Ernie Hudson Says Quantum Leap‘s Magic ‘Would Love to Get’ Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett Back Home
In the original Quantum Leap series, which ran from 1989 to 1993 on NBC, Herbert “Magic” Williams (played by Christopher Kirby) was just a soldier in the Vietnam War when Samuel Beckett (Scott Bakula) leaped into him in the Season 3 episode “The Leap Home, Part 2 (Vietnam).”
Decades later, NBC’s upcoming revival — premiering Monday, Sept. 19 at 10/9c — now finds Magic (played by Ernie Hudson) heading up the rebooted Quantum Leap project with the hopes of understanding the mysteries behind the machine, and the man who created it.
“[Magic] spent pretty much all of his adult life in the military and found out about this project that had been shut down for a while, and worked hard to get it up and running,” Hudson tells TVLine. “He’s a guy who sees the potential of what it can do, not just for the government, but also for mankind. He really is excited about it.”
Everything changes when physicist Ben Song (Kevin Can F**k Himself‘s Raymond Lee) also makes an unauthorized jump through time, leaving the rest of his team wondering why he did it. His confused cohorts include Addison (Caitlin Bassett), a decorated Army vet who appears as a hologram only Ben can see and hear; Ian Wright (Cowboy Bebop’s Mason Alexander Park), who runs the Artificial Intelligence unit “Ziggy”; and Jenn Chou (Bosch’s Nanrisa Lee), who leads digital security for the project.
“[Ben’s jump] creates many complications,” Hudson notes, “just in terms of threatening the project.” Plus, Magic is the one who has to take the heat from his bosses at the Pentagon, who are invested in the project.
“Magic is in charge, but he’s also having to do a lot of dancing to make sure this thing stays afloat,” the actor adds. “And one of the things that was really important to Magic was Sam. He never made it back. He would love to get him back.” (Whether Bakula’s Sam Beckett will appear in the show remains to be seen, but the invitation is out there.)
And now that there’s another person in the throes of space and time, Hudson says that “the challenge is how do we control that? There’s a lot going on with [Magic].”
Since Sam learned he could jump where he wanted at the end won’t they be disappointed when/if they find him and he could have jumped home whenever he wanted and looking for him was a waste of their time. Or will have something else have gone wrong and Sam couldn’t anymore. Or will he have died in one of his jumps or actually finally wanted to retire and jumped into himself where he was happy and started a family
I think Sam arguably meeting god in the series finale may have reaffirmed that what he has been doing has been his purpose in life. I think depending on how religious you are if God gives you the thumbs up and tells you what a great job you’ve been doing you may just continue doing it.
I’m wondering if they’ll stick with canon from the original series, especially the fact that the displaced person’s consciousness was temporarily in Sam’s body while he was in theirs.
From something I read earlier Magic remembers being in the waiting room when Sam leapt into him, so they should be. It’s really the only way it makes sense to have Magic in charge.
That was my thought…they were conscious in his body when Sam leaped; but I didn’t think they remembered it. Was there some support group through the decades for people whose bodies were taken over and time traveled if they remembered being in the future? I always thought like Sam’s memory of his life and of the leaps he made before was somewhat hazy that those leapt into didn’t remember it. Because how would it affect all these people’s lives if they remembered there as a future time travel experiment going on? Butterfly affect and all that. But it would be a GIANT coincidence for Magic to end up heading the program and not have vague memories of anything. We shall see I guess.
I think the concept of a “support group” of former Leapees was floated in either the novels or the comic series, perhaps from a rejected episode idea. I think they even might have remembered Sam’s face in the mirror when they were in the Waiting Room.
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Whether or not Magic has memories from the Waiting Room, he might have been able to piece together information from Sam’s brother, Tom. And after Sam was “lost,” it’s possible Sammie Jo or even Donna approached him, trying to find some link to some way to find Sam.
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I do like the idea of a former Leapee being part of PQL 2.0. It would be interesting if everyone involved had been impacted by Sam’s Leaping thirty years ago, if not directly like Magic, then tangentially (i.e. grandparents, spouses, etc.). It would play to what God!Al said in the finale: “Do you really think that all you’ve done is change a few lives? At the risk of overinflating your ego, Sam, you’ve done more. The lives you’ve touched? Touched others! And those lives? Others! You’ve done a lot of good, Sam Beckett!” Aside from simply bringing Sam home at last, one of the most magical things they could do with the reboot is quietly assemble a team of people Sam helped in the past to bring him home in the future.
I think Sam was leaping around in time as himself and not inhabiting other people’s bodies. I think he was himself when he was talking to Beth teller her Al was alive and was coming home.
* talking to Beth telling her
The question is… what has become of Sam’s body all this time… does he have a place to return to?
S!@# you’re right. I never thought about that.
It’s been a while so I might be wrong but didn’t they say in the last episode that Sam’s body disappeared?
Actually, scratch that. I think they said there was no one in the waiting room at all. Sam was always in his own body.
Yeah, I think the TV show had Sam’s actual body leaping from time to time, taking on the “aura” of whomever he replaced.
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(There was a companion series of Quantum Leap novels, which for reasons unknown to me, had written it the other way around… in those, Sam’s “consciousness” leapt in time, while his body was left intact in the “waiting room.”)
Yeah, I think that was the first QL novel and it was so long ago that that bit is the only thing I remember from it. In the beginning, they hadn’t set the rules in stone yet. It wasn’t until a year or two into the show that they finally decided on what was actually happening to Sam. I think exec. prod. Deborah Pratt was the one who said they should do that as Don Bellisario was really not a sci-fi guy, as evidenced by his work on Battlestar Galactica :) .
But when Lee Harvey Oswald escaped and was on the run, wasn’t he in Sam’s body (i.e. seeing Sam’s face in the mirror)?
Well even in the Quantum Leap chamber the people from the past looked like Sam. And it makes sense that his body left but the (not so sensical) “aura” remained, because Sam could always do physically what he could do, not what the person he leapt into could. Still was strong as a man, knew his martial arts, etc.
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The question is if he continued leaping and fixing things after the last episode, where did the people he leaped into go if not the waiting room? Where were they displaced when he went in them? Were they both in there? Great question Lincoln.
Janitor: Hey Sammy I am home!
Sam’s body breaking down in chair in corner of a house:
Janitor: So this new guy is doing your old job. Guess were getting a mew roommate.
The series finale implied that Sam was now Leaping whole, i.e. body, mind, and soul. There was no one in the Waiting Room during the final leap, that’s why Al and Gooshie were trying to find him.
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It was then implied by God!Al that Sam could control his own Leaps, but that couldn’t have been the case. Sure, Sam’s next Leap was to tell Beth that Al was still alive, but he knew where he wanted/needed to go and what to put right. But from there, he’d basically be Leaping blind. So while Sam COULD Leap home at any time (for a “sabbatical,” as God!Al said), he can’t necessarily CONTROL the Leaps, he still has to be sent (by God/Fate/Time/Whatever) and guided (by Al).
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One of the implications of the final episode was that, by telling Beth about Al, Sam changed the timeline where Al may not have been part of Project Quantum Leap, and that paradox could be the reason he never came home. He could have been Leaping all these years without guidance of what needed to be fixed or the ramifications if he failed. Though it stands to reason that Al probably was still involved (there was a deleted scene that may or may not be canon that showed Al still looking for Sam), or that another Observer was with Sam if Al was removed from the current timeline.
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But if Sam WAS Leaping without an Observer, just being pointed by GFTW at things that needed to be put right, there’s a chance he failed somewhere along the line. The original show implied that, if Sam failed to put right what once went wrong, he’d be trapped in that body in the past, and the person he Leaped into would be trapped in Sam’s body in the future. If Sam was Leaping as himself, there wouldn’t be anyone lost to time as before, but if he were stuck in the past somewhere, he’d have to create a whole new life for himself.
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Or there’s the simple possibility that, in Leaping alone, Sam’s mind got so Swiss-cheesed that he forgot where and what “home” was. Without Al (or another Observer) to tether him back, Sam just knows he’s a time traveler doing good deeds…and maybe not even that. He’s lost himself in his mission. Which could account for the original PQL getting shut down and nobody from the original Project (i.e. Gooshie, Tina, Donna, Sammie Jo, or even Al) being involved in the literal reboot. They “lost” him.
Swiss cheese brain could cause Sam to become the evil “leaper” that he was dealing with during the final season of the show.
Wasn’t the Evil leaper thing just a rival project though? They had their own A.I.(But evil..) like Ziggy and everything. If ‘God’ was guiding Sam I think it was implied by the red aura that maybe the ‘Devil’ was guiding the evil leapers. I think they were also from the future too and not the same timeline as Sam and co.
The Evil Leaper project (run by someone or something called Lothos) could have captured Sam somewhere in time. The Leapers had to come into physical contact in order to see each other’s true face, so if one took Sam by surprise…
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It did feel a little contrived when the Evil Leapers were introduced, after four years of stand-alone anthology, but I also appreciated the effort to add some outer conflict. I could see Lothos returning in some form if the showrunners want there to be a recurring or overarching villain, or “mythology” for the reboot. The Evil Leapers could have also been behind the shutdown of PQL 1.0. And it would be a convenient reason for Sam never coming home, if he were captured or even stranded in the past.
Doubtful, though if Swiss-cheesed enough, or if just outright captured, it’s not a huge stretch to think Sam could’ve been forced to help them. Supposedly Ziggy was a one-of-a-kind hybrid computer, but the Evil Leapers had their own…
You know, I’ve never thought of the implications of the finale that way. I’ve always assumed that part of Sam’s decision in the finale was related to his string theory of time travel. According to Sam, a person’s life becomes a loop if the ends are tied together. Ball the loop up, and someone can go anywhere in time…as long as it’s generally within one’s lifetime. (I restated the theory in case someone wasn’t familiar with it.) As the time traveler keeps traveling, sooner or later, they would run into that knot. What happens then was anyone’s guess.
Anyways….
In the finale, Sam had the opportunity to cut the knot and unravel his ball of string when he jumped into the moment of his birth. That left a great deal of uncertainty as to what would happen if he decided to return home. On the one hand, he had no idea whether he would have a life–family, social, or even physical–to return to or what it would look like. (His ID showed that he was a little over 40 at that point.) On the other hand, he could erase his and PQL’s existence and undo all of the good he had done since he wouldn’t have been born. Correcting his mistake with Al and Beth, however, presented the least amount of damage to all of the lives he’s changed, the chance to keep PQL and–eventually–its memory alive far into the future, and some subconscious hope of Sam eventually returning home when God/Fate/Whoever decided it’s time. So, it made more sense to him to continue his life’s mission instead of attempting to return home right then and potentially losing everything.
That said, I can see your point about Sam leaping whole without a PQL Observer and with Swiss-cheese amnesia. I highly doubt that God/Al/Fate/Sam’s conscience would allow him to do too much damage to the timeline without a way for him to fix it. (That’s implied by Season 2’s finale and the series finale.) However, even if Sam’s leaps are a mixture of God’s/Fate’s/Time’s direction and Sam’s volition, the sheer number of combinations of people, places, and moments of his life are astronomical. He may or may not be lost, but his past and current whereabouts are certainly unknown.
The thing is if he was leaping as himself, how would he integrate himself into the problems in that timeline? Heck, without being someone else and having the computer to calculate (which even that wasn’t always right) how would he know what he was there to even fix? He couldn’t just say “I want to fix this thing” because it’d be his past and he wouldn’t know it was “wrong” to begin with.
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An open ended ending is leaving a lot of problems for a sequel show.
If he just appeared somewhere to fix a problem, he’d basically be like a lot of 80’s TV protagonists. Showing up as the stranger in town, getting involved with whatever was wrong, and trying to help. GFTW probably wouldn’t just plop him down on the outskirts of town to figure everything out on his own, or in the middle of a crowded grocery store to answer a lot of questions about what just happened. If it was all GFTW without an Observer, GFTW would probably provide some kind of a nudge towards whoever needed help.
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But you’re right, without an Observer to track the established history, Sam would be adrift with the potential to make things worse if he misjudged. It wouldn’t be deliberate, Sam was a good man with good intentions. But he could’ve still made mistakes. Presumably, had the show continued, he still would’ve had Al (or another Observer, but between the deleted scene that implied Al was still part of PQL, and the chemistry between Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, that might have been one potential paradox the show would have fudged for the good of the show). But the finale’s end tag implied otherwise, that Sam was “lost” in time and to PQL 1.0, either through a disconnect from Leaping alone as himself, or through some neferaious and mythology-building circumstances…
Getting Beckett home would be stellar.
This could be a great way yo fix the ending of the series. That was terrible, just having a sentence appear on screen saying he never found his way home.
Couldn’t Ben just “put right what once went wrong” in the original series with Sam never returning home? Obviously that ending can be “fixed.”
It’s a deal breaker!
Hrm. I might have to watch this. I mistakenly thought they were redoing the old series with just new people in the place of the original characters, which was rage-inducing. That’s what I get for assuming.
I know. I did the same thing. I blame all of the recent remakes for my mistake
I wish I’d have had time to watch season 3 so I’d be ready for it. Stalled out after finishing season 2. So close.
Oh well, I’ll pick up on things like that as I watch the rest of the seasons of the original and enjoy the reboot as it airs.
I recently discovered footage of the alternate ending (definitely look it up if you’re a fan of the original)and they should’ve included it when it aired. It features Al and Beth talking about Sam. It would’ve completed Al’s story a little more and they still could’ve put the “never went home” placard.
Can’t wait for this program. Ernie Hudson does a great job in everything he is a part of.