By: Jonathan Cyfer
I learned this morning that the television show Quantum Leap (1989-1993) is going to be made into a film. I have mixed feelings about this. I'm a fan of the original show, primarily because of the "buddy chemistry" between the show's two stars, Scott Bakula (as Dr. Sam Beckett) and Dean Stockwell (as Al Calavicci). Of course, I'm also a sucker for a good time travel story and Donald Bellisario's creation managed to hold its quality for the four years the show was on the air.
On the other hand, I don't think that every single television show ever made must be made into a film, either because film producers think it would be a good way to make money or because they lack any sort of creative vision and thus have to recycle the ideas of others. My first inclination is to say, if Quantum Leap needs to be remade, remake it as a TV show.
However, since nobody listens to me anyway, I might as well accept Quantum Leap as a film and move on. That said, there were things about the show I thought could have been improved. If a Quantum Leap film is to be made, it would be a good time to fix some of the more obvious "holes" in the show's nature. First, a basic background.
Dr Sam Beckett is a genius who creates a time travel project based on a rather simple premise. He theorizes that a person should be able to time travel within their own lifetime. Imagine a person's life is a string, with one end representing the person's birth and the other end, the person's death. Now crumple the string in your hand into a ball. The string now intersects at a large number of points along its length. These are the points at which a person can "leap back" into a moment in history.
That's what happens to Sam but there's a problem (well, more than one). Once Sam leaps, his memory is almost completely wiped out and he has no idea who he is or what he's doing there (more on this later).
Unlike most time travel stories, Sam doesn't materialize in the past as himself. He "leaps into" the life of a person who exists at that point in time. Sam is still Sam, but he appears to everyone else as if he's the person he has leapt into. Meanwhile, the person Sam is replacing actually changes places with him in time, and is transported into the future (Sam's present).
Sam's best friend and a member of the project's senior staff Al, is able to communicate with Sam by projecting a hologram of himself into the past, homing in on Sam's brain waves. In this fashion, only Sam (for the most part) can see and hear Al. Al can't affect anything in the past, since only his image is transported back...he is still really in the present in a holographic chamber. In this manner, Al is able to help Sam fill in some of the blanks in his memory. Eventually, he starts to recall bits and pieces of his personal history along with most of his skills, which are considerable.
The show's premise is that God or fate or time somehow wants or needs Sam to fix a wrong in the past and make it right. Once he's in a time period and situation he cannot leap back out again until he's fixed it and, failing that, he'll be trapped forever in another person's life in the past. To help Sam on each "mission", Al uses a remote hand held to communicate with the project's supercomputer Ziggy (who in one episode is described as an artificial intelligence with the ego of Barbra Streisand). The hand held technology isn't perfect and one of my favorite moments in just about every episode is when Al has to hit the hand held, like a faulty transistor radio, to get information out of it.
Once Sam solves whatever problem he's been put there for (which isn't always what he thinks it is), he leaps out of one person and time and into another, usually at some critical or embarrassing moment. Sam has even leapt into women and although still Sam and still a guy, he appears to everyone else (including the lust-driven Al) as a woman. He's also leapt into children, a mentally challenged person, a blind person, and a person without legs, all the time retaining the abilities of his actual brain and body.
The summary on
When Sam is in the past and is wearing the aura of the person he's leapt into, that person is in the future in someplace called "the waiting room". Once Sam is done fixing their life, Sam leaves and the person leaps back into their own life. Problem: does the person remember what Sam did or don't they? If they do, the problem is they might also remember the future, screwing things up in their past. If they don't, then they have one heck of a memory gap and have no idea what Sam did to fix their lives, possibly resulting in their undoing the process.
One suggestion would be to have Sam somehow "superimposed" on the person he leaps into so that they are held suspended in some pocket in time but their brains "record" the changes Sam makes. When same leaves and the person resumes their life, they can remember the changes without necessarily understanding why they were made. Some made up scientific explanation will have to be introduced, but it'll be better than having various people from the past leaping into the future all the time and then having amnesia about their lives for whatever time period same happens to be occupying their existence.
Another issue (and this will be hard to resist) is to not have Sam interact in any famous point in history or with any (future) famous people. Almost all time travel stories are based on changing a famous event (JFK's assassination, for instance), but there's just a ton of history that can be mined without dredging up famous events.
The Quantum Leap show did a very good job of avoiding history book history for the most part, but later in the series, probably to engage more of an audience, it had Sam leap into Lee Harvey Oswald (speaking of JFK's assassination), Dr. Ruth Westheimer, help Chubby Checker develop the twist, and launched Stephen King's launch horror writing career. Cute, but I could have lived without these episodes.
Do not, do not, do not give in to the temptation to have Sam fix all of the problems in his own life>! Sam's brother was originally killed in Vietnam and Sam is eventually allowed to save his life, fix the life of his sister who originally married an abusive alcoholic, and even saved Al's marriage which originally ended when Al was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam era and presumed dead.
The show (or movie) shouldn't be about fixing everybody's everything. There should be problems that Sam can't or at least shouldn't fix and, if he does, the "fix" actually makes things worse.
The resolution. At the end of the TV show, it's revealed that Sam is never allowed to leap home. This brings up a problem with his time travel theory. If Sam can only leap within a segment of time between his birth and his death and, during his lifetime, he's launched into a perpetual existence of time traveling, when does he die? How is the end point defined? Would it mean he would never die and thus could leap into any event in his "future"?
I know, with rare exceptions, TV producers and writers are loathe to resolve a Run For Your Life premise in a show, just in case there's a way to bring the show back later on, but good guys deserve happy endings. At some point, enough is enough. Sam deserves to eventually come home, be reunited with his wife (who he forgets all about while leaping in time, thanks to his "swiss-cheese memory"), and either keep tinkering with time travel or trash the project (create an ending that sets up the sequel).
Oh, one other thing. Why does the Quantum Leap Project exist? Assuming the military is funding it (Al's a US Navy Rear Admiral and former astronaut), what do they hope to gain out of the project? Answering this question could introduce some interesting "sinister conspiracy" aspects to the show and even provide a different purpose for Sam's seemingly random leaps in time.
As much as I like Scott Bakula as an actor, I don't see that he absolutely needs to reprise his role as Sam. I'm sure another actor will be able to do the role justice. I am however profoundly sorry that Dean Stockwell is now considered too old to play Al. He absolutely made the show and his portrayal of Al and interactions with Sam were the highlight of every episode. Finding an actor who can recapture Stockwell's performance will be one of the biggest chores for the team making the Quantum Leap film.
This isn't a film I think has to be made, but if it's going to happen, I can't wait to see how the film makers pull it off. On the TV series, each episode was a different leap into a different life and situation. Episodic leaps can make a movie seem fragmented and disjointed unless, at least covertly, the leaps all have something in common (here comes my military sinister conspiracy theory again).
Like I said, I'd prefer it if Quantum Leap made its return on the small screen, but if a film is in its future, I wish it, and everyone involved, all the best.
Follow Jonathan Cyfer on twitter
Read Jonathan Cyfer's blog The Missing Man
Please Leave A Comment-
Comments