• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

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

Not Lothimus? :D

With two more episodes to go, I'm glad we're getting payoff now and not all squished into one episode. I'm guessing bringing up the Evil Leapers now was part of the fakeout around Martinez, but who knows - re-establishing them in this show opens up a new Pandora's Box worth of future/past conflict.

Mark
 
Hmm... Why are the Project's predecessor's files redacted so heavily? Wouldn't all originals be available for full view to Magic and his team?
 
IMC Headquarters said:
Hmm... Why are the Project's predecessor's files redacted so heavily? Wouldn't all originals be available for full view to Magic and his team?
Click to expand...

Evil Ziggy at work? I can't remember if Magic was around to say something about that.

I'd be surprised if Al never mentioned the evil leapers to Magic, as it seems they had a good working relationship before Al passed on.
 
Last edited:
Moreover, why would these reports supposedly made in 1999 all look like they were typewritten? I'm pretty sure they had computers and printers in full use in the US government and military by then..?

Mark
 
Finn said:
Evil Ziggy at work? I can't remember if Magic was around to say something about that.

I'd be surprised if Al never mentioned the evil leapers to Magic, as it seems they had a good working relationship before Al passed on.
Click to expand...

If 2022 accidentally Paradoxes the Evil Leapers, so that they don't exist in the future, then they don't exist in the past either, and Sam's fate changes, or a couple old missions just got a lot easier.

Ben's mission is not to help the greater good.

Yes, good shit is happening, for people who had a raw deal, but that's just the fuel Ben is using to propel himself though time, for his purely selfish mission, to rescue Addison. His time drive is powered by good deeds, but good is relative.

Were Ben's good deeds the right good deeds, necessary to create the brightest future, or just the future Ziggy picked?

;)

I'd really like it clarified who is changed when time changes, and who stays the same when time changes, because every one at Project Quantum Leap seems to be able to remember visiting multiple timelines, which have had zero impact on their lives, when pop culture should have been shifting, their friends and family should be dead or alive like they didn't used to be, and even they may live some place else, or work some place else, god forbid any of them have a spouse who is winking in and out of their lives depending on what the new past each week looks like.

The staticness of project Quantum leap might make me think that these people are unstuck in time, and Ziggy killed all their dopplegangers, except that magic knows everyone, and seems to know some one who has vital decades ago to each of Ben's missions, as if Magic's life was the road map Ben is using to slingshot into the future.
 
My guess is something happened, and the program, years and years from now when Martinez is in, the boss (as Major surely would be long retired by then) is more of a gung ho than Magic or Al ever were, and had him do things more rigidly.
 
I've been wondering why the new show did so little with Ziggy, when she was clearly a sentient A.I. in the original series. The idea that Ziggy has been laying low this whole time in pursuit of some secret plan is a partial explanation, though not a full one. I wonder if Deborah Pratt will return as Ziggy's voice.

At first, what with the mental institution and the thunderstorm, I was wondering if Ben would be in the same place and time as Sam in his mental-institution episode, in a sort of "Trials and Tribble-ations" setup. I thought maybe Beth and Janis would recognize the place and time because Al told them about it (since it was just before the leap where he and Sam switched places). But I guess that would've been difficult to arrange. I was thinking maybe they wouldn't recognize Sam because they'd see the leapee, but this episode and the battleship episode confirmed that leapers see each other's true selves.

Again the new show contradicts the (later seasons of the) old one by making it clear that Ben has the physical attributes of his host, e.g. potentially being too hefty for the vents.
 
What if Ben leaps into someone who was around Sam before the program, like when he was working on one of his doctorates?
 
Really liked this episode. Lots of good Janis involvement. I liked it at the end when Janis was complaining to Magic that they needed to keep her in the loop and he turned it around and was like Well you too. The misfiled report was an easy way to explain why the current team didn’t know about the Evil Leapers. But as has been said earlier, I don’t know why Al wouldn’t have mentioned that to Magic but maybe he just assumed it would be in the records. Janis’s theory on who the mole is but it’s intriguing and sets up a good theory to explain Martinez and future Ian. Will be interesting to see this unfold over the last two episodes of the season.
 
This was a good one, and I like that it shined a light onto the really awful way mental patients were treated (and are still treated, honestly). I believe a good sci-fi show opens up little bits of social commentary here and there for all of us to think about, to expand our perspective, and I'm glad QL 2022 is carrying on that tradition of its predecessor. For all the fun little "oh boy" moments of the original, they touched on important subjects.
 
Not much, I’d wager. The way the show is structured he might be able to film several episodes’ worth of 2023 stuff in one block of filming, leaving Ernie to work his Magic on other projects. They did a lot of that in the latter seasons of Stargate SG-1, when Richard Dean Anderson cut his time down to three days a week and everyone filmed around this limitation.

Speaking of, Martin Gero showran that show AND this one. And the SG-1 franchise used the whole “travel back from a disastrous future timeline” plot trope at least three or four times that I can think of, so I’m not surprised that it seems to be happening here. Still, this is the first time that QL has played with the future as a setting, so I hope this opens up some interesting potential that the original show never got around to, potential evil leaders aside.

Mark
 
It also may mean Sam ended up in the future as well, which would explain why they couldn't find him. The quantum connection may only work if the leaper is in the past....
 
I guess the early 1970s is an appropriate time to set a jetliner-disaster episode, since that was the heyday of air-disaster movies, and of real-life hijackings to Cuba, I guess. Although sometimes the show's colorblind casting gets a little implausible for the depicted time periods. They talked about the difficulty Leslie faced as a female NYPD officer in the early '70s, but they didn't mention she was a black woman, which would've made it exponentially harder and been much more of a big deal to people at the time. Indeed, from what I can find, there were only two black female NYPD officers in 1973, so I think there would've been at most one when this was set (1971, IIRC).

So Ian finally gets their turn as the hologram. I guess in story-arc terms, that had to happen before the finale, to establish Ben's recognition of Ian before that cliffhanger scene. And we learn why there's usually only one hologram, though now that Ian's "patch" has been established, we might see more double acts in season 2.

I'm disappointed that the "Ziggy is the mole" cliffhanger from last week turned out just to mean that the future leap team is using the same Ziggy and has all their records. It's frustrating that this show treats Ziggy as just a fancy computer instead of the sapient, part-biological artilect she was in the original show. I mean, how is it that the show set further in the future is so much less advanced in computer science? (Plus, for some reason, I have a lifelong affinity for disembodied sapient A.I. characters like HAL or KITT or the original Ziggy. I don't know why that is, but it's a quirk of mine, and the reason I have so many of them in my own original fiction.)

And the finale is set in the future. Well, we knew that's where Ben's leaps were "slingshotting" him to. Not sure I like the idea of a climax where Ben saves the world from a future apocalypse. That kind of fate-of-the-world time travel story was one of the cliches that the original QL strove to avoid by focusing more on smaller-scale personal drama.

When Ben said "Snow? In LA?", how did he know he was in LA? Did he recognize the ruins of the Project, assuming that's where they were?
 
Christopher said:
They talked about the difficulty Leslie faced as a female NYPD officer in the early '70s, but they didn't mention she was a black woman, which would've made it exponentially harder and been much more of a big deal to people at the time. Indeed, from what I can find, there were only two black female NYPD officers in 1973, so I think there would've been at most one when this was set (1971, IIRC).
Click to expand...
It gets even more odd when you see her file on the computer screens at Quantum Leap HQ which says she was with the NYPD for fifteen years, meaning she would have joined in the 1950s. If the NYPD only had two black female officers in 1973, I'm pretty sure the number would have been significantly less in the 1950s.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top