Recently, while convalescing, I slowly worked my way through watching series one of Quantum Leap on dvd. I have fond memories of enjoying the programme as a child, and so wanted to revisit it.
To use Sam’s catchphrase at the end/beginning of every episode, oh boy. What had I seen in it? A show with, supposedly, ‘quantum physicists’ as the main characters – Sam and Al – yet it contained no physics whatsoever. Sam was quite a bland character, whereas Al was a lecherous, cigar-smoking older man in hologram form. The premise of the whole show is that an experiment went wrong and Sam became trapped in a journey of ‘quantum leaping’ – in every show, he is suddenly in someone else’s body and life. When he has “put right what once went wrong” – e.g., making sure someone doesn’t get killed, or stopping a disastrous marriage – he leaps again, into the next person and their life, and, with Al’s help, has to figure out what to do to make the next leap. Always hoping, of course, that “the next leap will be the leap home”.
The episodes have a fairly relaxed paced. For example, you could pop out to make a cup of tea and some toast without missing too much. Sometimes that’s what you want from a tv programme. Cheesy storylines often prevail. Yet for some reason there is something compelling about watching it – will he make the leap and will it be the leap home, into his own body and time?
Of course we already know the answers. Yes, he will make the leap, and no, it won’t be back into his own life. Why? Because the series couldn’t carry on any other way! And yet… As time goes on and episodes roll by, these answers are known and we carry on watching not to find them out, but to find out what the next leap will be. Who will he be, what will he have to do? We start each journey from scratch with him, the viewer finding out everything as Sam does.
So maybe I can start to see what I had liked about the programme. It has a good hook. It’s gently paced so almost anyone could follow it. It can be very cheesy and there is always some satisfying truth to find in cheesiness. But was there something more?
Dr Sam Beckett is an adult – a fascinating subject for a child. To children, adults are, on the whole, strange and foreign. The main thing you know about them is that you yourself will be one one day, and so studying them is essential.
Sam is an innately good person. No matter who he leaps into, he’s on the side of the good guys. He defends those who need defending, he takes on those in the wrong.
And this is what it comes down to.
He always has a purpose. As a child, I longed to have purposeful work to do, and I don’t believe I was particularly unusual in that. Most of the games I played as a child were ones where I was pretending to be a grown-up doing a fairly run-of-the-mill job – e.g. library assistant, teacher, shopkeeper – although occasionally it would be something slightly more flamboyant, such as an actor or comedian.
But the sad truth is that I didn’t have much purposeful work to do as a child. I wasn’t ’stretched’ at primary school, which was clearly a place to learn about social survival and not a lot else, and my parents lacked the necessary enthusiasm or knowledge to properly follow up my real-life interests or take them seriously. I feel sorry for the me as a child, and wish the me now had been around then to help me out and show me just what possibilities there were for me. But as a consolation prize, it’s still pretty good that the me now is helping the me now to see what possibilities there still are for me.
So the good points about Quantum Leap are it is entertaining, sometimes truthful, and can make a person connect with the idea of having worthwhile work to do, even if they can’t do it in their present situation. I think that makes the bad points fairly insignificant. Not bad for a tv programme.
