Sure, there's a good chance it went unnoticed. I'm just saying it's not a 100 percent chance.
Will Sam Beckett Return Home? NBC Orders Quantum Leap Reboot Pilot
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Sure, there's a good chance it went unnoticed. I'm just saying it's not a 100 percent chance.
It gets worse if you look closely at season 5 where we see other leapers which suggests Sam wasn't the only person to have come up with leaping technology that works the same as his. I mean the technology doesn't seem to be in any way unique if you take into account the evil leapers or even that final episode with a bar full of leapers. I am currently at "Deliver us from evil" in my rewatch
Well, granted that QL's grasp of science was never any good, but logically, it stands to reason that even independently invented time travel systems would work basically the same way, because the laws of physics are universal. Just like anyone who invents heavier-than-air flight is going to end up using some kind of airfoil. So if "leaping" is how time travel works in the QL-verse, different scientists would arrive at it independently just by following where physics led.
Indeed, you often see the same thing invented by different groups at the same time, because it can't be invented until the necessary ingredients are already known, so they're there for anyone to build on.
There are a lot of people, both men and women who adopt "dumbass personas" to hide their true intelligence so they can coast by without people expecting much from them.
About the handlink not working outside the Imaging Chamber, I have this vague recollection of Al using it when he's hunting down the criminal escapee out in the city, in the present. But maybe I'm remembering that wrong.
There's one thing I was never real clear on with the original series. Was Sam repairing things had gone wrong in the timeline or changing it? Was the way he resolved things how they were supposed to happen, and they were somehow changed before he leaped? I've wondered if the introduction of other leapers later in the show meant that he was actually going around fixing things that they had screwed up.
And I have a vague recollection of Al using it to open the door to the imaging chamber from outside. I think it's just inactive when it's in the past.
No, the idea was that he was changing the original timeline for the better. It wasn't like the earlier time travel series Voyagers!, with its stupid conceit that the "correct" textbook version of history had somehow inexplicably "gone wrong" and had to be fixed by time travel. (I mean, if there was no time travel involved, how could the way it already happened be changed? I always hated that about that show.) The idea was essentially that "God or fate or whatever" was using Sam's time travel experiment for a do-over, to take a mulligan on events that hadn't gone well the first time.
The idea of "evil leapers" wasn't conceived until years later, so it wasn't part of the original thinking. And as I mentioned before, QL deliberately differentiated itself from other time travel shows by not being about important historical events or famous figures, but just about making individual people's lives better in ways that would never show up in the history books, like fixing someone's relationship with their son or getting them sober so they could play in the big game or whatever. Evil time travelers would've had no reason to meddle in such everyday things.
The implicit idea (although again, I may be getting this from the novels instead of the show) was that whatever force was behind the leaping was trying to work toward some ideal version of the timeline, to nudge it toward a cumulatively better state one person at a time. I remember formulating the idea that Ziggy was the one controlling the leaps in order to achieve some goal. I think I may have thought that it was to ensure Ziggy's own creation, but that's a circular time loop that doesn't fit with a mutable timeline.
OK, thanks. I knew the evil leapers came in later, but I still wasn't sure if the reference to "what once went wrong" had always meant that something had gone wrong with the timeline. But I see now that it was just a reference to him making things better for the people he was helping.
Still, sometimes he made quite big decisions where I wonder what the person he leaped into thought about them once they returned to their own life.
Like Sam was proposing to a woman. Would be odd if that other person then was saying, what I proposed? I never meant to do that!
How can he make such big life decisions for another man?
I think the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes were among the bigger historical ones they did on the show. That was a good two parter
They didn't show that the leapee had a total amnesia of what happened?
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Actually thinking about this now and the shows premise the Oswald episodes kind of nix that whole idea don't they? Why did Sam leap into Oswald if not to change history, was he supposed to not kill JFK?
We almost never saw the Leapee post Leap. In Double Identity, Frankie is confused and thinks it's still the day before (to be fair, he Leapt back into the same location and situation that he Leapt out of) he didn't show any signs of remembering what Sam had changed yet, but he definitely didn't have total amnesia. Similarly, Angel and the warden are mildly confused but not seemingly amnesiacs in Revenge of the Evil Leaper. There might be others, but those are the only ones I remember off the top of my head.
Sam was there to save Jackie. In the "original" timeline, she was killed as well.
OH.... OK must have missed that bit wasn't paying attention to the whole thing.
I often wondered that myself, but it was one of many bits of fridge logic the show avoided addressing. Logic or science were never priorities for QL's makers; they were doing an intimate character drama and a historical fiction pseudo-anthology, and the mechanics of the leaping were just a set of handwaves to make that happen.
There was one episode where we saw the "Leapee" in the waiting room in the future, right? Didn't Al talk to him and tell him what Sam was doing? Or again, I'm probably thinking of the McConnell novels, which went into much greater depth about what went on back at Project QL. I think maybe part of the deal was that they offered counseling to the person in the waiting room so they'd be on the right track after Sam fixed their life.
That 2-parter was a deliberate exception to the usual avoidance of the cliche of time traveling to big historical events. It was a response to Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which advanced a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination despite the fact that the theory was based on a document that had been exposed as a hoax decades before. QL's creator Donald P. Bellisario had been briefly acquainted with Lee Harvey Oswald in his youth, and he was confident that the conspiracy theories were BS and Oswald had acted alone. So he wrote an episode about Sam leaping into Oswald at various points in his life in order to present a counterargument to Stone's movie. There's even a dramatization in the episode of Oswald and Bellisario's meeting, IIRC.
Right. QL was an anthology-esque show, and it was in a time when it was still sometimes common to rearrange the broadcast order of episodes arbitrarily. So the format was to end one story by having Sam Leap out and the screen fade to blue, then cut to a clip from the beginning of the next episode where the blue fades out and Sam finds himself in a new body. That way, they could cut to a teaser clip of any given episode based on the selected airing order. It was basically the same format used by The Time Tunnel, except that TTT had a commercial break between the end of one story and the teaser clip from the next, while QL used the blue-light fade-out/fade-in to make it look like a direct transition.
It occurred to me once that QL has basically the same premise as The Time Tunnel -- scientist threatened with loss of funding jumps prematurely into experimental time machine in near future, gets trapped jumping around in the past from week to week, and has only one companion on his journey. Of course, there were plenty of differences in execution, like TTT having two physical travelers and routinely cutting back to the time-travel complex in the near future. But the main difference, besides QL's "leaping into bodies" conceit, was its avoidance of the "big events from the history books" focus that was TTT's bread and butter. (Or rather, TTT's bread and butter was "big events from historical movies that we can crib stock footage from.")
More than one, we see young Al, Doctor Ruth, and that killer Stiles all gaining info in the future. (Possibly others. Again, I forget.) Which I assume got swiss-cheesed away when they Leapt out.
Although it could be quite an interesting story to tell where hundreds of people across the country from different time periods all tell basically the same story. ...Damn, Doctor Who already did it.
I'd guess they end up with a blend of their own memories and Sam's, and they interpret his actions during the Leap as their own. Maybe the details are blurry, but they piece together a narrative that feels consistent to them. Which is really what we all do with our memories as a matter of course.