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I know I said I was done with the current incarnation of Quantum Leap and for very good reasons. If I want to watch the franchise, I’ll stick to the original, classic Quantum Leap starring Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell.

However, I was visiting Ars Technica for an entirely different reason and came across a video called Unsolved Mysteries: Unsolved Mysteries of Quantum Leap with Donald P. Bellisario. If you didn’t know, Bellisario has created a number of terrific TV shows including the aforementioned Quantum Leap (and even is involved in it’s current expression).

The current show debuted on NBC on September 19, 2022, but this video was released on May 25, 2021, almost sixteen months before the Raymond Lee, Caitlin Bassett, and Ernie Hudson led program. What Bellisario said in the video makes it seem as if he had no knowledge that another show, a sort of sequel, would be created. Maybe he said all these things before he was approached, or maybe the Ars Technica video was made well before it was released.

The video was edited to make it appear as if the super-computer Ziggy were interviewing Bellisario, and contains some interesting if not astonishing insights. I’ll relate some of the questions and answers but you can watch the entire interview (see below) for complete details.

The video acknowledges that it is 30 years after the original show.

The first question took me completely off guard.

[Ziggy] Was Sam really leaping or was he imagining it all?
[Donald] Wasn’t in Sam’s mind. He was actually leaping. That’s what I felt, anyway. It wasn’t something he was imagining. It was real.

It never occurred to me that Sam wasn’t time traveling and that he was just in some sort of coma imagining all of this experiences. Wow.

They talked about the people in the Waiting Room, and the revelation that Sam was married to Donna. Yeah, his wife would be disturbed that he was sleeping with other women, but would understand because of his swiss-cheesed memory. Donald said she never remarried or hooked up with another man.

Then there was the limitation of Sam ONLY leaping within his lifetime:

[Donald] I didn’t tell any stories where he would radically change history because we know what goes on in history. And that would have been as if the show was a pure fantasy, which, I didn’t want the audience to feel that way. I wanted the audience to feel that there really was Sam out there leaping through time. There were certain things, he could only leap into people that were ordinary. That was what we started off with, that rule, which I broke a couple of times later in the show. The reason he could only leap into his own lifetime was to make the show believable. I didn’t want it one day he’d leap into Rome and Caesar’s time. I didn’t want that.

The current show paid some lip service to the limitation and then did away with it. Here comes fantasy land, maybe.

At one point, Ziggy asked:

How controversial was it to produce the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes?

Bellisario had actually served in the Marines with Oswald and knew him. Based on those experiences, Bellisario felt that Oswald was the only shooter in the John F. Kennedy assassination. That’s why he made those episodes and why they felt so different.

According to Bellisario, the “evil leapers” were inserted into the show by another writer. He allowed it, but felt uncomfortable with them compared to the other episodes. We still don’t know where the evil leapers came from or if there was another “Project” out there trying to “put wrong what once went right.”

The original show lasted for five seasons and was cancelled by the network abruptly, so no one knew until it actually happened including Bellisario. Ziggy asked, “What were some of the ideas for a potential season six? Donald responded:

I didn’t have a plan for season six. It was going to be the same thing, to tell all the stories that we could tell. Quantum Leap had the great ability to tell any kind of story. There was not a running line that you couldn’t get away from, you have to just go with whatever story was being told. I just planned to do a lot more individual stories.

Now here’s the kicker. Ziggy asked, “How would you envision a modern reboot of Quantum Leap?” Remember, Bellisario is uttering these words not quite sixteen months BEFORE the “Quantum Leap” sequel first aired.

I think if I did Quantum Leap today I’d do it just the same way I did it decades ago. I would tell the same type of stories, doing stories of individuals, their challenges. I would be able to use more sets from other shows and more modern sets, but it would basically be the same show.

What made the show great was the stories and the interaction of the people, not the sets or the costumes or anything. How today’s audiences would view the show, I don’t think that view it any different than they did when we created it. It’s the stories that were so good. And the people that I cast in the roles that made the show come alive.

And I think the same thing would happened today. Wish I could do it again. I wouldn’t serialize it. I got away from that. Never did it in the old show and I wouldn’t do it in doing it again. I’d follow the same format.

Wow. First off, I had heard from other sources that if there had been a season six, Sam would have leapt into the future as himself and Al would leap after him. That obviously didn’t happen but what else?

He says he wouldn’t change a thing. He’d tell the same types of stories in the same way, even 30 years later. He also said today’s audiences would probably receive the show in the same way as they did the original. Most importantly, he said he wouldn’t serialize the show.

Except sixteen months later, the modern show doesn’t resemble the original at all and it most definitely is serialized.

When Ziggy asked what happened to Sam after the finale, Bellisario said he would continue leaping, he wouldn’t live forever and would eventually die. He said he got a lot of letters from fans who were pretty upset that Sam didn’t come home. For Bellisario, Sam’s mission in life was to leap through time, putting right what once went wrong. He’d keep on doing that. It’s his life’s work.

I haven’t seen every episode of the old show and so this one was a curveball. Sam has a daughter named Sammy Jo who he conceived during a leap (remember, it’s Sam’s body going through time, even though everyone sees him as his “host”). Apparently, this occurs in the episode Trilogy Part 1 (aired Nov 17, 1992), Part 2, and Part 3 (episodes 2 and 3 both aired on Nov 24, 1992). In a video clip from Part 3, Al says:

She has an IQ of 194. So she got her brains from her father.

According to the Quantum Leap wiki, Al tells Sam that Sammy Jo is doing fine in Al’s present. She’s a technician at Project Quantum Leap trying to find a way to bring Sam home. She doesn’t know Sam is her father. Sam tells Al he’ll never forget her.

Bellisario potentially considered a grown up Sammy Jo picking up her father’s mantle and leaping through time in some future sequel show. Ultimately though…

But I couldn’t have done it because Scott Bakula was so integral to the character and so important to the show that without him. I don’t think the show could have gone on.

That never happened in the sequel show and in fact, Sammy Jo is never mentioned again, as opposed to Al’s daughters (see the first season of the current show for details).

Interestingly enough, the current showrunners asked Bakula if he wanted to be involved and his very polite “no” gave us all a hint as to why he didn’t.

Bellisario envisioned Al always being at Sam’s side as he kept leaping. Actually…

Well, that’s an interesting question. What happened to Al? [laughing] I hadn’t thought what happened to Al. Dean Stockwell probably did. But I think Al would have been traveling along into the future along with him, would still be there as a sidekick. It would have to continue the storylines just as they had. Sam’s connection to Al was like an umbilical cord. I don’t think you could separate the two. Where Sam went Al would follow. Al wouldn’t pass away, it’s television.

Al wouldn’t pass away, but Dean Stockwell sadly did.

So did “Quantum Leap” as I indicated in my previous blog post. It was killed by the panderverse. Everything Bellisario wanted never happened. Instead, the show went completely off the rails and “pandered,” not to a different audience, but to a fantasy audience the writers and showrunners made up for themselves. It’s “Quantum Leap” in name only.

It would have been nice to see the sequel treated the way Bellisario rendered it in this video, but it was not meant to be. My guess is that NBC had other plans and Bellisario went along with it. Such a tragedy. At least we were given a taste of what might have been.

Go to the full video and watch it. Kind of like visiting an old friend one last time.