One of my favorite moments was an episode that was a dual story: Sam is years in the past while Al, in the present, is in front of a Senate committee fighting for the project’s funding. Things are looking bad for Al …
… but Sam, who has completed his primary mission, is helping the wife of the guy whose body he leaped into study for the bar exam. Without his help, she never becomes a lawyer and never gets a spot on that committee. With his help, her presence on the committee saves the project’s funding.
I’d forgotten that one; that was a neat way of solving the problem.
I liked the way they often made wrong guesses about what the mission was.
I seem to remember that it was suggested that once Sam was loose in time, God or whoever immediately grabbed him and put him to work putting right things that had gone wrong. Like, “well, finally! someone’s loose; I’ll put him to work.”
In almost all of the shows, they stayed within Sam’s lifespan, but wasn’t there a show set far outside his past life? Right around Reconstruction with a freed slave whose name was revealed as something quite important for a descendent of his in the 1960s.
???
Or was that a Voyagers episode?
If it was a QL ep, then would that have been where they began to set us up for the super leaping Sam chooses in the finale?
One thing you guys forgot to mention about the episode Leap for Lisa:
As Sam is trying to save the young Al (who’s accused of Lisa’s death), his attempts aren’t working and at one point Sam’s hologram guide is no longer Al but Roddy McDowall. Presumably Sam’s failure to save the young Al leads to Al going to prison and therefore never joining the Quantum Leap Project. Of course, by the end of the episode Sam’s set things right (with Roddy’s help).
The Evil Leaper stories were great too. The first one especially because we get a lot of the way through the episode before we catch on to what’s happening. Sam’s trying to set things right and they keep getting worse and worse. Finally it’s revealed that one character’s not who she appears to be, she’s another leaper. Even then, it’s a while before Sam learns that she’s leaping through time specifically to un-do what’s gone right and set things wrong, and that she’s got her own evil hologram guide.
Your recollection is correct, NoClueBoy. Sam leaps into his great-grandfather during the Civil War. As you said, normally his leaps are only to periods within Sam’s lifespan, but in this case he’s able to leap into his ancestor because of their similar DNA (or something like that :)).
Yes – that was “Leap Between The States”, set during the Civil War. Explained away by genetic similarity between him and his great-grandfather. (He leaped IN to his great-grandfather, a Union soldier).
I thought that when Al and Sam switched places, that over-rode the previous lifetime limitation based on Sam’s lifetime and now Sam could go even further into the past, based on Al’s lifetime.
Of course I could be remembering wrong… also wouldn’t Sam finally solving Al’s biggest regret create a time-paradox? A lot of the advice Al gave Sam, was based on his previous failed marriages; if those failed marriages never happened, wouldn’t the experience that Al had ceased to exist as well? Would Al even be part of the program?
this little twist in the timeline actually resulted in worse than prison for Al. I believe it was that he went to the gas chamber (and therefore never joined the Quantum Leap Project).
I think that the only time Sam truly went out of his own lifetime was the Civil War episode. The one where they switched places, the leap went before Sam’s lifetime, but that’s because Al was the leaper in this one, and it was within Al’s lifetime.
I would think so. And I think the way the series finale ended, it sort of left the viewers the ability to draw their own conclusions about…
what happened to Sam and why he “never returned home”.
This was a fun show, even though just about every episode had some sort of hole in its own logic.
I used to love the little cameos from famous people in the past. Like when Sam was at a talent show and a little kid is playing the saxophone. Sam is involved in a conversation with someone else when the kid’s set ends, and you can hear the emcee in the background saying, “Let’s have a hand for little Billy C, all the way from Hope, Arkansas!”
Or when he’s at a Jewish wedding and saves some guy who’s choking on his food, and someone asks the man, “Are you all right, Dr. Heimlich?”
My favorite episode is Nowhere to Run - Sam leaps into a double amputee Vietnam vet. They had to figure out how to keep Sam from standing up…until the very end.
Personally, I always thought that was why Sam was told that from there on the jumps would get harder, because he wouldn’t have Al’s influence anymore. Unless he was given another compelling reason I’m forgetting about.
The displaced person ends up in the Waiting Room, where Al and Dr. Beeks (the project psychiatrist) try to get as much information out of the person’s swiss-cheesed mind as possible to help Sam. As Quantum Leap is a top-secret military project, the “leapees” usually don’t have a chance to escape. There was one time, however, when Sam leaped into a murderer who DID escape, which meant that they had to get him back for Sam to leap.
It was also a fairly important issue in the JFK assassination episode, where Al (if I recall) was heavily grilling the real Oswald in some white sterile room.
Wow, reading this thread is really taking me back. I used to watch QL with my mother when I was younger and I didn’t pick up on a lot of the things you all are mentioning. Very cool.
I seem to remember an episode towards the end in which Sam winds up in the modern day lab and seems to know exactly what he’s doing there. At some point did he gain the ability to return home at will?
Right – the Waiting Room was pretty much a bare white room with a table. That was about it.
And yes, Wolfian, that was the one episode mentioned earlier called “The Leap Back”, where Al is the leaper and Sam is the hologram (freak accident switching them). In that one, Sam actually remembers that…
