They could have done that at the end of Enterprise:
“You know, you really should wear more catsuits.”
Speaking as someone who didn’t watch the show – so why the confusion? Was he told his decision was final – if he kept on jumping there would not be any more chances to go home? Or what?
I don’t recall. Most who express disappointment with the ending seem to think Sam should have been able to claim his rest and reward after so many world-changing efforts. I think that would have been the cop-out, though.
It’s not so much that Sam wouldn’t get another chance to go home. I always took it to mean that Sam kept jumping, always intending to go home at some point, but died (heroically) before he got that chance.
I also took it that Sam’s leaping was essentially reactive. That is, the supernatural entity who hijacked his time-travel booth did so because another, evil supernatural entity had started fucking with history, and that, although Sam didn’t know it at first, each leap was to correct a screwing-with-history that had been done “before” Sam’s arrival. That’s a fanwank, though.
As one of the few people on Earth who did not like Newhart’s ending, I must state my objection to watching the show for years, only to find out it wasn’t even “real” within the show’s own context. GodDAMN but I hate “it was all a dream” endings! (for the same reason, I also hated the Buffy episode where she was possibly in an insane asylum.)
And the X-Files ending has been referenced, but not truly hated-on. It was horrible, far worst than Lost. All we got was a clip show that reviewed what we spent the past 8, 9 years watching. :rolleyes: At least Lost gave the characters closure, even if it wasn’t the closure many wanted.
Is it? I thought somewhere in the mid seasons they established some kind of “evil leaper” who was doing just that. Other than that, I don’t recall a clear explanation of why Sam had to do what he was doing - a single reason why each of these people was out of tune with the flow of the universe. Just a vague “God needs you to fix some blown fuses” notion.
Either lots of people weren’t paying much attention, or the show was more ambiguous than you recall, because there are several posts in this thread which suggest the Sam didn’t have an opportunity to go home.
My entirely personal reaction to “Sam never went home” was that in fixing Al’s life, he eliminated the need ever to go home. With Al’s life fixed retrograde to his repatriation, there never was a Project Quantum Leap. The Sam we knew in 1992 basically became an angel. Perhaps the symbolism of him making this decision on the day of his birth means that poor Mr. and Mrs. Beckett wound up losing baby Sam, I don’t know. But I do know that the moral of that episode is, “You can do a lot more by leaping than you ever could have done by not leaping,” so in my book, it’s a happy ending.
Sorry about this brief hijack but I just decided to try QL on Netflix. Was there a pilot or something? Because the show just starts with him leaping, having been leaping for some unknown amount of time, and no explanation at all of how it started. This seems to me to be about the dumbest beginning to a series ever.
Boyo Jim, the pilot episode is titled “Genesis” and is very definitely his first leap, discussed at length during the episode. Every episode (IIRC) has a date at the front, too, and there’s a database of which dates go with which episodes.
Thanks, it’s not included in the Netflix series. What they call episode one is him jumping into a crooked boxer.
I rule it not a hijack and so will file your needless apology away for a later time.
I also think you missed an episode, or maybe a scene. I remember the first episode beginning with Al driving a dated futuristic car 
and hitting on a blonde, then rushing off to try to stop Sam from using the quantum leap accelerator.
I seem to remember that being a problem when I was trying to get some friends to watch the show. Aren’t there also only like 30-40 episodes on Netflix?
That episode, btw, is titled “The Right Hand of God,” IIRC.
I don’t know the total Just looked it up on IMDB, and what Netflix calls episode 1 shows as episode 4 in the list on IMDB.
Kinda fun to see Nancy Kulp playing a nun, though. First time I ever saw her in anything other than the Beverly Hillbillies.
Happy Days: have the final episode be a flash-forward to 1969, showing us how the gang moved into the hippie era.
The thing I disliked most about the Seinfeld finale wasn’t that it made no sense or became a clip show, but it just simply wasn’t funny. The returning characters were angry and bitter and if you listen, you hardly hear the studio audience laughing. They could have had the exact same premise but simply had better jokes and I would have been content.
I hated Enterprise’s ending so much I barely remember it. For the first deep space exploration starship credited for doing major things to establish the Federation and the Prime Directive, they should have went all out and made the ending, even the last season, more grand. Much has already been said about the stupid Xindi story arc that I don’t want to belabor the point, but it should have skipped that whole thing and resolved the stupid Temporal Cold War thing established at the beginning of the series. That should have been what the last season was about, not the Xindi, an unknown threat to earth nobody in the chronologically later series ever mentioned once.
Married…with Children’s finale was also not a real finale, I think they decided to cancel it without giving the writers a chance to resolve it. I think Kelly gets married but ends up not marrying the guy somehow, right? I hated it so much I have chosen to forget about it on purpose, just like Enterprise.
For some unknown reason, a select few QL episodes are disc-only, and such a break interrupts the series right at the beginning.
I think the number of eps available might depend on the device. For quite some time, we watched Frasier on our older Blu-Ray box, and we were always 14 episodes or so into 100, even after we’d watched dozens. Then we got the Roku… and it shows all 224 or whatever episodes, all the time. There may be some episode limit in the code of older boxes… or not.
The real first episode can be seen on hulu.
sigh
I really struggle with the idea that there’s people out there that don’t understand that they were only ever dead in the side story in the final season. I seem to have this discussion with my Dad every few months. It isn’t even a case of not paying attention, it feels like some people simply couldn’t have watched it. They were really damn clear about this.