"Journeyman" Recap & Review - "The Friendly Skies"

Journeyman
"The Friendly Skies"

Original Air Date: October 1, 2007

Jeff L - TwoCents Staff Writer

Katie Vasser waits outside while Dan Vasser gets an MRI. The results will be in on Tuesday. The couple then heads for the airport for their romantic getaway weekend. It turns out that Dan’s “Quantum Leap”ing is preceded by a headache. Hence the MRI. Aboard the plane the couple talk about his headaches and his trips into the past. It seems the wedding ring might have done the trick of convincing Katie that Vasser has actually become unstuck in time.

Vasser heads to the airplane bathroom where he flips back the the 1970s. He exits the bathroom to find a smoke filled plane filed with actual stewardesses and funky dressed passengers. He returns to his seat to find a pregnant woman (General Hospital’s Annie Weshching) Diana Bloom about to go into labor. Meanwhile (is meanwhile appropriate when we’re talking about a 32 year time difference?) Katie’s plane in current time is being turned back to San Francisco since Dan Vasser has disappeared. She leaves a voicemail for her husband and text messages Jack Vasser, her ex the cop, to meet her at San Francisco Airport ASAP. Vasser helps the single mother give birth to the baby while in flight and then wakes up next to some travelers sleeping in the airport back in present time.

The FBI is questioning Katie about how her husband got off the plane but they explain that he ran off the plane before takeoff while he wife was napping. Likely story, but they buy it. It’s been a long day so Katie heads to bed and Vasser heads “Back to the Future.” This time he wakes up in the 80s where he’s awakened by his thought to be dead former fiancé Livia, who tells him he’s going to need an old cellphone, expired money (whatever that is?) and a personal id. She also tells him not to travel with citrus. It explodes apparently. (I hope we get to see that in future episodes).

Livia disappears and Vasser meets the woman from the plane. This time the person who he’s helped in the past remembers him. She tells him that she’s been looking for him for years. She tells him that she’s having a fight with the daughter he helped give birth to. Turns out the daughter would like to meet her father but mom doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Vasser tells her maybe she should know her father and the leaps back to the present where he digs out the world’s oldest cellphone, buried in a junk drawer, but his wife has sold the charger at a garage sale. On the plus side, Katie is starting to accept Vasser’s trips to the past.

Vasser starts up his computer and googles Diana Bloom only to find an obituary and his pre-trip headache prompts him to run like Clark Kent looking for a phone booth. He leaps back to the past again, and heads back to the apartment we saw him sharing with Livia in the pilot. He finds the charger for his antique phone and takes all small change and maybe a dollar or two from a bowl in the kitchen. Just then the past Vasser comes home with Livia and Katie and her boyfriend Vasser’s cop brother. There’s some weird tension since time traveler a hiding Vasser leaves his iPhone on the counter and past-Katie picks it up for a second before she’s distracted by a phone call. Vasser sneaks out of the apartment and winds up in an office building where he meets a young girl who’s waiting in the lobby. It’s the Tana the girl who he helped give birth to on the plane and she’s come to her father’s office to tell him that her mom has passed away. Her father is a real jerk about it and gives her some money and tells her to go away.

Vasser heads back to modern day where he starts charging his antique phone and then goes to pick up his car from the body shop. He starts to leap again while driving but manages to pull over this time before he leaps back to 1995, back aboard a plane and back with Livia who tells him to sit in her seat, which is right next to a man with an oxygen mask. The man is the girl’s father from Vasser’s last leap and he’s now got leukemia and he’s going to San Francisco for treatment. Vasser tracks down Tana and tells her about her father and that he needs a bone marrow transplant. She goes to the hospital to have it out with her father and decides that she’ll take the test to see if she’s a compatible bone marrow donor. While the father and daughter talk, Vasser has coffee with a man named Billy Marble who was a pilot before he was diagnosed with leukemia. Before he can drink any he’s back in our time where he tracks down Tana again and finds out that Tana wasn’t able to donate bone marrow to her father who passed away in 1996. She was, however, a match to donate to Billy Marble who is now flying humanitarian missions in Darfur.

Vasser and his wife try the airport again for a rain check romantic weekend only to find that they are on the no fly list. They decide to travel by car with Katie driving. 4 out of 5 stars.