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Will Sam Beckett Return Home? NBC Orders Quantum Leap Reboot Pilot

Skipper said:
It seems to me that Al needed Sam to "anchor" himself at a certain point in time.
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Right, and the only reason Sam and Al were connected was because they both donated neural tissues to the creation of Ziggy, so they were linked through her. They did eventually find a way to link other people to Sam as holograms, and clearly the new team has found another way to do it, but it's not something you can do without an actual time traveler to link to, apparently.


Now, intelligence gathering aside, why didn't Al use some free time trying to see what had happened in unsolved crimes instead of peeking into the ladies' dressing rooms? I think I remember that there were times when Sam stayed weeks in the past. If Al used a couple of hours for the common good it wouldn't be bad.
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Again, it would depend on being coincidentally at the right time. Also, if the program is classified and time travel is not provably real, how would any such information stand up in court?

Although I think there were a number of cases where Sam's mission was to clear an innocent person's name or ensure that the real criminal was caught.
 
Gingerbread Demon said:
In the old series didn't Sam meet his wife at a point in time before they were married, Donna I think her name was.
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Not sure how long Sam and Donna knew each other before he started leaping but they were engaged at some point. So it was probably a considerable length of time.

In the original timeline, Donna left Sam at the altar and they didn’t get married. In the Star-Crossed episode, Sam fixed Donna’s relationship with her father (Col. Wojohowicz), so she no longer had trust issues.

Which also assured continued funding for the project, due to the Colonel’s military connections.

Thus, in the revised timeline, Sam and Donna did get married…but because of his Swiss Cheesed memory, he doesn’t remember it, and Donna has insisted that Al not tell him - because in the course of his leaps Sam has to have relationships with various women, and he couldn’t do that if he remembered that he’s married.

As for Magic: I have no idea where they’re going with this, but it CANNOT be a coincidence that he is here. There’s no way the writers just pulled his name out of a hat. There MUST be a reason Magic is the project leader. We’ll just have to wait and see.
 
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1987SpaceGuy said:
Sam‘s Magic Leap will be explained.
https://tvline.com/2022/09/23/quantum-leap-spoilers-season-1-episode-4-sam-beckett-magic/
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“[Magic] does explain, from his point of view, that leap,” Gero hints. “Ernie [Hudson] gives this phenomenal monologue. It’s so beautiful. It might be my favorite scene of this first chunk [of episodes]. It’s really, really special.”
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Great! Not only do we finally, after decades, get some insight into the experience of a Leapee post-leap, but we get it delivered in an Ernie Hudson monologue. I can't wait.

The article overstates a bit by calling Deborah Pratt a co-creator of the original show. Donald Bellisario was the sole credited creator; Pratt was a member of its writing/producing team. But she was with the show for its full run.
 
crookeddy said:
Not sure why the Internet is crushing this show with a 4.7 IMDb rating. Pile on is making these rating sites completely useless.
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Herd mentality. Mass rate bombing can kill a show too if it's an organized campaign, and the cast members seem to offend the sensibilities of some people.
 
Christopher said:
It's just that, as with the Time Tunnel, they were able to shift their imaging focus to other places, using Sam as their anchor to that time but widening their scanning field beyond his immediate location.
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How though? Sam is actually in the past, Al is not. Sam can see and hear Al through his brainwaves, essentially Al is "all in his head". So how do children see Al, and how does Al see events that Sam is not there for?

I'm not worried about of course, I just go with it.
 
My thinking after my last couple exchanges, would be that he's being projected into the past in general, but at a certain wavelength that only Sam is supposed to be able to see, but that animals, kids, ect. can also pick up on.
 
Tosk said:
How though? Sam is actually in the past, Al is not. Sam can see and hear Al through his brainwaves, essentially Al is "all in his head". So how do children see Al, and how does Al see events that Sam is not there for?
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It's like I said -- they have technology that scans the past. That's how they find Sam and communicate with him. It's not telepathy or magic, it's a scanning and communication technology that uses Sam as a targeting focus. Once they've locked onto Sam in a given place and time, they can scan the world around him. As I said, The Time Tunnel worked the same way, just without the 2-way communication (usually) and the immersive holographic interface.

Sam is the only one who can see or hear Al because they're both linked to Ziggy, a hybrid semi-organic supercomputer created using brain tissue donated by Sam and Al. But it's still some kind of broadcast signal, an energy pattern being beamed to the past and tuned to Sam's brain. The conceit is that animals, small children, and some neurodivergent people have a special "sensitivity" that lets them intercept the signal as well.

Really, though, the answer is that it works however the writers wanted it to work. QL was more fantasy than science fiction. There was no logic or credibility to the science, and they used gibberish terminology like talking about "neurons and mesons" as if they weren't completely different categories of things, as well as using "string theory" for an idea that had nothing even remotely to do with actual string theory. So it's best not to worry about the technical specifics too much.
 
Christopher said:
they have technology that scans the past
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Except they don't really...Ziggy relies on records to theorize about what needs to be done (There are heaps of times when Ziggy can't find records on something or someone important.) If they had direct access to the actual past that surely wouldn't necessary.
 
Tosk said:
Except they don't really...Ziggy relies on records to theorize about what needs to be done (There are heaps of times when Ziggy can't find records on something or someone important.) If they had direct access to the actual past that surely wouldn't necessary.
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You took my words out of context. I meant that they can scan the point in the past that Sam is currently in. As I already said multiple times, they have to lock onto Sam first, and then they can scan a wider volume around him.
 
I get what you're saying, I'm arguing with the logic of how they could possibly do that...and why they so often aren't able to use that to solve the problem. They still rely on records and guesswork. Like so many other things on the show, it varied depending on what the story needs were.
 
Christopher said:
You took my words out of context. I meant that they can scan the point in the past that Sam is currently in. As I already said multiple times, they have to lock onto Sam first, and then they can scan a wider volume around him.
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I saw the last episode dozens of times.

Video Tape.

There's a scene where Al is looking through the decades for Sam, and then Al says "Doh! We forgot to check the year he was born."

"scanning time" might be a completely different technology, that helps them locate Sam.

The new guy, Ben, is on Kevin can Fuck Himself.

Is Kevin can Fuck himself crossing over with Quantum Leap?

If Raymond's character "Sam" leaps out, in the last episode of Kevin can Fuck Himself, that would be absolutely amazing.
 
Tosk said:
I get what you're saying, I'm arguing with the logic of how they could possibly do that...and why they so often aren't able to use that to solve the problem. They still rely on records and guesswork. Like so many other things on the show, it varied depending on what the story needs were.
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"Logic"? It's just the Fugitive formula with a little bit of sci-fi dressing. Every week he'll help someone, why it's happening is secondary. It's like wondering about angels' aerodynamic after watching "Touched by an angel".
 
Skipper said:
"Logic"? It's just the Fugitive formula with a little bit of sci-fi dressing. Every week he'll help someone, why it's happening is secondary. It's like wondering about angels' aerodynamic after watching "Touched by an angel".
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But if they all looked like Roma Downey did they'd be very sleek and able to fly
 
Tosk said:
I get what you're saying, I'm arguing with the logic of how they could possibly do that...and why they so often aren't able to use that to solve the problem. They still rely on records and guesswork.
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I don't see the contradiction. When they're locked onto Sam, they can only observe Sam's immediate present. They need the historical data to give them context about what happened before Sam's arrival, and to tell them what's going to happen in Sam's near future, so he and Al can figure out what Sam needs to change.

And yes, they can theoretically look anywhere around Sam in his subjective present, but they need to know where to look. They need their research to figure out what's important, who they should follow, where they should focus their attention.

Also, just seeing events doesn't automatically mean you understand them. They can see and hear the people around Sam, but they don't know who those people are without the historical research.
 
Skipper said:
"Logic"? It's just the Fugitive formula with a little bit of sci-fi dressing. Every week he'll help someone, why it's happening is secondary. It's like wondering about angels' aerodynamic after watching "Touched by an angel".
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Anybody remember "Nowhere Man"? In the pilot this guy was in a restaurant with his wife and when he came back from the toilet she was gone and when he went home she said she didn't know him... big mystery and of course you wanted to know what had happened and why but the next episodes he also was going from place to place, not getting any wiser about the conspiracy... I was frustrated with it so much, I stopped watching a few episodes in. I guess I was not ready for the slow burn mystery. It felt like a waste of time watching him do things that had nothing to do with anything. Maybe I should go back to it?
 
Astra said:
Anybody remember "Nowhere Man"? In the pilot this guy was in a restaurant with his wife and when he came back from the toilet she was gone and when he went home she said she didn't know him... big mystery and of course you wanted to know what had happened and why but the next episodes he also was going from place to place, not getting any wiser about the conspiracy... I was frustrated with it so much, I stopped watching a few episodes in. I guess I was not ready for the slow burn mystery. It felt like a waste of time watching him do things that had nothing to do with anything. Maybe I should go back to it?
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This one? Wasn't it cancelled?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowhere_Man_(American_TV_series)
 
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