Quantum Leap: Genesis
Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections:
Quantum Leap:
Season One:
Quantum Leap: Genesis
"Ziggy says no, but Sam's leaping!"
As the pilot movie starts out, we find Rear Admiral
Albert Calavicci picking up a strange woman on the road. He's got a test model car and things are going fine untill Gooshie from the project calls and reports panickly that Sam's leaping.
We find out that Sam is DR. Samuel Beckett. And Sam's stuck in the past with a swiss cheesed mind and an identity that isn't his own.
He can't seem to convince anyone and then he starts seeing the Boogieman. * The Boogieman is of course Al, who is
using a neuro-hologram -- he seems Sam and his surroundings
as a hologram, and Sam sees HIM as a hologram. No one can see or hear Al -- supposedly.
Sam's in for the ride of his life -- literally- - when he's leaped into a test pilot. He's expected to fly the X-2 to MACH 3. Meanwhile, Sam is fumbling to remember his old phone number at the farm so he can call his family...
He ends up on the X-2, with no flight experience AT ALL (God, help us!) but Al's there to help! (Help!) AL has flight experience.
Unfortunately, Al can't touch the controls and SAm has to follow orders. But Sam doesn't leap yet -- he has to save the leapee's unborn baby.
But alas, the movie isn't over yet. And he's not home either. He's leaped into Ken Fox, a minor league baseball player who must make the winning play in the 1968 season. Before he does that, though, Sam calls his father and speaks to him -- and his father is dead in the future -- and claims to be Cousin Sam. After Sam hangs up, we see a glimpse of his father and young Sam!
He finishes the deed, and leaps...
This pilot was a good one, and they should show it together on the Scifi Channel, but here is my nitpick:
When Sam leaps into Ken Fox, he first has the leapee's son
tossing him the baseball. It's flying through the air, day turns into night behind the ball.. Good affect for a leap, but why at the end of the episode was it suddenly blue for leaping? (Please correct me if I'm wrong about it being the blue...)
====
* Spelled out here for reasons that that's what Sam said -- but for medical reasons, and otherwise, never utter this title of the Halloween episode of Season Three aloud! It's been proven to have bad affects!
(Of course this is only a rumour, but message boards have been known to mess up when the word is uttered.)
By Rene on Friday, April 02, 1999 - 8:22 am: What with the naration thing? I don't know...
but it's a bit weird for Sam to narate the
episode...esp. during a leap.
By Rene on Thursday, April 08, 1999 - 6:34 am: Anyway, I also find a bit weird that, after his second leap into the baseball player, he seems
to remember everything that happened to him
in the previous leap.
By Rene on Thursday, April 08, 1999 - 8:14 am: Given Al's explanation of time travel and
project Quantum Leap, how come Sam has never travelled into the future?
And if it is God who took control of Sam's
leaping, why is he being cruel to Sam? Sam
seems to always leap into an awkward situation...
(like at the end of this episode, he leaps
into a teacher right in the middle of class.)
By Charles Cabe (Ccabe) on Thursday, April 08, 1999 - 1:33 pm: Mabye God has a cruel sense of humor. He puts out a best selling book that says the world started in 8868 BC then buries 200 million old rocks. Perhaps Sam is being smited (punished) for tinkering with the past.
By Todd Pence on Thursday, April 08, 1999 - 5:47 pm: How come in some episodes small children are able to see Al, but in other episodes they can't?
By A. Sinclaire -- Moderator on Friday, April 09, 1999 - 10:34 am: It depends on their age, I think. AFter a certain age you're not "pure of heart" anymore, but that doesn't make sense, does it?
By Todd Pence on Friday, April 09, 1999 - 5:52 pm: No . . . but then neither does any other premise of this show. I still think it's a great show, though. Just shows that scientific accuracy has nothing to do with dramatic quality.
I remember also there was an episode in an asylum where one or two of the inmates could see Al. I guess this links "sanity" with impurity.
By Brian on Thursday, May 06, 1999 - 11:59 pm: I think the reason why children can sometime see Sam is because they still believe in magic and things like that so they can see him.. we could further speculate that since their brains may not be finished devloping it's easier for them to see him.
By Rene on Saturday, August 07, 1999 - 8:29 pm: Many odd things in this episode when compared with the rest of the series. First, Al usually always holds the handlink when he's in the imaging
chamber. But in this episode, he didn't have it.
Also, he seemed to open the door to the imaging
chamber like a regular door....usually, he uses
the handlink to open the door. And what took him
so long to first visit Sam.
By Ghel on Wednesday, January 26, 2000 - 9:12 am: I think that at some point in the series, it is mentioned that Al's hologram is somehow linked to Sams neural patterns. Possibly some children and mental patients have neural patterns close enough to Sams to enable them to "see" the hologram.
By Scott McClenny on Monday, May 28, 2001 - 2:35 pm: It's never actually stated in the series why
Sam entered the Accerlation Chamber prematurely
but somewhere I think I read that it was because
the government was about to cut funds to the
program and they needed results FAST!
(Or am I mixing it up with Time Tunnel?)
I also have wondered how Sam is able to make
the narration during all of the episodes throughout the series,obviously he couldn't keep
a diary or anything while the events were happening.
My theory is that somehow Sam WAS able to make it
home and the show is based on his memoirs that he
wrote in guise of a Science Fiction novel as no-one would really believe it happened!
By Merat on Tuesday, May 29, 2001 - 5:29 am: Anyone else notice that in this, the pilot episode, Sam was a pilot?
By JD on Tuesday, May 29, 2001 - 7:45 pm: Yes, I did. I was watching an old tape of this, and when I heard "And now back to Quantum Leap, the Pilot episode", I said "There's a double meaning in that" in my best Kenneth Branagh voice. (A cookie to anyone who gets that reference.) Anyway, my mom was watching also, and didn't say anything until a minute later. She shouted out, "NOW I get it!" and started laughing.
By Rene on Tuesday, May 29, 2001 - 7:57 pm: "It's never actually stated in the series why
Sam entered the Accerlation Chamber prematurely
but somewhere I think I read that it was because
the government was about to cut funds to the
program and they needed results FAST!"
Wasn't that mentioned in the original naration for the show?
By Mike Deeds on Wednesday, May 30, 2001 - 5:36 am:Rene, you are right. Original narration:
Theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett lead an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Dr. Beckett prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator -
and vanished! He awoke to find himself in the past suffering from partial amnesia and facing mirror images that were not his own, driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. Fortunately, contact with his own time was maintained through brainwave transmissions with Al, the project Observer who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Dr. Beckett finds himself Leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next Leap will be the Leap home...
http://www.geocities.com/area51/chamber/9282/
By Scott McClenny on Wednesday, June 13, 2001 - 2:47 pm: W.K.Stratton who appears as the medic who
gives Sam the physical after the flight played
K.C. on Baa Baa Black Sheep.
By ScottN on Friday, August 24, 2001 - 1:56 pm: In one of the bar scenes, I saw a guy who looks like Al the bartender from "Mirror Image".
By Darth Sarcasm on Friday, June 25, 2004 - 3:43 pm:When Sam leaps into Ken Fox, he first has the leapee's son
tossing him the baseball. It's flying through the air, day turns into night behind the ball.. Good affect for a leap, but why at the end of the episode was it suddenly blue for leaping? (Please correct me if I'm wrong about it being the blue...) - Moderator
The difference between the two leaps is that in one, we are shown what it looks like from Sam's perspective... Sam may be unaware of the blue glow that surrounds him when he leaps. The second leap, we are looking at Sam, not through his eyes.
Many odd things in this episode when compared with the rest of the series. First, Al usually always holds the handlink when he's in the imaging
chamber. But in this episode, he didn't have it.
Also, he seemed to open the door to the imaging
chamber like a regular door....usually, he uses
the handlink to open the door. And what took him
so long to first visit Sam. - Rene
Al may simply not have thought the handlink would be useful the first time around. Remember, this is the first time Sam has ever leapt... it's all new to all of them.
As for why it took him so long to visit Sam, remember that Ziggy has to locate Sam first before Al can visit him. This has been depicted a number of times, including the final episode... where Al was delayed because Ziggy expected him to be elsewhere.
I have no explanation for the change in the door effect.
In one of the bar scenes, I saw a guy who looks like Al the bartender from "Mirror Image". - ScottN
Bruce McGill, who played Al the Bartender in the series finale, played Weird Ernie... a central figure in the pilot episode.
By Johnson Templeton on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 - 11:50 pm: God didn't write the Bible. No one said he did. No religion beleives it is God's personal word.
By Godot on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 3:10 am: When Al 'walks through' the plane in the hangar, his shirt appears to be a different colour from how it is in the rest of the scene. A side-effect of the lighting for the FX shot, no doubt, but still a nit.
During the same scene Al's reflection is visible on the surface of the plane at one point, but later on they make a big deal of the fact that holograms don't reflect.