What happens in the last episode?
Whew! Long story.
In the last episode, Sam leaps to the date August 4, 1953 - the date of his birth. He arrives at a bar in a Pennsylvania mining town, and looks in a mirror to see his own reflection! He looks in his wallet and sees his 1997 driver’s license.
Meanwhile, in the future, the QL team cannot locate Sam because nobody has swapped places with him in the Waiting Room. Al, as the one tied to Sam mentally, enters the Acceleration chamber while Ziggy zooms through all the time of Sam’s life trying to find him.
Sam meets many people at the bar, several who look like people he’s met the last few years in his leaps, others who have names of friends from the future: Gushie, Ziggy, and the bartender Al. (Al also looks like the flight surgeon from his first leap.)
Admiral Al has a hunch, and has Ziggy focus just on Sam’s birthdays. After a long unsuccessful search (which makes Al very dizzy), Al asks if she searched 1953, which she did not. After a bit, they find Sam.
Sam has a discussion with Al the bartender that convinces him that Al knows why he’s leaping about time instead of going home. Suddenly Adm. Al appears, and he and Sam catch up on what’s been happening. Adm. Al is sceptical of Sam’s suspicions about Al the Bartender.
Suddenly, someone comes to the bar announcing that there’s been a cave-in at the mine, but that the management is not allowing a rescue effort. The miners and Sam rush there. Sam then pretends to be a government safety inspector who will investigate the company if they don’t allow a rescue. The trapped miners are soon rescued.
Sam has more philisophical discussions with Al the Bartender, who tells Sam that he could’ve lept home all along, but that something in him wants to leap through time helping people.
Sam then leaps to Beth Calavicci’s house, just after he lept away in the episode “M.I.A. - April 1, 1969”. Beth is startled by his appearance, but he assures her that he’s a friend. He tells her to wait for her husband, who is still alive as a POW in Vietnam. He leaps, and then the screen goes black. Text appears saying that Beth waited for Al, and they then had a large family. That disappears, then another message that says that Sam never returned home.
This has been discussed before, I think. That’s ok. I can tell you absolutely for sure what happened.
Sam leaps to a weird place called “Al’s Bar” run by a guy named Al(but not the hologram one).
He looks in the mirror and is himself! It’s a weird episode filled with several stories, including one where Sam unintentionaly helps another leaper leap. In the end, Sam learns that there was one thing in his previous leaps he had failed at.
He failed to reconsicle Al(the hologram) and his wife. He gets back to that time and Al dances with his wife(but she doensnt’ know it’s him because she can’t see him).
Sam leaps and the screen goes black. It says, “Sam never leaped home.”
This ending outraged half the viewers. It thrilled the other half(which includes me).
Good thing I previewed first or I would have repeated most of what was already said (but not as clearly).
Some people think that Sam continued to leap through time helping people; some say that Sam ceased to exist as a leaper because he altered the history of Al, and thus his own history since Al was a major player in Sam building Project Quantum Leap; and some say Sam died (there may be a hint that this happened because earlier in the show Sam met Al’s uncle (?) who guided Sam to help the miners that were trapped in a cave-in and then leaped out. Al later told Sam that his uncle (?) died in a mine accident long before the time Sam leaped into and that Sam couldn’t have actually seen him, so Sam theorized that death is a form of leap).
That’s pretty much were it was left.
At a sci-fi con I went to last year, there was a forum on the last episode of Quantum Leap. Apparently, that was NOT originally intended to be the last episode and the show was going to go a very different direction, but the network decided to can it and Don Bellisario gave the show the ambiguous ‘Sam Beckett never made the leap home’ ending in a fit of pique.
According to the people in this forum, one of whom was the editor of the Quantum Leap series of novels, the next season would have involved the following:
Sam now is able, thanks to Al (the bartender), to leap at will wherever and whenever he wants. Drunk on his new power, he goes a little nuts and leaps through time and space. Distraught about being unable to find his friend, Al (the womanizer), jumps into the Quantum Leap accelerator and chases after him.
IMO, sounded a little too much like Sliders for my taste. Considering that an animated episode was planned and the final season had the monkey episode, the vampire episode and the little kid episode, I think the show had definitely run its course and they were treading water.
But the question is, how in the world did Sam manage to leap into the captain’s chair of the Enterprise?
I liked Quantum Leap. A bit campy for me (and yes, the last season sort of stretched the limits), but it was fun. What I never understood is why the future was always 1999. Why didn’t it progress along with each year of the show?
I thought the last episode worked. It was a nice ending. I didn’t get the impression that Sam deleted himself from history, or created a paradox through his actions, or anything of that nature. Based upon the information given in the episode, Sam just had better things to do in life than return home. Good thing he forgot about his wife, I guess…
They show Quantum Leap on the SciFi channel all the time now, so the final episode should come up in the rotation some time in the next few months.
It did, at least for the final season. The end of the second-to-last season had Sam leaping back to HQ for a short time. The first episode of the final season showed the year had advanced to 2004.
After checking the IMDb, it seems my memory is off. The end of the '91 season is when we see the HQ for the first time since the series pilot. Thus the year would have been shown at the start of the '92 season, and would have been either 2002 or 2003.