Fate’s Wide Wheel

“Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator – and vanished.  He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better.  His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear.  And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap… will be the leap home”

 

I had never been a fan of science fiction growing up.  My heart lay with the action heroes like James Bond or Indiana Jones.  I’d seen Star Wars and the like but they didn’t get my heart pumping or my mind racing.  That was until I discovered an American sci-fi show that had just begun airing over here on BBC2.  That show was Quantum Leap and it blew my tiny, little mind.

Up until that point I had never thought to ask the bigger questions or even dared to consider possibilities beyond our own existence.  Yet here was a television programme that, almost immediately, had begged to ask me one simple question.  What if you could travel through time and change history for the better?  Where would you go?  Where could you go?  In the case of Quantum Leap you could, theoretically, travel through time within your own lifetime.  This fascinated me.  I didn’t understand any of it but it fascinated me and, watching that very first episode had me hooked.

A person’s life is like a length of string; one end represents birth, the other represents death. If one were to tie the ends of the string together, their life becomes a loop. Next, by balling the loop together, the days in one’s life would touch one another out of sequence. Therefore, jumping from one part of the string to another would allow someone to travel back and forth within their own lifetime, thus making a “quantum leap” between each time period

The brainchild of television legend Donald P. Bellisario (Magnum, PI, Airwolf, JAG, NCIS) Quantum Leap followed Dr Sam Beckett (played by Scott Bakula), a brilliant physicist and creator of Project Quantum Leap, who steps into his own experiment and vanishes.  Aiding Sam on his journey is his best friend and collaborator, the cigar-chomping womaniser Admiral Al Calavicci (Hollywood veteran Dean Stockwell) who, while still at base somewhere in New Mexico, appears as a hologram that only Sam can see and hear.  At first, Sam’s brain is confused – swiss-cheesed, as Al refers to it – and he has very little memory of who he is, let alone the strange reflection in the mirror.  With information from the project’s super-hybrid computer, Ziggy, it is determined that Sam has leaped into this specific person’s history in order to right a wrong of some description.  The fun of the story comes from Sam working out ways to get to the crux of the problem, correct the mistake and leap out.

It’s a fantastic premise for a series, leading to a brand new set of stories and characters each week held together by the relationship between Sam and Al as well as Sam’s desperation to find a way home.  Bakula is brilliant playing Sam who, in turn, also gets to play many different characters that Sam leaps into whether they be a fighter pilot, baseball player, lounge singer or single mother.  One week he could be playing piano, the next he could be singing in an all-girl group.  The possibilities were endless, just as long as they fell under the rules of the show.  Stockwell, on the other hand, a veteran of Hollywood since his childhood, showcased his own special set of skills as the Pancho Villa to Sam’s Don Quixote.  If you want to see the perfect example of this, then you must seek out the episode M.I.A. which floors me every time.  Stockwell gives a flawless acting masterclass and is testament to the quality of character he brought to the show.

The show had picked up steady viewers of the years and, by the time of the fifth and final series, had amassed a cult following as well as numerous awards.  The final episode, “Mirror Image”,  saw Sam leap through time and space as himself, landing in a bar at the very moment of his birth.  Throughout the show’s lifetime, Sam and Al had questioned whether the leaps had all been random or whether someone, or something, else had been pulling the strings.  In Mirror Image, these questions are asked again as Sam, facing his own reflection for the first time, begins to wonder if he had the ability to take himself home and just subconsciously chose to continue leaping to help others.  As a fan of the show, I found this episode particularly moving as, one the one hand I was willing the show to continue but at the same time I wanted Sam to find his way home.  Ultimately, though, the goodness in Sam’s heart won through.

I became obsessed with Quantum Leap.  I watched every episode, I even recorded them onto VHS (I still have them!).  I bought the books, the novelisations and the CD soundtrack.  I even managed to get hold of one of the comic books.  Even now, twenty-five years since it ended, I can still sit and watch them.  Sometimes the whole thing will be repeated on a cable channel and I’ll sit and watch them over again.  Recently, I decided to have my own QL marathon and sat and watched my DVDs over the course of a couple of weeks.  I even found my peace with Series 5 which I had unfairly scoffed at as being the poorest season.  There are some real gems of episodes in that series.  Truly.

Quantum Leap pushed the boundaries of what was possible for a weekly TV show.  Tackling difficult subjects like rape and racism, some of which were not being highlighted by prime-time television.  Bellisario wanted to make a modern anthology series and was inspired by movies such as Heaven Can Wait and Here Comes Mr Jordan to create a truly original series.  In recent years there have been rumours of a reboot, a continuation and even a feature film (In October 2017, Bellisario confirmed at the L.A. Comic Con that he has finished a script for a feature film).  Whatever happens, I’m sure Dr Sam Beckett is still out there, putting things right that once went wrong and still working on a way to get home.

“Oh boy!”