show's second season as a frazzled loser/inventor, not entirely far from a befuddled Sam Beckett, early in any given Leap, nervously looking around for clues as to who he is and talking to his imaginary friend. They referenced the "oh boy" and I thought he might well LEAP as soon as Ellie's marriage was saved. But no, Stephen Bartowski was also Orion, super-hacker and inventor of the Intersect, taking on the Archer-esque hero role in the shadows. It was perfect casting, and not just because of this dual role. One might be angry at a father who mysteriously left his kids when they were teenagers, but who could stay mad at Scott Bakula? He immediately ingratiates himself into our hearts and we forgive him everything. Not because he's got a good excuse, but because we've been conditioned by the Geek Intersect to think of him as a GOOD GUY.

Favorite moments: I've always loved the Man of La Mancha episode of Quantum Leap - really shows off Bakula's versatility. Archer scenes that come to mind all feature his dog Porthos, I don't know why. (Wait, of course I do.) And in Chuck... fight in the cabin? Yeah, fight in the cabin.

Extra credit: Bakula starred in Lord of Illusions, one of the few Clive Barker stories put on film, and more recently, he was cast as the voice of Jake Gillenhall's father in Source Code, SOLELY to make the audience care about a father-son relationship that couldn't have much screen time (and of course, that film borrows Quantum Leap's premise somewhat).

Geekmeter says: Aces, Charles!

What are your favorite Scott Bakula memories?

Comments

Jon K said…
I've also been greatly enjoying Scott on "Men of a Certain Age" on TBS... while that show isn't inherently geeky, it certainly resonates to those of us near or at that "certain age"!
Siskoid said…
I haven't seen, but have been meaning to... completely on the basis of Bakula's presence!
De said…
He was great in a Disney sci-fi flick called I-Man, where he was exposed to an alien gas that rendered him invulnerable.
F. Douglas Wall said…
He voiced the main character in the animated film Cats Don't Dance and impressed me by doing the singing for the character as well. Most of the other characters had a separate singing and speaking voice actor.

And let's not forget his portrayal of a gay character in the film American Beauty.
Siskoid said…
A small but memorable part!
Jeff R. said…
What, Geeks didn't get to watch Murphy Brown and see him as Peter Hunt during the QL-STE 'gap'?
Kandou Erik said…
Archer and Enterprise where great. It was a shame to see the series be so hated by fans. I thought, through scaling back, they achieve something Star Trek hadn't done in a long, LONG while: renew the sense of exploration. So much of the universe was simply mapped out in Star Trek - while I adore DS9, it made the Star Trek universe a more well known, and less unknown, place. Enterprise scaled that all back, along with making some truly great creative choices, in not letting hardcore continuity get in the way of simply telling a good story. (And, BTW, they pretty handily wrapped up any perceived continuity-errors in the 4th season.)

Plus, I think Enterprise was the first series since the original series to capture Gene Roddenberry's message. Season 3, particularly, captured and dealt with a serious real world subject, the attacks on 9/11, and allowed us to deal with it through morality tales, like with the old Star Trek. No, Archer didn't always make the most noble decision during that season -- but neither did Kirk (interfering with all sorts of races, ect). It really all came together for me at the end - when instead of just destroying the enemies that had attacked Earth, Archer instead managed to forge an alliance, and make peace. (However hard-fought it was to achieve.)
Kandou Erik said…
Someone just mentioned Mentioned Bakula's appearence on Murphy Brown. He again showed up with the actress who played Murphy during an episode of Boston Legal.
Siskoid said…
Yeah, geeks I'm sure enjoyed him on Murphy Brown (I know I did), but we can't quite call that a seminal genre-related role.

So just because I don't mention it in the body of an article doesn't mean it's not worthy of attention.
Servo said…
While I'm a fan of Bakula in both Quantum Leap and Enterprise - the latter of which I think he got a bit of a bad rap about -I remember Bakula used to fall into more of the "lovable rogue" type early in his career. I first caught him in a show called "Eisenhower & Lutz," in which he was basically a womanizing, ambulance-chasing lawyer with a fake partner to bolster his law firm.
While he kind of went back to that a little with Archer, he was more intense with that character. I think its more apparent in "Men of a Certain Age."
While I don't doubt that he's always going be the "good guy," I think we tend to forget that he's not necessarily the "Dudley Do-Right" type of hero.
Siskoid said…
And certainly, that sparkle in his eyes helps make him lovable in either incarnation.
Delta said…
Actually, there's a typo in the title of the post. Not sure how easy that is to fix (I think the url stays the same)...
Siskoid said…
Very easy to fix.
Doc_Loki said…
My favourite Bakula moment is the episode of Quantum Leap where he leaped into Lee Harvey Oswald. More than most, that one got to showcase Bakula's acting chops, not to mention the heart-wrenching twist at the end...
Bully said…
A late comment, but I've just been rewatching Season Three of Enterprise (the Xindi arc), and there's a wonderful personal arc for Archer in which he is forced to evolve from the explorer ("do no harm") to the military man who must torture a prisoner for information and hijack a ship and steal its warm coils (stranding them light years from home), both of which obsess him throughout the later parts of the season. It's very interesting to see Archer try to deal with the contradictions of his personal beliefs and the necessity of his deeds in stopping the Xindi weapon. The mental anguish and doubt seem to be wrapped up a little too neatly in the fourth season episode "Home" (he's apparently put at ease simply by having sex with the captain of the only other NX-class starship—she's an old flame) but it does resonate through themes of the fourth season about Enterprise's journey to explore and ally without losing what makes one human (the Augment story, the Vulcan arc, the Earth First movement).

On rewatching, especially the final two seasons, Enterprise is a really fine show that was cancelled too soon (the Trip/T'Pol story was one of the best subplots on any Trek show since Worf's discommendation in TNG), and the rapid-fire Next Gen holodeck wrap-up that served as its final episode was a deep disappointment. I'd truly love to see IDW develop new stories for Enterprise's voyages beyond Season Four.
Bully said…
(Also, I like to think that T'Pol asked the Xindi Aquatic ship that brought Enterprise home to do the same for the ship Archer was forced to highjack and strand.)
Siskoid said…
Agreed, I liked Enterprise a heck of a lot. It was a victim to Trek fatigue by then, and I blame Voyager.

But then, I blame Voyager for a lot of things. I ran out of coffee this weekend - Voyager. THOSE BASTARDS!