2) Sometimes Sam & Al Just Weren’t That BrightĪl is “a hologram that only Sam can see and hear.” It’s right there in the show’s voice-over prologue. God or fate or whatever just really liked watching the poor bastard squirm. Is any of that really necessary for Sam being able to put right what once went wrong? Absolutely not.
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Seriously, why couldn’t Sam have ever been allowed to simply leap into someone sitting around their living room watching TV, with maybe their wallet (and thus a quickly accessible method of identification) laid out on the table in front of them? Nope, instead Sam got dropped into situations like this: Yes, that’s Sam seconds after he has leaped into a man about to executed.Īnd this: Your pilot today will be a man who only just moments ago arrived in the cockpit and has no idea whatsoever how to fly a plane.
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However, if we ignore the part where this is a TV show with a story structure designed to keep viewers hooked, and think of the logic of the show’s own universe it becomes pretty apparent that God or fate or whatever the heck it was leaping Sam throughout time has a wickedly dark sense of humor. It’s one of the things that makes Quantum Leap so compulsively watchable, its every episode ending on a cliffhanger in which Sam has no idea what to do next and lets outs an exasperated, “Oh boy.” That’s a pretty shitty existence, going from smiling earnestly one second to walking on a stage in front of a packed theater of people waiting to hear you play piano the next second. 1) God or Fate or Whatever Sure Has a Sick Sense of HumorĪlmost every single Quantum Leap episode ends with Sam being thrown into the deep end in a new and terrifying situation, forcing him to either sink or swim. There are plot holes and awkward moments galore as well as some simple reminders of how much TV culture has changed since Quantum Leap went off the air. My love for the show has not faded, but my willingness to mock it has sure increased.
Those are the types of things which really jump out at me every time I re-watch Quantum Leap. Plus, the mechanics of the time traveling component of the show are pretty wonky, and what they thought the future was going to look like was hilariously inaccurate. In general, there’s an awful lot of plot convenience to what Sam and Al turn out to be capable of. His best bud Al (Dean Stockwell) is always around for a reliable one-liner, but even he gets in on the sermonizing and turns out to have led an insanely eventful life, with an ever-growing list of prior careers and ex-wives. However, he’s constantly faced with the prejudices of our past which leads to plenty of sermonizing. Sam is fate’s grunt soldier, fixing broken relationships, saving one life at a time, and occasionally running into young versions of celebrities, e.g., Stephen King, Buddy Holly and Michael Jackson. On the other hand, Quantum Leap is very easy to mock, largely due to its remarkably earnest tone and many “very special episodes,” like a sci-fi Blossom. The show is so utterly well-meaning, following the lovably gee-whiz Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) as a scientist whose experiment “leaves him leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping that his next leap will be the leap home.”
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It is hard to hate Quantum Leap, the NBC sci-fi series which debuted in 1989 and was canceled in 1993 after completing its fifth season.
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