On a rewatch – complicated because episodes are only for sale or at the “premium” level at Peacock – the original 1989 pilot for Quantum Leap is an impressive thing.
Not least because it’s a two-episode premiere, creator Donald P. Bellisario can play almost the entire first 45 minutes without a shred of exposition. Scott BakulaSam Beckett wakes up in the body of a 1956 test pilot with no memory and he must find out what his situation is and why he keeps talking to a man (Dean Stockwell’s Al) that no one else can see. Sure things get explained eventually, but there’s a long stretch where the episode just lets the audience figure things out or clash. No 2022 pilot, and certainly no pilot, could ever show a comparable level of confidence.
Quantum Leap
It comes down to
Talking too much, not jumping enough.
Sadly, that’s evident in NBC’s new sequel/reboot. The pilot for this new Quantum Leap is 41 minutes of nearly non-stop exposition and hand-holding, making sure new viewers understand every aspect of the premise and returning fans understand the connection between this update and the original — irrelevant as it gets.
There is such a desperate need to explain in the Quantum Leap pilot that there is no time at all to have an ounce of fun with the premise, and if you can’t immediately have fun with a premise like this, it makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, due to the tight production schedules of broadcasts, the pilot is all I’ve seen, so maybe episode two will mark the point where series developers Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt (NBC still lists Bellisario as “creator”) starting to have fun? I’m not ready to take that leap yet.
The new Quantum Leap begins 30 years after the original series ended. Under the friendly supervision of the US military, Project Quantum Leap is rebooted, complete with supercomputer Ziggy. The team is led by Herbert “Magic” Williams (Ernie Hudson), who will remember super fans and absolutely no one else from the Season Three episode “The Leap Home (Part 2) – Vietnam.”
The team consists of physicist Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) and his fiancée, army veteran Addison (Caitlin Bassett), along with tech wizard Ian (Mason Alexander Park) and security chief Jenn (Nanrisa Lee). The program isn’t ready to move to human testing yet, but Ben leaves his own engagement party when he receives a mystery text. Before you know it, Ben finds himself in 1985 in Philadelphia, where he has to avoid a bombing or a robbery or something, essentially righting what once went wrong in the hopes that his next jump will be the jump home. This is a good theory, except that Sam Beckett never really came home. Will Ben have more luck?
like the original Quantum Leap pilot proves that viewers are smart enough to follow the plot of the franchise without holding any hand as it is accessible and powerful. Dude travels back in time to different people’s bodies to fix things in their lives. Add half a sentence of “quantum entanglement” mumbo jumbo and nothing else is required because nothing else makes sense anyway.
The new Quantum Leap let people chat about new software and the room Addison makes in the past appear as Ben’s helpful hologram and levels of military jurisdiction and a dozen other things I’d describe as “Episode 7 Problems”. And that’s before characters remind each other of Sam and Al, showing viewers photos of Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, and making various connections between the shows.
Problem: Bakula has been posting on social media and stuff, talking about why he decided not to be on the new show. This is either garden variety deception or a bargaining tactic. If it’s the latter, allow me to do my part in Bakula’s negotiations: the way this new show is structured, the presence of Sam Beckett on screen is not optional. It borders on necessity that Sam makes a brief appearance in the first half of the season, a longer appearance in the finale of the first season, and then at the very least become a recurring character by the second season. Otherwise, the double exposition pilot was meaningless.
The pilot could have ended with an Easter Egg confirmation of the original series, a photo of Sam on a computer screen or something, and that would have already satisfied established fans. The unnecessary callback gibberish is that it takes time to give Ben and his new team extra personality traits.
Or maybe it’s time taken away from the pilot’s episodic plot, a weak use of what’s special about the Quantum Leap Brand. I’m happy to begin my complaints with the hilariously bad geographic doubling for Philadelphia or the fact that for certain viewers of a certain age “Philadelphia + 1985 + Bombing” automatically evokes associations with the infamous police bombing, MOVE, something the creators seem to realize. unaware of this.
But no, most of the time it’s a bad first episodic plot because it doesn’t take advantage of the premise’s possibilities being trapped in another body at all and the “make right what went wrong” part of the premise to, “Bad Guy Does Bad case for sentimental reasons is therefore not really bad.” The original series tapped into a rich vein of Baby Boomer nostalgia – who was Sam Beckett, if not the time-traveling Forrest Gump? – and the time markers in the pilot here give no indication from which the new version will be tapped into, if anything at all.
Will all of this be addressed in future episodes and will there be storylines that take more emotional value and entertainment from the premise being trapped in another body? Probably! But you put your best foot forward in a pilot or you don’t. Despite that advantage of franchise specificity, Quantum Leap ends up being a less distinctive pilot than the previous NBC wannabe Quantum Leap show like Timeless or the ephemeral companiona great Quantum Leap reboot if they just called it Quantum Leap.
With Lee, this Quantum Leap seems to have a solid centerpiece, should other creative elements come together. He has a good mix of nerdy insecurity and cocky stubbornness, of easily confused confusion and soft charisma. I can’t say if Bassett is any good right now, but I like the new jumper/guide dynamic, bringing all those subtextual Sam/Al hisses to the surface.
Hudson, Park and Lee have little to play for, and it repeatedly struck me that there was a reason the original series minimized Sam’s team, which is that the more you complicate or simply expand the current part of the show, the more less time for the creative episodic stories that are an integral part of the brand.
We’ll see if, after this clunky, but not entirely unpromising, pilot, NBC’s new Quantum Leap eventually finds out. And we’ll see how soon Scott Bakula appears “shocking”.