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

[Skipper]

How is that proof that god exists? And who can that be shown to? Even the oversight committee were unable to see proof that Sam was even in the past, let alone anything supernatural.

There were literally dozens of methods to prove it. Get Sam to write something and put it in a safe that will only be opened after 50 years. Have him collect clues for a cold case. It is evident that they cannot get him to go home because people who are working on the QL project are not very bright.

 

[Skipper]

I think the original QL series had come out today the writers would have been bombarded with questioning on Twitter. "Why doesn't Sam do this or that?"

 

[Christopher]

There were literally dozens of methods to prove it. Get Sam to write something and put it in a safe that will only be opened after 50 years. Have him collect clues for a cold case.

That's essentially what happened in the second-season premiere. Al tried to get Sam to make a change that would prove his existence in the past to a congressional committee, and ultimately he changed the future so that the woman he helped was now the head of that committee and approved continued funding for the project.

I'm not sure, but I think the people at PQL were careful to avoid telling Sam too much about what was going on in their own time. His "swiss-cheesed memory" meant that he didn't remember much about the project, and they let him remain ignorant so he didn't risk altering the past the wrong way with future knowledge. They didn't even tell him he had a fiancee on the project.

Although of course, the real reason for that was because the writers preferred to keep the future (and Sam's backstory) deliberately vague, partly to keep future writers' options open, and partly just because it wasn't what the show was about.

 

[Marc]

There were literally dozens of methods to prove it. Get Sam to write something and put it in a safe that will only be opened after 50 years. Have him collect clues for a cold case. It is evident that they cannot get him to go home because people who are working on the QL project are not very bright.

But as Sam changes things, time ripples around and changes so that people problem don't even remember.

After all, a member of a congressional committee changed right before Al's eyes and nobody else was ever the wiser to change.

As to using a letter to be opened, I can remember that being denigrated when Sam and Al changes places and the former was stuck in the imaging chamber.

 

[Christopher]

As to using a letter to be opened, I can remember that being denigrated when Sam and Al changes places and the former was stuck in the imaging chamber.

It was hardly denigrated, since they actually did it and it worked exactly as they hoped it would. Did you mean "demonstrated," maybe?

 

[Skipper]

Help me because it's literally decades since I've seen the series. The structure of an episode (if I remember correctly) was usually the following:

a) Sam leaps into someone's body.
b) Al arrives. After they have determined the identity of the person, Ziggy establishes what "went wrong" in his life.
c) Sam settles the matter and the timeline changes
d) Sam leaps again.

Now, if Sam has fixed everything, from the perspective of the observers of the future, he really hasn't done anything, because now they no longer know that there was a previous timeline in which things had gone differently. He simply re-enacted what was supposed to happen.

So, why did Al and others on the project think that Sam's purpose is to "fix" things? For them there is nothing to fix, everything is happening as it was supposed to. And they're not immune to timeline changes either (in more than one episode it was seen that Sam's actions also affected the lives of those working on the QL project) so they can't remember what really happened before Sam's intervention.

What I'm missing?

 

[Christopher]

Help me because it's literally decades since I've seen the series. The structure of an episode (if I remember correctly) was usually the following:

a) Sam leaps into someone's body.
b) Al arrives. After they have determined the identity of the person, Ziggy establishes what "went wrong" in his life.

Rather, Ziggy tries to figure out what went wrong and what Sam needs to do, based on available historical records and probability calculations. Ziggy's guesses are often wrong, because it's an hourlong show and they need to prolong the mystery. Al often points Sam toward the wrong goal the first one or two times, and sometimes the two of them are at odds about what Sam's mission probably is. Usually, the true reason for the leap isn't discovered until late in the episode, sometimes not until the very end, since the only way Sam knows he's succeeded is that he leaps.

Now, if Sam has fixed everything, from the perspective of the observers of the future, he really hasn't done anything, because now they no longer know that there was a previous timeline in which things had gone differently. He simply re-enacted what was supposed to happen.

So, why did Al and others on the project think that Sam's purpose is to "fix" things?

Al remembers the original timeline, because Ziggy was built using Sam and Al's neural tissues, so the two of them are linked to one another through Ziggy. That's why Al is the only project member who can communicate with Sam, and why Sam can see and hear Al's hologram when nobody else can. (The show used the phrase "neurons and mesons" for the bits of their brains that Ziggy shared, which drove me crazy, because a neuron is a living cell and a meson is a subatomic particle.)

I've mentioned the Ashley McConnell novels a lot. They spent a lot of time at Project Quantum Leap in the future, and depicted how Al experiences the world constantly changing around him as a result of Sam's actions, with nobody else in the Project (except Ziggy) knowing that the reality they know this week is not the same one they knew before.

I wonder if the new show will depict the present-day stuff in a similar way. It seems unlikely to be sustainable.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Is Ziggy even IN the new show?

 

[Tosk]

There were literally dozens of methods to prove it. Get Sam to write something and put it in a safe that will only be opened after 50 years. Have him collect clues for a cold case. It is evident that they cannot get him to go home because people who are working on the QL project are not very bright.

Okay, but how about the original point...how do you prove god?

 

[Pondwater]

Yes. He’s going to wake up, take a shower, and realize it was all a dream then go into the lab and look into a crystal snowball.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, but how about the original point...how do you prove god?

You could try mentioning the Babel fish... https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/35...izarrely-improbable-coincidence-that-anything

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Yes. He’s going to wake up, take a shower, and realize it was all a dream then go into the lab and look into a crystal snowball.

Now that would be meta! Way meta!

 

[Samurai8472]

Okay, but how about the original point...how do you prove god?

Simple. Steal the Enterprise

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yes. He’s going to wake up, take a shower, and realize it was all a dream then go into the lab and look into a crystal snowball.

And you know fans of that show HATED that ending

 

[Christopher]

And you know fans of that show HATED that ending

Which one? There are at least two shows being referenced there.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Which one? There are at least two shows being referenced there.

Oh OK. The one I picked out was St. Elsewhere because that snowglobe is how that all ended and people were salty about that ending.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Is Ziggy even IN the new show?

There's an AI based on the character Mason Alexander Park is playing, they've mentioned on Twitter that the character is the head AI researcher at Project Quantum Leap.

 

[Christopher]

Ugh, sans-serif fonts. It's hard to keep track of whether people are talking about AI, as in artificial intelligence, or Al, as in Albert Calavicci. Maybe we should write "A.I." instead to be clear?

 

[The Wormhole]

It's hard to keep track of whether people are talking about AI, as in artificial intelligence, or Al, as in Albert Calavicci.

I find context of the sentence usually helps to figure it out.

 

[Christopher]

I find context of the sentence usually helps to figure it out.

Yeah, but it doesn't hurt to add visual clarity. When I first saw the phrase "an AI," my initial thought was that it wasn't "an A.I.," but "an Al" as in a character filling the Al Calavicci role. It took me a moment to figure it out from context. After all, there wouldn't be a head Al (Calavicci) researcher.