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 In its five seasons the show progressed LEAPS and bounds, but was one of them a LEAP too far?
Oh boy. Quantum Leap was conceived by Donald Bellisario (previously responsible for hit shows such as MagnumPI and Airwolf) as an Alfred Hitchcock Presents-style anthology show. When he realised that some stories might not be as popular as others, he threw a pair of time travelling friends into the mix, hoping to add a sense of continuity for viewers. The finished product featured Sam Beckett, a time travelling scientist who leapt into the body of a different person each week. His mission: to put right what once went wrong. Finding out who Sam would jump into next was always the show's strength, and over five years the writers came up with some great scenarios, including pregnant women, gay men, racist bigots, and, on occasion, a monkey. The show was at its creative peak in the third series, which featured "The Boogieman", one of the scariest Halloween TV shows ever. Though the series' quality continually fluctuated and often lapsed into soggy sentimentality, there was always plenty of entertaining banter between Sam and his sex-a-holic hologram guide, Al.  Despite the show's solid fanbase, the show was endlessy shuffled around the schedules, making it harder to see and build up. By the final series (with it's horrendously bombastic new version of the opening title music), the show eschewed its commitment to telling stories about the lives of ordinary people, and started tackling subjects like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and, controversially at the time, Lee Harvey Oswald. (Apparently this episode was inspired by a brief meeting Bellisario had with Oswald when he was in the marines, which had subsequently convinced him that Oswald had later acted alone in the assassination of JFK.)
There was also a move towards arc plots, the weakest of which was the "Evil Leaper" trilogy. In "Deliver Us From Evil", Sam leaped back into Jimmy, a mentally handicapped man he?d helped in the second series. It turned out that Jimmy's sister-in-law was not who she seemed, and Sam realised that she too was a leaper called Alia. She even had a hologrammatic help, an Ab Fab-styled Zoey. It wasn't until she tried to frame Sam (or Jimmy really) as a rapist that he realised Alia?s true intentions: to put wrong what Same had once put right. Sweeping aside the rather daft notion that someone with a time machine and a penchant for evil would spend their time home-wrecking, rather than, say putting huge bets on horses and football scores, there was also the suggestion that Alia and Zoey were in the direct employ of the Devil, someone who clearly doesn't need to resort to time travel to make bad things happen. Sam bested her that time, but Alia returned, in the appropriately named two-part episode "Return of the Evil Leaper", a lame tale of drag racing and superheroes. At the end of part 1, Sam and Alia lept together, this time into a women?s prison, where they were suspects in a murder. In a convoluted and poorly acted episode (more caged ham than Caged Heat), Alia's helper Zoey also leapt into the prison, and the whole thing became a jumbled mess, as the writers fell over themselves trying to work out who could see who. The thing ended with Alia getting shot by Zoey and Sam retaliating by grabbing a shotgun and blowing away Zoey - an action so deeply uncharacteristic that made your skin crawl.  Al then appeared to tie up the plot in a few sentences, revealing that Alia was "free" (ie, dead). This was a show on its last legs, written by people whose memory of the Quantum Leap rulebook had become a hole ridden mess.
By the end of the season, Sam had leapt into sex therapist Dr Ruth, and also into his own great-grandfather (despite the fact that he could only jump into people who were alive in his lifetime). The final episode wrapped things up with a hippie-ish conclusion in which Sam met a God-like figure who gave him a choice of returning home, or changing Al's life for the better, at the cost of leaping alone forever more. A bold ending, but something of a downer. |
