My Love for Quantum Leap. "Oh, boy!"

The subject of this blog came to me today as I read Paul Shirley's blog(he mentioned Quantum Leap therein). I apologize if you were looking for something more political, but I felt the urge to talk about my love for Quantum Leap today. It was a strange coincidence(seeing the show mentioned on Shirley's blog), as I had just added the first three seasons of Quantum Leap to my Netflix queue not 2 minutes earlier. It seems like no one I know will admit to liking this show, but someone had too....it was on for 5 seasons! And most of the people I know are history people. Come on, the guy is traveling around in history(Civil War, Watts Riot, Vietnam, Kennedy Assassination)! I actually didn't see the show when it was originally on NBC from 89-93. I picked it up in reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel(maybe this is why people are afraid of the show...'I'm not a nerd. I don't watch the sci-fi channel') in the mid 90's and watched it every weeknight at 11:00, trying desperately to stay awake until midnight on a school night to see the end of the episode...ahh memories.

"Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and Vanished...He woke 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 Dr. 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 will agree, though, with what many of my friends have argued, that much of the show is too conservative...he leaps into Lee Harvey Oswald but is unable to control many of his actions and leaps out before the assassination(which the show claims Oswald does alone, arguing that people only believe in a conspiracy because they cannot come to grips with that fact that "if one man can kill the president, then what hope is there for the rest of us." This is, of course, ignoring that opposite argument that 'what hope is there for the rest of us if our government can kill the president and cover it up.')...he also is 'poor angry black man' in Watts and tries to convince his friends that violence is not the answer. ...But anyway, in spite of all this the show is actually incredibly addictive and entertaining. You never knew what kind of hilarious and compromising situation Dr. Sam Beckett was going to leap into next...and better yet what time in history? Although I must say the show would have been far more interesting if he would have been able to leap outside of his own lifetime...the possibilities would have been endless...The American Revolution, A French fur trader, how about the Lincoln assassination!

In spite of the missed opportunities of time travel and the political problems I alluded to earlier, this show was a television milestone that is totally underappreciated by the masses and deserves to be heralded as one of the greatest shows of the 80's and 90's...if not all time(partial sarcasm here). I was also happy to see today on Project Quantum Leap (a geeky Quantum Leap fan page) that series creator Bellesario is planning a spin-off show on the sci-fi channel that would feature Sam Beckett's daughter(you'd have to have seen the original series to know who she is) as the new leaper that is traveling through time looking for her father...with Scott Bakula making guest appearances from time to time. I sincerely hope it comes to fruition...I need a new Quantum Leap fix...even if the Leap-haters will scoff at me.