Ziggy Predicts a 99% Chance that a Quantum Leap Reboot is in the Works

Dean Stockwell's been dead for what, a couple of months as of this post. That didn't take long.

I said it in another thread, Sam was a boomer, so he had all that good juicy boomer history to leap through.
Gen-X or millennial, not as interesting.
I mean....I guess there's a jillion 9/11 episodes you could do, but that'll get depressing fast.

Gen X or Millennial could be as interesting, jsut there's no happy ending to reset the timeline to.

That's the trouble with all time travel stories going forward.
"We can't hog-tie Muhammed Atta because reasons".
"We can't kick Fred Trump in the balls because reasons".

maybe there's the story line then? the protagonist has to chase sam beckett through time to undo his "repairs" that result in the world we know?

That's actually a really good idea.

NBC should hire you, because I'm sure that will be better than the stuff they'll crap out.

Didn't the original ultimately ignore the "leap within his own lifetime" rule because he got swiss-cheesed with Al and thus could leap in his lifetime too?

Anyhoo, all the new series has to do is have Project: Quantum Leap be a means of historical discovery from the get-go by knowing full well that Sam will leap into people from the past (and at any point in history) but with the caveat that they didn't know he couldn't be retrieved, and find out that he has to correct "what once went wrong" in order to allow his next leap.

Sam also lept into an ancestor of his from the civil war. A lot of Quantum Leap didn't involve huge historical events so if NuSam is born in The mid-late 80s you can set it any time from then until say 2019. QL also never left America so they can go international, we can see NuSam leap into someone in Germany who's a David Hasselhof enthusiast or Sam leaps into summer of 1999 when the Matrix and The Phantom Menace comes out. How about Sam leaps into a TOS fan when TNG premiers? Sam's an old hippie when Nirvana comes out. Sam leaps into Woodstock 99 and has to save someone from Fred Durst. Lots of possibilities.

Ooh, Sam can run into Trump again. That's how he got covid.

Oh yeah!
And one of the novels took him to the revolutionary war.
Another novel had him think he was in medieval times, but it turned out he was just a LARPer.
So, they really could cut loose, and not have the old rules.

Actually, I rather like that idea in a sense. It would go to show that anyone who tries to effect positive change is quickly rendered ineffective by a more powerful entity determined to maintain the status quo. It would be a meta commentary on the state of things as they are now.

They did have the evil leapers for a couple of episodes.

I think there would be plenty of episodes if you had a millenial leaper in a boomer's lifetime

There would be the episode of figuring out how to use a TV with dials.
Then they could have the episode where they had to use a rotary phone.
Then there would be the episode where they would have to cook with an oven
Then there would be the episode where they had to go outside and play
Then there would be the episode where they would have to play video games with a one button controller.

There are countless options.

How many of us wishes we could go back in time and invested in Apple in the mid eighties? Imagine Sam leaping into a Russian in 1989.

No, the good thing with QL is it averts that bullshit by having Sam leap into other people. Even if he does invest in stuff, he's investing as someone else, and it's going to look incredibly suspect if he also wills/directs the earnings to a random 4/12/17/22 year old American kid.

Besides, Sam had - what - SEVEN doctorates? A black belt? AND a sex life? He doesn't need cash.

This also addresses Tererun's millennial point. Sam is a massive nerd. Whether he's a millenial or not, he WILL know about old-style tech. He's probably memorised every ep of Mythbusters to be able to replicate a trubuchet, let alone know about rotary phones.

You may know about a rotary phone, but I am pretty sure they do not have the finger strength to use one, or the ability to fold a map. Of course, the map folding thing was already a nightmare from the freddyverse.

They might take liberties with the old plot too. Considering Sam's memory was swiss cheese he might have had a child and that child could have a child who went into some barn in the midwest and found all of his time travel stuff and zapped themselves into the past by accident. Remember, reboot does not mean we stick to the original plot so they could use the plot to ghostbusters the millenial years.

Just to ruin it all for the fanbois Sam's grandkid could also know Al's grandkid. Since Al was a manwhore IIRC, his grandkid could be a transexual bisexual black woman to cover a bunch of bases.

I am joking around, but the idea nothing has happened in the past 30-50 years is absurd. You are talking about the media and computer revolution. You could tie it into Sam by having his kid try to resurrect his experiments after they were closed down when he never came back.

He did.
Sammy Joe.
He lept into mid-coitus with her mom, then lept ahead to see her as a little girl, then again to her as a teen, then Al told him she works on Project Quantum Leap.

I must have moved on from QL by that point.

I remember liking this show as a kid, but not sure I could deal with it today now that I find time travel as a plot point irritating.

Especially when the plot is "We have to make sure that this thing in history happened so the world winds up like the one we know now." Fuck that. That was one of my beefs with First Contact. Not only does the TNG crew find themselves hundreds of years in the past, where they have a technological advantage over the Borg of that era, but they also have the element of surprise. Give 21st Century Earth 24th Century technology, and build an armada that can easily paste 21st Century Borgs. I mean, it's not like you easily beat the Borg in the 24th Century, so you know that some really fucking bad shit is going to happen even if you don't alter the past, so why not take a stab at changing things in order to tilt things slightly in your favor at the very least?

The way the tech worked there was little for a longer story arch regarding sam actually getting home or something happening to progress the overall story line in the future. From a production value it made each episode a contained event where you did not need to keep up on the rest of them to watch. That was sort of why I fell out of it. I did not need to watch it to keep up so after a season or so I found other things and never bothered coming back.

In today's production of long bingable seasons it has to change. It is like MOTD shows of the past. They just get repetitive and boring through most of the arc. QL does not even leave much room for a seasonal arc because Sam does not remember what he did. You would have to add in the perspective of Al, and even that leads to a predictable failure if you want the show to continue.

Wait he never remembered anything?

They called it "swiss cheese memory".
He remembered what the writers wanted him to.

This plot device really seemed to effect him seeing any of the future. From the perspective of the plot and creators this keeps the story episodic, and each episode generally isolated from the others. There was some messing around with that for a couple of two parters, but generally it was consistent. This sort of thing was common for the time. If you look at a lot of the shows back then you had a very episodic run with few larger arcs. I think people got bored with that sort of thing.

Quantum Leap dealt less with major historical events and more with individual lives. One episode was a black girl accused of murder in the Deep South. He was her lawyer. In the original timeline, she was convinced and spends the rest of her life in prison even though she’s innocent. Sam is there to prove her innocence so the timeline changes and the girl can live a normal life. The episode was just meant to highlight racism and prejudice in the south with a little morality tale. It wasn’t meant to be earth shattering changes, but the NBC executives started interfering so they started having Sam leap into historical figures and events.

Quantum Leap is actually a perfect show for a nice balance of episodic and story arcs. The story arc being getting Sam home. There was one episode where Congress was thinking of shutting down the project and Al had to convince them to keep it going. That could have stretched over a few episodes. Another episode where Sam kept into Al and actually made it home. It gave him a chance to work on Ziggy to try and find a way to leap back into his own body. That could have been stretched over a few episodes, if not a whole season. There’s the evil leapers that were undermining Sam’s work, that was a two parter that could have played out for a whole season. With ten episodes a season, there’s three seasons worth of material right there.

The evil leapers was a trilogy.
Conceiving Sammy Joe was a trilogy.
They had mini-arcs.
And swiss cheese memory wiped them for Sam so they could go back to episodic.
They had their cake and ate it too.

Let oks like it’s not a reboot, but a continuation.

I hope they find Sam. I mean, Scott could guest in the pilot where they find him and send him home, and we see the new guy on his own journey.