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

Unless he leaped out of America.

 

Much simpler. It’s to lower taxes on the rich and corporations and reduce regulations. Finally, it’s to support whatever social policies are necessary to maximize the number of voters to achieve those aims.
They’ve accomplished their aims. Now, to maintain their base, they’re rolling back progressive policies one by one. Now, we’re worse off on progressive social policies than we have been in decades.
Throwing coal on this polarization fire doesn’t make things better. It’s going to result in more rolled back progressive social policies in the long run.
I’d prefer the show take a more nuanced approach like the original.

 

What you prefer is to see heroic white men. Sorry, that's not the world we live in now.

 

Ben's fine. He's not Sam but then he was never written to BE just like Sam. He's a different scientist from a different decade who's going to react differently from Sam Beckett if he lands in, say, 1997 Miami.

 

There are still plenty of those; they're just not treated as the default anymore. And people who are accustomed to the default often mistake that for oppression.

 

That's not what I said.

 

See, all I’m reading is that white men still hold the monopoly on main antagonist roles. Where’s the representation?

 

Okay, I looked through the episode recaps of season 1 to identify who the villains, if any, actually were.

Spoiler: QL season 1 villains

1: Cole, played by Michael Malarkey. Male and mostly white, but part-Arab on his mother's side.
2: No villain, just the hazards of space.
3: No villain, just the PTSD of the Leapee's brother.
4: Carla, played by Sofia Pernas. Female, Moroccan/Spanish.
5: Josiah McDonough, played by William Mark McCullough: finally, a white male.
6: No villain, just an earthquake.
7: Percy Gray (Josh Meyers) and accomplice Lola Gray (Elyse Levesque). A white man and a white (French Canadian) woman.
8: Sullivan (Eric Lee Huffman) and Ringer (Kurt Yaeger). Two white men.
9: Loretta (Tate Moore), a white woman.
10: The closest thing to a villain is the overbearing Dr. Harper (Eugene Byrd), a black man.
11: Eugene Wagner (Joe Dinicol). A white man.
12: No single villain, just transphobia in general.
13: Kathy Tanner, played by Laura Niemi, who's Spanish/Turkish/Greek.
14: No real villain, just an erratic captain.
15: ADA Bill Barnes (Jonathan Chase). A white man.
16: Dr. Mueller (Patrick Fischler). A white man.
17: Leslie Drobis (Davida Williams), a black woman, and her accomplice Paul Kirk (Bart Johnson), a white man.
18: The season's primary villain, Martinez, played by Walter Perez, who's Mexican-American.

So out of 15 villains in 12 episodes, I count 9 white or mostly white men, 2 non-white men, 2 white women, and 2 non-white women. So "the bad guy is almost always a white male?" No. It's 60% of the time, when there's even a villain at all.

 

I think anyone can look at that list and see that the same amount of diversity isn't being applied to the villains as it is to the heroes.

It seems what some people are finding upsetting isn't the diversity among the heroes, it's a lack of diversity among the villains. They expect more of a fair scale. And I think that's a valid criticism.

 

As FreezeC77 pointed out, it's logical that the majority of people in positions of authority in the past, and thus the majority of villains in the past, would be white men. Even aside from that, the US population is more diverse and inclusive today than it was in the past, so it stands to reason that the main cast in the present day would be more diverse than the guest cast in various periods throughout history. Now, if Ben were to leap back to the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Partition of India, that would be a different matter, but both incarnations of the series have kept the leaps mostly in the United States.

I don't. It's just whining from white people who can't handle not being treated as better than everyone else. Speaking as a white person, I think it's high time we got the hell over ourselves and let other people have the spotlight we've been hogging for centuries. We could stand to learn some humility.

 

The better shows usually have it. The new QL is a okay show but it is a network tv show which means lots of creative choices are going to be made by guys in suits looking at diversity like a formula to appeal to a modern audience more than something coming from pure artistic intent. You can tell the difference when you compare a show like this to something were you feel like the artist have more control over the content than the suits like 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" as a example and also is one of my all-time favorite shows.

You can tell the difference between the corporate mandated stuff and stuff you can tell comes from the heart and thus a show like Crazy-Ex Girlfriend comes off like a show that has some really interesting things to say about modern society were as the other is content to be mildly progressive, light entertainment that doesn't have much to say you couldn't pick up from a random Twitter debate were people exchange all familiar talking points and phrases but doesn't really dig deep on a issue.

 

You can't spit in Western Literature without hitting a white guy. I think we're good.

 

Apparently at most nine of the main villains in Season 1 were white males. That's not my tally but someone else on the board did the math and it makes sense. A large chunk of the freshman season's antagonists? Sure. All-white and male? No.

 

I'm pretty sure most of the baddies were white men. But that was also the case of the first QL. The better question is how well rounded were the bad guys. Were they bad, but bad in the conflicted way were we understand and even feel for the bad guy a little bit or are we talking mustache twirling crap villains.

I do understand why a show like QL often gets targeted for it's diversity. It's easy pickings. The show is not good enough to really have something deep or important to say about society or social issues despite the diversity of the cast creating the trappings in which such a show could exist.

Like mentioned above. It is light entertainment that is a passable way to spend 42 minutes to a hour, but it doesn't even come close to holding a candle to the first show. It's easy to mistake bad writing for some dark agenda against white people or whatnot in such a case. You can see this in spades on a network like the CW.

 

The show is back. Who watched?

 

I forgot...but will do so today. Thanks for the spoiler free reminder (no sarcasm intended)

 

I watched last night. OK episode. Man, that woman does not have good luck with planes. It occurred to me that even if Baccula and Stockwell aren't available they could do a "Trials and Tribble-ations" kind of thing leaping Ben into an earlier Sam leap. They probably won't but it could be a hoot.

 

Haven't watched the new show but have seem some trailers, and it includes a leap as far back as 1692. I thought the premise was that the leaper could only jump within the span of their own lifetime? What is the explanation for the change, if any?

 

That rule was cast aside very early in season 1; there were leaps to 1977, 1879, 1934, 1962, 1954, and 1971, and various times in the early 1980s, though it's unclear when Ben Song was born (Raymond Lee was born in 1987, but Ben appears to be older, since his first leap was to 1985 and nobody thought it was odd).

As for the explanation, it's unclear, but it may have something to do with the new calculations Ben used to try to reach a specific point in time.

 

There’s a line where they essentially say “ he turned the safeties off”