ANSWERS
TO COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT QUANTUM LEAP
ANSWERS
TO COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT QUANTUM LEAP
QUESTION #21:
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Don Bellisario and Scott Bakula have both offered the opinion that Al the Bartender in "Mirror Image" is in fact God, and the character did not deny this outright (although he did deny it in the script). Sam Beckett's own opinion was that Al the Bartender is G/T/W, but once again Sam failed to completely discount the Time/ Fate/Whatever part of the equation. |
As important as the identification of G/T/W as Al the Bartender (maybe)
is the revelation that Sam is in some sense controlling his own leaps. Whatever
or Whoever G/T/W is, I've always felt that Sam is essentially a willing pawn
in G/T/W's game, and would never want to undo the good he's done by preventing
that first leap. If he did, he would lose Donna, Tom, and Sammy Jo, and all
the people he's helped would no longer have been helped. I agree with Don
Bellisario, who in an early Q&A session once pointed to Sam's attitude
in the pilot after he got to talk to his Dad. As Sam says in that episode,
Quantum Leaping "isn't such a bad deal after all." Sam might be fed up at
times, and definitely wants to get home, but he still cares deeply about
what he's doing and the people he's helping. So if Sam ever does make it
to New Mexico in the mid-90's, he is unlikely to stop himself from leaping
in the first place, however much he may be tempted to do so. Even if Sam
accepts the idea that he can leap home whenever he accepts responsibility
for his leaps and chooses to do so, he's going to keep leaping anyway, at
least for a while longer. This is partly because he enjoys helping people,
partly because his altruism won't let him place his own needs ahead of those
of others, and partly because this is who Sam Beckett is now, far more than
the quantum physicist he was before he leaped. Quantum Leaping has become
his life's work.
Oh, and one more thought. If Al the Bartender is indeed God, then he is perfectly
capable of making arrangements as much as fifty years before Sam's arrival
in Cokeburg to people the town with names and faces that will be familiar
to Sam. That possibility works better for me than any suggestion that the
events in the tavern were not real or at best a subjective reality, real
only for Sam. How can Ziggy lock onto a subjective reality? Yet I think we
have to accept that the real Al did indeed show up at Al's Place. On the
other hand, guest stars on "Mirror Image" have mentioned a theory that the
Cokeburg PA in that episode was a mystical waystation through which real
people passed. Perhaps in some sense, Frank, Jimmy, and Moe Stein really
did make a stop at Al's Place.
If Sam is leaping himself around, where does G/T/W come in? The answer can
be found in the priest analogy Al the Bartender made. When and where Sam
leaps is controlled by G/T/W, just as when and where a priest is assigned
is controlled by a bishop. But how to solve the problems the priest finds
in that parish, whether to request a transfer or a sabbatical, and even whether
to quit entirely are all up to the priest. Sam has similar prerogatives and
responsibilities. G/T/W may choose the wrong that needs righting, but Sam
must decide how best to do it once he gets there. We've also seen Sam
successfully request a particular moment to leap ("What Price Gloria") and
a particular assignment (saving Tom in "Vietnam" and Al's marriage to Beth
in "Mirror Image"). And like the priest, even Sam can quit--but Sam is as
emotionally committed to helping others as the average priest is to his
respective calling, and neither is going to quit lightly or easily.
G/T/W is also quite capable of pulling Sam out of a leap in case of failure.
We've already seen it happen. In "Double Identity," Sam leaps out of Frankie
just as Frankie is in danger of getting killed by Don Geno, and leaps into
Don Geno instead. On the other hand, Sam didn't leap when he got Al killed,
but had to stick it out as Bingo until he managed to undo the "100% probability"
scenario. Perhaps the fact that Sam found a way to save Al after all justifies
G/T/W leaving him in what seemed like an impossible situation. The "Success
has nothing to do with leaping" premise mentioned in "A Leap For Lisa" and
"Lee Harvey Oswald" probably means that Sam doesn't leap until, win or lose,
he has no further recourse. In "Freedom," it can be argued that Sam
failed, because Joseph did not survive long enough to die on the reservation
as he wished. (Another few seconds and he would have made it, and the leap
would have been successful.) Sam had no further action to take in order to
try to set things right, so he leaped rather than being stuck there indefinitely
as a result of this possible failure.
Thanks to Steve Lazzar for the Bellisario quote, and to Adina Ringler for
her posted conversation with DPB.
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/12/97)
The handlink is the hand-held "computer remote" Al uses to access data from
Ziggy, talk to Gooshie, and operate the Imaging Chamber and its door. The
paperback-sized box of multicolored panels and flashing lights--or "rotten
pile of gummy bears" as Al once called it--is at least the fourth handlink
design in use at Project Quantum Leap. The one in the pilot episode was flat
and clear, like a futuristic calculator. The small, round black buttons on
it made a modest "beep" when pressed--or no beep at all. The second design,
introduced in "Double Identity," was still mostly clear but larger, in the
boomerang shape that was to become familiar in the third design. "Double
Identity" was meant to be the second episode but shown later, by which time
the third design had appeared. The handlink did not appear at all in the
second aired episode, "Star-Crossed."
The third design, used in the remaining first and second season episodes,
was similar to the second but less transparent, dark with winking buttons,
flashing multicolored lights and what appears to be a small liquid crystal
display screen for reading out data. This third handlink died at an inconvenient
moment during "The Great Spontini" (Season Three) and was replaced before
that leap ended with the now-familiar "gummy bear" design.
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The first handlink was small, |
The second was larger and |
And the third is the "rotten pile of |
Dean Stockwell has stated rather adamantly that he prefers the previous handlink
design to the multicolored version.
Please note that there may have been other modifications along with way,
but these are the changes large enough to detect by watching the episodes
carefully. Even so I may be wrong. For example, the "Lego" design may have
changed at least once, adding lights outside the flashing colored boxes.
The "gummi bear" design, reminiscent of Ziggy herself, does not seem to have
a data readout screen. Instead, the data is most likely holographically projected
to a point just above the handlink for Al to read. This is a logical supposition
considering that a) we've seen the handlink project holographic images in
"A Little Miracle" and elsewhere, and b) this would make it possible for
Al to read data that Sam can't see. We know from numerous episodes ("A Portrait
for Troian," "The Leap Back," etc.) that Ziggy and Gooshie can speak to the
Observer through the handlink (any version)-- and yet the leaper cannot hear
this, hearing only the handlink's characteristic bleeps and whines as the
Observer accesses data. The invisible data screen and the inaudible audio
link may be deliberate attempts to limit Sam's access to data that he "shouldn't"
have. Or maybe not. We also know that there are times when Sam or someone
else in Sam's time can see readouts (the answer to how to stop Fred at the
end of "Good Morning, Peoria") and projected data (dinosaurs in "Another
Mother").
If the above theory is correct, Al can indeed talk to Ziggy in the Imaging
Chamber--through the handlink. The reason we never hear this except
in "The Leap Back" is that as viewers we are generally shown only what Sam
experiences, since Sam is the viewpoint character. Early episodes are told
almost exclusively from Sam's pov, with relatively few scenes taking place
in his absence. Later on, especially after "The Leap Back," our point of
view widens to take in Al's side of the story more often than before (eg,
scenes in the Waiting Room). Since we usually only see and hear what Sam
sees and hears, we don't hear Ziggy because Sam doesn't hear Ziggy through
his neurological/holographic link with Al. But Al himself does hear Ziggy
through the handlink. And when Sam wears the wristlink in 1998, or holds
the handlink in the Imaging Chamber as he checks on Al, he can hear Ziggy,
too.
Al also hears Ziggy in his car in "Killin' Time," while using a just-recorded
CD-ROM of data downloaded from Ziggy for briefing purposes. From the natural
give-and-take of the dialogue between Al and Ziggy in this scene, it seems
likely that Ziggy, via handlink, was commenting "live" on the pre-recorded
data Al was accessing.
The handlink that Al was using in "Shock Theater" somehow physically leaped
with him to 1945 as seen in "The Leap Back," probably due to the massive
power discharge that precipitated the simo-leap. When Sam replaced Al as
Tom Jarret and then leaped himself, the handlink stayed in 1945. Sam used
a back-up handlink while home, and presumably Al uses either the same back-up
handlink or another one. Either way, all handlinks used from "The Leap Back"
through "Mirror Image" have been of the same colored boxes design.
It has been suggested that the handlink left behind in 1945 could have changed
history, since it almost certainly uses microchip technology. But since the
handlink didn't work 50 years before Ziggy existed--and since Al as Jarret
had called it useless--it seems likely that nobody in 1945 investigated it
closely enough to figure out what the microcircuitry was. There's also the
question of how well scientists could decipher technology that many years
ahead. If you gave Leonardo DaVinci a VCR (and no tv!), would he comprehend
what it was? I think not! This is a less extreme case, but even if the real
Tom Jarret gave it to the Pentagon, and they didn't say, "We didn't ask you
to evaluate anything," and throw it away, their scientist would see a
multicolored plastic box, filled with unlit lights and strange cards of plastic
and metal, covered with microscopic designs. And it doesn't even do
anything! There is no Ziggy to connect to, so there is no way to determine
what the microchips are supposed to do, or how they work. Nor has the scientist
any resources with which to reproduce the technology. That hasn't been invented
yet, either! So unless the guy is a well-funded super-genius, I think history
is safe from anachronistic breakthroughs in technology.
But suppose I'm wrong, and microchip technology gets started early. How would
that affect PQL? Not as much as you might think! Ziggy might be even more
amazing than she is now, but G/T/W would still have taken a hand in Sam's
experiment, and Sam would still be out there leaping around until he accepts
responsibility for his leaping and allows himself to leap home.
"Real world" aside: the handlink props included "working" models that lit
and non-working models that didn't, the latter being used for scenes in which
the handlink wasn't required to do anything. Some of the handlink props have
since been sold to lucky leapers at QL convention charity auctions, fetching
hundreds of dollars each.
(Thanks to Jackie Vansuch for restoring this "lost" CQ Answer to my archives.)
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/19/97)
A "kiss with history" is Don Bellisario's term for a historical event or
person with which Sam accidentally interacts. Kisses involving celebrities
are as follows:
Some event-oriented kisses with history are as follows:
Many others deal directly or indirectly with historical events and trends:
streaking and anti-war protests ("Animal Frat"), the civil rights movement
("The Color of Truth"), the U-2 incident ("Honeymoon Express" and "Lee Harvey
Oswald"), the Sylmar Earthquake of '71 ("A Portrait for Troian"), the Watts
riots ("Black On White On Fire"), the Cuban Missile Crisis ("Nuclear Family"),
etc., but these are more "context of the times" backdrops for the action
than actual "kisses." The first two lists of examples are more correctly
"kisses with history" than these others, because in a true "kiss with history"
Sam helps to precipitate the historical events. Still other episodes have
Sam "coining" anachronistic phrases ("nerd," "an offer I can't refuse" and
so on), but these hardly constitute kisses because a) we don't know whether
Sam's use of an expression was picked up and spread into general parlance,
b) Sam's changing reality is sufficiently different from ours that in
some cases we don't really know whether Sam's slang expressions are anachronistic
or not, and c) even if Sam did coin a phrase retroactively, it's hardly a
major contribution to history.
Deborah Pratt told us in a 1993 interview that when an episode had to be
cut for time, the kiss with history was usually the first thing to go. In
"A Single Drop of Rain," for example, the script calls for the piano player
at the picnic to be a young man named Jerry Lee, who is later berated with
the words "Goodness Gracious, great balls o'fire!" And in "The Driver," a
staff-written script (by Robert Wolterstorff) that was never filmed, Sam
suggests to Bartles & James that they add wine to their fruit coolers:
and is promptly thanked for his support.
What is the purpose of a kiss with history? The real-life purpose is
simple: it's mean to entertain, amuse, and/or provide historical ambiance
to a story. Within the context of the laws of quantum leaping, kiss
with history concept is a tricky one. As mentioned above, Sam usually
does not change history in a kiss so much as fulfill history. The whole
purpose of leaping is to "change history for the better," so what is the
point in suggesting lyrics to Buddy Holly, who, in our reality at least,
wrote "Peggy Sue" without Sam's help in the original history? What is the
point in showing the Heimlich maneuver to Dr. Heimlich, who in our reality
developed it on his own? How can Sam change history to what it is anyway?
(This, by the way, is precisely the problem that ruins my enjoyment
of the early issues of the Quantum Leap comics once published by
Innovation. They had Sam fulfilling history rather than changing it, which
betrays a profound lack of understanding or the basic premise of the show.)
Perhaps the answer lies in the tricky variation on the Quantum Leap
premise that Don Bellisario introduced in "Lee Harvey Oswald" when Sam saved
Jackie's life. In Sam's original history, Jackie died. In Sam's original
history, Marilyn Monroe didn't live long enough to make The Misfits.
So who is to say that Buddy Holly and Dr. Heimlich didn't need Sam's
help in the original history that Sam changed with his kiss? True, "Peggy
Sue" and the Heimlich maneuver to stop a person from choking must have been
invented even without Sam's help, or else Sam wouldn't know about them.
But perhaps by helping these people when he did, Sam helped them to
come into existence sooner and more easily. Buddy Holly might have
had more time to write hit songs because he wasn't busy trying to finish
that one he started back when he was a vet's assistant, and Dr. Heimlich
would have had an opportunity to start saving the lives of choking victims
sooner rather than later.
© 1992-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/13/97)
In considering these questions, it is important to keep in mind the order
of the episodes. Sam messed around with his own past (i.e. Donna) in the
second episode ever aired ("Star-Crossed"), with Al's reluctant help. It
was not "all right" for Sam to do this; he was breaking the rules
even then. Al actually got fired over it, but blackmailed his way back in.
In a choice between what Sam thinks is right and his love for his family,
his family tends to win, even though Sam generally gets stomped for it--his
father still dying and so on. Much as he cares about Al, changing Al's past
isn't as vital to Sam as helping Donna and his own family, and Sam's ethics
tend to hold unless he has an intensely personal stake in the situation.
So any further changing of Sam's own past is very much in keeping with Sam's
character, and not a "changing the rules" situation so much as Sam learning
that sometimes he can succeed and sometimes he can't (or can he?). In "M.I.A.,"
it became increasingly apparent to Sam that his attempts to keep Beth and
Dirk apart were doomed to failure. Every time Sam tried to keep Beth and
Dirk apart, G/T/W put them back together. So Sam concluded that keeping them
apart wasn't meant to be. Al himself had reached the same conclusion by the
time of "The Leap Home." Although Beth obviously missed Al and mourned his
probable death, she did not seem to consider her marriage to him all that
successful even before Al went M.I.A. Sam showed a lot of compassion for
Al, but once he knew who Beth was he couldn't jeopardize his real mission
to do what seemed impossible. For all Sam knew, Al staying with Beth might
have prevented Project Quantum Leap from ever happening, although we now
know from the end of "Mirror Image" that this was not the case.
Sam finding out that he can change some things and not others was the whole
point of "The Leap Home" and "Vietnam," taken as a whole. Equally significant
to this theme is the fact that "The Leap Home" was the next episode after
"M.I.A." "The Leap Home" showed that Sam can try to change history for himself
and fail, just as he couldn't ultimately help Al to stay married to Beth.
At the time of "The Leap Back," Sam believed--or wanted to believe--that
he was being rewarded for his efforts. Much as Al has given to Sam and the
Project, ultimately it's Sam whose whole life has been given over to putting
right what once went wrong. He deserves the occasional perk--and he usually
doesn't get it. Sam tried and failed to save his dad from a heart attack
and Katey from her first marriage. But in "Vietnam" he succeeded in saving
Tom--at a price. (Maggie's ultimately responsible for her own death, though.)
We don't really know what effect Tom's survival had on John and Katey Beckett,
or on Sam himself. The only thing we know for sure that Sam remembers is
that he personally saved Tom in Vietnam. In "Rebel Without a Clue," Sam mentions
that "I got him back," and in "Promised Land" he is thrilled to hear from
his family's neighbors about Tom's homecoming from Vietnam.
It's not that Sam is privileged and Al is not; it's that some things Sam
is meant to change and some he apparently can't. Al came to terms with this
in helping Sam to save Tom instead of his younger self. Until "Mirror Image,"
however, there really did seem to be a discrepancy in how much of Sam's past
has been changed compared to Al's. Perhaps this is fair, since Sam is the
one who is making the greatest personal sacrifice, adrift from his own life
and the people he loves. Al has had Tina (and now Beth), and his friends
and associates, and he can go home at night. Sam doesn't and can't. In
compensation Sam's gotten back the woman he loves (although he doesn't know
it and isn't with her), talked to his father repeatedly and told him that
he loves him, saved his brother and gotten the love and gratitude of hundreds
of former strangers along the way. By the time he's through (if ever!), Sam
may have fixed just about everything that's ever gone wrong in his life,
or at least come to terms with what he couldn't fix. Whether Sam ever gets
home or not, he's had "a wonderful life" in the Capra sense, with memories
of people and events he never would have experienced in the original history,
and the knowledge that he's done some good in this world. As Sam concluded
in the pilot, it's "not such a bad deal after all."
On the other hand, Al didn't get Beth back the first time, or keep his mother
from leaving (which is beyond the scope of Sam's lifetime anyway), get home
early from Vietnam, save his sister Trudy or see his father again. Al seems
to have come to terms with his memories of Vietnam, though, and Lisa didn't
die. Now he even has Beth, whereas Sam doesn't really have Donna because
he's not home and doesn't remember. I'd like to see Sam save Trudy eventually
in a Quantum Leap movie, but it may not be possible. As with Beth
(although we lucked out there), and the timing of getting out of Vietnam,
Trudy's survival would be such a fundamental change in Al's past that it
could endanger the very existence of the Project. If, for example, he had
to devote a lot of time to her care, Al might not have been able to go to
M.I.T., join the Navy, or go to Vietnam. He might never have met Beth, let
alone married her. Virtually everything we know about Al's adult life and
career could be wiped out, including heading up Star Bright, meeting Sam,
and fighting to get funding approved for Quantum Leap. On the other
hand, if Trudy became as self-sufficient as Jimmy appears to be, then Al
might have been free to pursue a career after all.
There may be another reason why Sam failed to save Al's marriage to Beth
in "MIA" only to succeed in "Mirror Image." Before "The Leap Home: Vietnam,"
before "Dr. Ruth" and "The Leap Back" and "A Leap For Lisa," Al wasn't
emotionally ready to make his marriage to Beth work over the long haul. Maybe
now he is, so G/T/W let it happen. Maybe Al has now earned that second chance.
Yeah, I know, the 1967-1973 Al hasn't, but even in that era he now has a
history in which Lisa lived and didn't reveal their relationship, and he's
potentially the Al who has matured a lot since Sam stepped into the Accelerator.
Yes, there's a lot of paradoxical memories to deal with, but nevertheless,
Al in the year 2000 has finally earned and gotten a revised past, and maybe
this time he didn't mess it up!
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It also seems unlikely that Sam is deliberately putting his own needs ahead
of Al's in this way. We know from "Trilogy" (and from an interview with Deborah
Pratt) that what Sam remembers, even about prior leaps, varies from leap
to leap. Sam may honestly not realize the parallel between changing Al's
past and changing his own. Also, Sam has no idea that his efforts in
"Star-Crossed" succeeded, even if he remembers that leap at all. As for Beth,
Sam doesn't even seem to recognize her name in "The Leap Home," indicating
that at that moment of that leap Sam's memory of Beth was hazy at best. Yet
in "Mirror Image," Sam remembered the situation with Beth all too well--and
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Some fans have suggested that in helping Al by leaping in to talk to Beth
at the end of "Mirror Image," Sam gave up his chance to go home. I think
that one has very little to do with the other. In changing Al's past so
radically, Sam could conceivably have endangered the existence of the Project,
but based on the script version of "Mirror Image" and comments by Don Bellisario,
we know that Sam lucked out and that didn't happen. As it turned out, helping
Al vs. going home was not an either-or situation, and the choice Sam made
between the two was more by way of deciding where to go next rather than
whether to go home at all. Now that he knew he could do it, Sam
felt a special responsibility to make up for having let Al down. Having done
this, Sam can now go home if he lets himself. But how can he deny the next
person his help, and the next? Sam finds it easier to believe that he "has
to" make the next leap and help the next person, and so that is exactly what
he continues to do, leap after leap. |
The other end of the "changing the rules" question concerns the Bellisario
Laws of Quantum Leaping, which have evolved over the course of the series.
In our reality, this was inevitable as each new story raised questions the
producers hadn't previously considered, and Don Bellisario reinterpreted
the rules to make the story work. On the other hand, many things about Leaping
that we learned only after many episodes had aired are concepts that Don
Bellisario had worked out very early on without mentioning them on the show.
An example of this is the infamous "body theory" which so many fans fought
against for so long. Don Bellisario said at the Hitchcock Theater screening
in 1991 that a mind-only leap "was never the concept," and yet Scott Bakula
himself was telling fans the opposite just six months earlier. As Deborah
Pratt remembers in a 1993 interview, "That was pretty well worked out in
the very very beginning. In the premise of the show, I mean very early on,
Don sat down and he and I talked, and he said he physically leaps. I said
'No, no, he can't physically leap.'
"He said, 'No he has to physically leap because then he won't be young and
he needs to be strong.' And we would get in huge, huge arguments. So he had
it very clearly set in his mind how quantum leaping worked."
All this has its parallel in Sam's reality, too. Aside from the gaps in Sam's
memory, Sam and Al undoubtedly know a lot about leaping that never made it
onto our tv screens. But Sam and Al never counted on the astonishing variety
of leaps and situations Sam's been in over a period of five years or so (Al's
time), nor on G/T/W's influence, nor on any number of other factors which
have little to do with physics equations on paper. Sam knows a lot more about
quantum leaping than he did that evening in 1995, and he's still learning.
Who knows what more Sam--and the viewers--may learn about quantum leaping
when he eventually leaps into a feature film?
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/13/97)
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We know from "Lee Harvey Oswald" that the Project is located in Stallions
Gate, New Mexico, but where exactly is that? Until very recently there were
two schools of thought on this question. Many fans, including Julie Barrett,
author of Quantum Leap A to Z, believe that Stallions Gate is near
Alamogordo in south central New Mexico. (The Los Alamos reference in Julie's
book instead of Alamogordo was the result of a proofreading error.) The main
basis for this locale is the comment by the "Other Tina" in the pilot: "You
know, that's about where they set off the first atomic bomb." The first atomic
bomb was set off near Alamogordo, according to most encyclopedias, although
that's a gross oversimplification of New Mexico geography, as we shall see
below.
However, until I finally visited the relevant parts of New Mexico in May,
1997, I favored another location for Stallions Gate: outside of Los Alamos
in northern New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project was
based, and a lot of the early atom-splitting and testing was actually carried
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Starting in 1943, Los Alamos was the home of the Atomic Research Laboratory
(now called the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory). The first atomic
bomb and the first hydrogen bomb were both produced there. Significantly
(or so I thought), Grolier's Encyclopedia says that the Manhattan Project's
weapons laboratory "was built on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, N.Mex."
Sound familiar? Los Alamos is not too far from Gallup New Mexico and Monument
Valley, Utah, an area littered with red rock mesas similar to those shown
in various episodes and saga cells. The fact that the Imaging Chamber is
in "a cavern somewhere" supports either local. Alamogordo is not in a red
rock are. Also, the zip code on Sam's driver's license (in Stallion Springs
NM) begins with 87...; it looks like 875... something to me. The zip code
for Alamogordo is 88310, whereas Los Alamos is 87544, making it probably
much closer to Stallion Springs (and by implication Stallions Gate) than
Alamogordo is. One further reference places the Project not too far from
Destiny, NM where Roberto Gutierrez works, but since Destiny is as nonexistent
on New Mexico maps in our reality as Stallions Gate, that's not terribly
helpful.
There's also a reference in the Quantum Leap Story Guideline to Sam
and Donna's first date taking place in Taos, which is considerably closer
to Los Alamos than to Alamogordo. However, this is significant only if Star
Bright was situated on or near the eventual site of Quantum Leap, and the
only evidence for that is the "Other Tina's" speculation in the pilot that
the secret government project near where the first bomb was set off had something
to do with "a deep space probe."
The above conclusions sounded pretty good to me until I had a chance to actually
explore New Mexico in May 1997. It didn't take long to find out that I'd
been wrong. As I soon learned on that trip, the northern approach to Trinity
Site, where the first atomic bomb was set off, is called Stallion Gate. Trinity
Site and Stallion Gate are over 80 miles from Alamogordo, but not too
far from Socorro, New Mexico (zip code: 87801), near the northern edge of
White Sands missile range. Access to Trinity Site via the Stallion Gate is
open to the public two days a year, on the first Saturdays in April and
October.
State route 380 runs from east to west along the northern boundary of White
Sands. It's a straight, lonely, two lane road. 53 miles west of the town
of Carrizozo (12 miles east of San Antonio, NM) is a green road sign labeled
Stallion Gate. This sign directs the traveler to a small southbound road,
NM 525, which leads to an area called Stallion Range Center. Trinity Site
is 17 miles south of the Stallion Gate, and 85 miles northwest of Alamogordo.
As one looks down route 380 near the 525 turnoff, toward the San Mateo and
Gallinas mountains, one can almost see Al's "experimental model" car speeding
toward destiny. This is undoubtedly the place where, in Don Bellisario's
mind and Quantum Leap's fictional reality, Al picked up the stranded
motorist in the series pilot.
According to a novel I purchased that weekend by Martin Cruz Smith (author
of Gorky Park) the name Stallion Gate predates the bomb site, although
I was unable to determine the name's origin. The title of the book, amazingly
enough, is Stallion Gate, and it's about love and intrigue at the
Manhattan Project in 1945.
Further north in the state of New Mexico is a scenic drive to Los Alamos,
headquarters of the Manhattan Project. This slow but beautiful journey leads
the intrepid traveler up state route 44 to route 4 and route 501, through
Pueblo Indian reservations marked by spectacular red rock mesas, steep curving
roads and finally a pine forest. At over 7000 foot elevation, seemingly in
the middle of nowhere (and well past the red rock mesas) isthe first of many
turnoffs to various buildings and research sections of the Los Alamos National
Scientific Laboratory. In between these research sites is the small city
of Los Alamos itself, on a remote plateau that was little more than a boy's
school when Dr. Robert Oppenheimer et al arrived there in 1942. This historic
locale is well worth visiting, but there is nothing there to suggest that
Project Quantum Leap could ever be headquartered there: no red rocks, no
lonely highway, and no place name with a stallion in it. If Project
Quantum Leap existed in our reality (which it doesn't!) it would be near
the road at Stallion Gate, not at Los Alamos.
Where does that leave us in our geographical placement of Project Quantum Leap? Clearly, the Stallions Gate mentioned in "Lee Harvey Oswald" is at or near the Stallion Gate east of San Antonio. The name discrepancy could refer to a distinct and highly secret place near Stallion Gate called Stallions Gate, or a colloquial misnomer used by Project staff (and Don Bellisario!). Alternatively (and this is my preferred theory), the Stallion Gate in what we prefer to think of as the "real world" is really called Stallions Gate in Sam and Al's fictional reality, just one of many minor variations between their reality and ours. In any case, the Project is not in a red rock area. This means that the shot of red rock mesas in the saga cell is exactly what it looks like: an aerial view of Monument Valley near the Arizona - Utah border. When "Dr. Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert," they probably flew over Monument Valley. As for Star Bright, it could still be at Stallions Gate, but only if Sam and Donna drove over 200 miles for their first date in Taos, or is the reference to that date in the Story Guideline is discounted as non-canonical since it was not mentioned on screen. Los Alamos is a more likely locale for Star Bright, being a town full of secret government research that's only about half as far from Taos at Stallion(s) Gate.
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"Led an elite group of scientists |
"...to form a top secret Project |
A later view of the Project, from |
Now that we know where the Project is, there's still the problem of what
it looks like, since views of it vary wildly in different seasons of the
series. Even so, there's no reason why the ultramodern white office building
in early saga cells, the electric mountain of "The Leap Back" and the flashing
mesa of "Lee Harvey Oswald" can't be different views of the same complex.
Each of the three eras show mesas, although in the "electric mountain" shot
they are harder to see because it's night time. Any changes made to the site
since 1995 can be no more than cosmetic, nor can the Project have been moved
to another site. For one thing, they could not afford to rebuild the Imaging
Chamber, the Waiting Room and the Accelerator Chamber, each with its own
complex equipment and built-in safeguards. For another, we've seen from "Killin'
Time" that it's dangerous to let the leapee out of the Waiting Room because
it affects Sam's ability to leap--so trying to move the operation elsewhere
would be incredibly dangerous. The third reason is that moving Ziggy would
involve down time for the hybrid computer, and they can't afford to do that
because they a) might lose data, and b) might need Ziggy at any given moment
to help Sam. In short, no way are they gonna move the Project!
Down ten levels from the surface outside where the cars are parked, as revealed
in "Killin' Time," is the Waiting Room, in which the leapee is sequestered.
From a description in the script to "The Leap Back" (and from Sam's comings
and goings in that episode), we know that the Waiting Room is adjacent to
three other crucial locations at the Project: the Imaging Chamber, the
Accelerator Chamber and the Control Room. The Imaging Chamber is the vast
underground cavern in which Al contacts Sam holographically via brainwave
transmissions. The Accelerator Chamber, from which Sam leaped in the pilot
and in "The Leap Back," is "a nuclear accelerator chamber," probably Sam's
variation on a particle accelerator (a device used to increase the energy
of electrically charged atomic particles). The Control Room is where Gooshie
operates the Project equipment from a colorful table-sized console that looks
like a giant handlink. The Control Room is also where Ziggy (or at least
Ziggy's primary voice interface) is.
A few further revelations concerning the Project's layout--and Ziggy in
particular--appear in the script version of "The Leap Back." Here's the quote
from Don Bellisario's script: "Sam stands near the perimeter of a circular
ceramic room with three exit tubes and an elevator. The tubes are marked:
Imaging Chamber, Waiting Room and Accelerator Chamber. The elevator leads
to the surface. The shimmering blue light is emanating from a glass sphere
floating without visible support above the center of the room. The sphere
is filled with living brain tissue immersed in a nutrient solution. THIS
IS ZIGGY." We didn't see any brain tissue, however, so it is possible that
the idea of Ziggy having a biological component may have been dropped. (Ashley
McConnell postulates something similar in the first QL novel, but the books
are not directly overseen by Don Bellisario as the show is and therefore
cannot be considered canonical.) Nevertheless, the physical layout of the
Project as described above seems to be borne out by what we've seen. Watch
"The Leap Back" carefully!
The script for "Mirror Image" mentions that Al has an apartment with Beth
on-site at the Project. It is not known whether or not Sam and Al have off-site
homes as well (Sam's home in "The Leap Back" is certainly within sight of
the white mountain), but the address on Sam's driver's license is a post
office box in Stallions Springs, presumably nearby. As best I can tell from
my researches, there is no Stallion Springs in our reality, so the name probably
refers to a mail drop at or near Stallions Gate--possibly even those postal
boxes I saw!
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (major revision 5/12/97)
In the mid-1980's, Sam and Al (and Donna before Sam got there) worked on
a secret government program called the Star Bright Project. From a comment
by the "other" Tina in the pilot, we think it may have had something to do
with a deep space probe, but it could also have been related to one or more
of the technologies later used in Project Quantum Leap. The latter theory
seems unlikely, however, for one important reason. From what Al has said
over the years, Sam seems to have been the genius behind every technological
innovation at Project Quantum Leap: hybrid computers (Sam designed Ziggy),
the Imaging Chamber (not built until Project Quantum Leap got its government
funding) and of course the Accelerator (Sam's bizarre variation on a standard
nuclear accelerator). Since Sam was only an employee of Star Bright--and
not one of the original staff at that--the earlier project's purpose probably
had little to do with the technological wonders Sam was later to design.
Some fans have speculated that Star Bright had something to do with learning
to communicate via "brainwave transmissions" between the neurons and mesons
of selected subjects. This is of course the means by which Sam and Al would
eventually communicate across time. The only problem with this theory is
that a neurological hologram needs and Imaging Chamber to function--and Star
Bright definitely didn't have one. Still, the possibility remains that Star
Bright could have helped to lay the groundwork for Project Quantum Leap
technology. At the very least, it gave Sam a paycheck while he developed
the string theory he and Professor Sebastian LoNigro had worked on years
before. On a personal level, there is no question that his Star Bright days
had a major impact on Sam. It was during this period that Sam met two of
the most important people in his life: Donna Elesee and Albert Calavicci.
In hiring Sam for Star Bright, Al gave Sam his "first break." But Sam didn't
actually meet Al until Sam started working on Star Bright and came across
Al drunkenly smashing a vending machine with a hammer because it ate his
change. Sam saw "a pretty terrific person" "underneath all that booze and
all that anger," and when the government wanted to fire Al from the Project
because of his drinking, Sam went to bat for Al, saving his job and helping
him get his life back together.
When Star Bright ended, Sam started Project Quantum Leap and brought Al in
on it. Al returned the favor by helping to convince the government nozzles
to fund Sam's experiments. Sam and Al have been helping each other ever since.
It is not yet known how much of the above history was changed when Sam saved
Al's marriage to Beth in "Mirror Image." Presumably they met on Star Bright
anyway, but it is quite possible (though by no means certain) that Al did
not have a drinking problem in the revised history. Perhaps Beth's presence
in the revised history helped Al to cope with his post-Vietnam readjustment
without crawling into a bottle. On the other hand, Al may still remember
the original history, at least vaguely. Those original experiences, remembered
or otherwise, almost certainly continue to have a major impact on the person
Al is today. More on this in another CQ Answer.
Despite Al's concerns at the time, there is no evidence that what Sam told
the Project Blue Book nozzles under truth serum in "Star Light, Star Bright"
had any bearing whatsoever on the later existence of the Star Bright Project
or Project Quantum Leap.
In several of the early episodes, Al wears a blue neon star pin, a motif
also found on the accelerator pedal and in the back window of his car in
the pilot episode. Gooshie also wears the star pin (on the shoulder of his
lab coat) in the pilot. It has been theorized that this was the Star Bright
logo, and that Gooshie therefore also worked on Star Bright.
According to the Quantum Leap Story Guideline (writer's "bible"), Sam and
Donna had their first date in Taos, New Mexico, which is not all that far
from Los Alamos. Since Donna had just left the Star Bright Project at the
time, and since Stallions Gate is also near Los Alamos, it 's possible that
Star Bright was located in or near the high security areas of the sprawling
Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, in the aforementioned comment
by the stranded motorist (the so-called "Other Tina") in the pilot, she mentions
a secret government project nearby that is "something to do with a deep space
probe." If Star Bright really did involve a deep space probe, this would
suggest that Project Quantum Leap is located near the site of Star Bright.
More on this in CQ Answer #27 below, about the location of Project Quantum
Leap.
The OTHER Star Bright Project was a fan cooperative spearheaded by Christina
Mavroudis which arranged for the Luncheon 2/29/92 (Leap Day) in honor of
Dean Stockwell's new Star that day on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The whole
Leap Day phenomenon of the Star, the ceremony when Dean got it, and the luncheon
afterwards came about through the efforts of fans from around the country,
who raised money for the Star by recycling.
© 1992-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/12/97)
QUESTION #22:
HOW AND WHEN DID SAM START LEAPING?
by Karen Funk Blocher
In 1984, quantum physicist Dr. Sam Beckett was hired sight unseen by
ex-astronaut, ex-MIA Albert Calavicci to work on a secret government project
called Star Bright (see CQ Answer 21). Even then, Sam had been working for
many years on a string theory of time travel, which postulated that a person
could travel within his or her own lifetime. (Sam initially developed this
theory in the summer of 1973 in partnership with his college mentor, Professor
Sebastian LoNigro of MIT.) Years later, Sam brought Al--now an Admiral--in
on his own government project, Project Quantum Leap. Al helped to convince
the government nozzles that Sam's time travel theories weren't crazy, and
was probably instrumental in getting Sam the funding he needed.
Even so, Sam was on the verge of losing funding when, in 1995, he "stepped
into the Accelerator" and leaped for the first time. While Al was away from
the Project complex (driving somewhere wearing a tux), Sam powered up the
Quantum Leap Accelerator and leaped, much to the dismay of Gooshie, head
programmer to Sam's hybrid computer Ziggy.
Sam woke up in 1956 looking like Tom Stratton, Air Force test pilot, while
Tom leaped to the Project's Waiting Room in 1995. But Sam's memory was
"Swiss-cheesed" by the leap. He couldn't remember who Al was or even his
own last name. But he knew he wasn't Tom Stratton, and he sure as heck didn't
know how to fly an X-2!
Al eventually told Sam that he was part of an experiment that went "a little
kaa-kaa" (sic). They hadn't been able to retrieve him back to 1995. Al was
still back in 1995, contacting Sam via "brainwave transmissions" designed
around Sam and Al's respective "brainwave patterns." Al was in an underground
Imaging Chamber, which transmitted a two-way "neurological hologram," "created
by a subatomic agitation of carbon quarks tuned to the mesons of my optic
and otic neurons," as Sam put it in the pilot episode (retitled "Genesis"
in its 90-minute NBC rerun). Sam and everything around him was a hologram
to Al and vice-versa.
Sam leaped in 1995, expecting that they would be able to retrieve him right
away. But it didn't work out that way. When the hybrid computer Ziggy tried
to retrieve him, it didn't work. The theory was that Sam couldn't get home
because "God, Time, or Whatever's leaping me around" had taken control of
Sam's experiment, putting him in people's lives to "put right what once went
wrong." However, Al the Bartender in "Mirror Image," who may well be God,
Time, Fate or Whatever (often abbreviated as G/T/W or GTFW), claims that
Sam is essentially controlling his own leaps. Sam hasn't been getting home
because he won't allow himself to do so, subconsciously choosing instead
to continue to help others. Basically, this works like Al the Bartender's
priest analogy: G/T/W chooses the assignments, just as a bishop does. But
like the priest, it's up to Sam to decide how to handle each assignment,
or whether to quit entirely.
Meanwhile, Sam continues to suffer from large holes in his memory, although
he's been gradually regaining those memories in the nearly five years (Al's
time) since he first leaped. He also loses little bits of memory with each
new leap, as St. John points out in "A Leap For Lisa." The most important
thing that Sam doesn't remember is that he's married, and his wife, Donna,
won't let Al reveal this to Sam. The main reason Sam doesn't remember Donna
is that they weren't married until Sam successfully changed Donna's past
in one of his early leaps. (More on this in the CQ Answers in Part Eight.)
A note on the dating of the first leap: although the Quantum Leap Story Guideline
(writer's "bible") says that "We know the experiment began in 1995," the
year 1995 is not directly mentioned in the pilot episode, and a reference
to "forty years" comes out as approximately 1996. However, interviews, the
Guideline and a contemporary NBC promo placed the first leap in 1995, a date
which was finally confirmed in the fifth season episode "Killin' Time." In
that episode, Sam says, "In 1995 I created a secret government project called
Quantum Leap." The fact that Al was at a basketball playoff game involving
the Lakers on the third night after Sam's leap-in places the leap date sometime
between about April 27th and May 8th 1995, based on the 1995 NBA playoff
schedule in "our" reality.
© 1992-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/12/97)
G/T/W (also known as GTFW, especially in recent years) is an abbreviation
for "God, or Time, or Fate, or Whoever's [or "Whatever's"] leaping me around,"
as Sam says in one form or another in several different episodes. The "Unknown
Force," as he/she/it is called in the saga cell, is now more or less identified
as God. But despite a few such speculations by Sam and/or Al (notably in
"Honeymoon Express"), there are enough "G/T/W" type references to imply that
Sam (and Don Bellisario) generally haven't willing to make a final,
no-way-out-of-it determination that God--either a specific Christian
interpretation or a more vaguely defined concept--is responsible for leaping
Sam around in time. However, "The Boogieman," "It's a Wonderful Leap" and
"Deliver Us From Evil" all strongly imply the Judeo-Christian God is involved,
along with at least one alleged "angel" as His agent and a personified Devil
as His antithesis.
Donald Bellisario has been quoted as saying, "When I started this show, I
said 'God or fate or time is leaping Sam,' and I was told by a lot of people,
'You can't say it's God leaping him around because it will turn a lot of
people off.' When we did the research, something like 40 percent of the people
said it would turn them off to the show because it implies that the show
would be preachy." Ironically, other series during and after Quantum
Leap, notably Highway to Heaven and Touched By An Angel,
have successfully incorporated an overtly religious premise (i.e. angels)
into their programs. On the other hand, television history is littered
with short-lived attempts at tv series that featured God, angels,
deceased-humans-as-angels, St. Peter and so on. It is also true that
many Leapers, myself among them, would have been less enthused with Quantum
Leap had the "unknown force" eventually mentioned in the saga cell been
firmly established from the outset as God, period.
The Whoever/Whatever possibility has been speculated to be everything from
a personified Fate (as mentioned on the show), or more specifically the
character known as Al the Bartender from "Mirror Image," to Sam Beckett's
own subconscious; or, more cynically but quite true, as Donald P. Bellisario
himself. As the show's creator and executive producer, Don Bellisario
was and is as close to being the show's "auteur" in the cinematic sense as
is possible for television. As such, he is the real-world "unknown
force" driving Sam from destination to destination. Al the Bartender (whose
bar is based on the one owned by Don Bellisario's father many years ago)
is a likely spokesman for Don's view of what is "really" going on with Sam's
leaping.
If this is the case (and it almost certainly is), then the subconscious idea
mentioned above is half-true, in conjunction with the still-unnamed "unknown
force." In "Mirror Image, " Al the Bartender claims that Sam is in
fact leaping himself around, and can go home whenever he accepts this truth
and chooses to do so. As long as Sam continues to put the needs of others
ahead of his own desires, he will never return home. But even though Sam
has a choice in whether he continues to leap, it is apparent that there is
also a G/T/W helping to direct when and where Sam leaps, and occasionally
lending a hand once Sam gets there (as in "A Single Drop of Rain" for example).
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Don Bellisario and Scott Bakula have both offered the opinion that Al the Bartender in "Mirror Image" is in fact God, and the character did not deny this outright (although he did deny it in the script). Sam Beckett's own opinion was that Al the Bartender is G/T/W, but once again Sam failed to completely discount the Time/ Fate/Whatever part of the equation. |
As important as the identification of G/T/W as Al the Bartender (maybe)
is the revelation that Sam is in some sense controlling his own leaps. Whatever
or Whoever G/T/W is, I've always felt that Sam is essentially a willing pawn
in G/T/W's game, and would never want to undo the good he's done by preventing
that first leap. If he did, he would lose Donna, Tom, and Sammy Jo, and all
the people he's helped would no longer have been helped. I agree with Don
Bellisario, who in an early Q&A session once pointed to Sam's attitude
in the pilot after he got to talk to his Dad. As Sam says in that episode,
Quantum Leaping "isn't such a bad deal after all." Sam might be fed up at
times, and definitely wants to get home, but he still cares deeply about
what he's doing and the people he's helping. So if Sam ever does make it
to New Mexico in the mid-90's, he is unlikely to stop himself from leaping
in the first place, however much he may be tempted to do so. Even if Sam
accepts the idea that he can leap home whenever he accepts responsibility
for his leaps and chooses to do so, he's going to keep leaping anyway, at
least for a while longer. This is partly because he enjoys helping people,
partly because his altruism won't let him place his own needs ahead of those
of others, and partly because this is who Sam Beckett is now, far more than
the quantum physicist he was before he leaped. Quantum Leaping has become
his life's work.
Oh, and one more thought. If Al the Bartender is indeed God, then he is perfectly
capable of making arrangements as much as fifty years before Sam's arrival
in Cokeburg to people the town with names and faces that will be familiar
to Sam. That possibility works better for me than any suggestion that the
events in the tavern were not real or at best a subjective reality, real
only for Sam. How can Ziggy lock onto a subjective reality? Yet I think we
have to accept that the real Al did indeed show up at Al's Place. On the
other hand, guest stars on "Mirror Image" have mentioned a theory that the
Cokeburg PA in that episode was a mystical waystation through which real
people passed. Perhaps in some sense, Frank, Jimmy, and Moe Stein really
did make a stop at Al's Place.
If Sam is leaping himself around, where does G/T/W come in? The answer can
be found in the priest analogy Al the Bartender made. When and where Sam
leaps is controlled by G/T/W, just as when and where a priest is assigned
is controlled by a bishop. But how to solve the problems the priest finds
in that parish, whether to request a transfer or a sabbatical, and even whether
to quit entirely are all up to the priest. Sam has similar prerogatives and
responsibilities. G/T/W may choose the wrong that needs righting, but Sam
must decide how best to do it once he gets there. We've also seen Sam
successfully request a particular moment to leap ("What Price Gloria") and
a particular assignment (saving Tom in "Vietnam" and Al's marriage to Beth
in "Mirror Image"). And like the priest, even Sam can quit--but Sam is as
emotionally committed to helping others as the average priest is to his
respective calling, and neither is going to quit lightly or easily.
G/T/W is also quite capable of pulling Sam out of a leap in case of failure.
We've already seen it happen. In "Double Identity," Sam leaps out of Frankie
just as Frankie is in danger of getting killed by Don Geno, and leaps into
Don Geno instead. On the other hand, Sam didn't leap when he got Al killed,
but had to stick it out as Bingo until he managed to undo the "100% probability"
scenario. Perhaps the fact that Sam found a way to save Al after all justifies
G/T/W leaving him in what seemed like an impossible situation. The "Success
has nothing to do with leaping" premise mentioned in "A Leap For Lisa" and
"Lee Harvey Oswald" probably means that Sam doesn't leap until, win or lose,
he has no further recourse. In "Freedom," it can be argued that Sam
failed, because Joseph did not survive long enough to die on the reservation
as he wished. (Another few seconds and he would have made it, and the leap
would have been successful.) Sam had no further action to take in order to
try to set things right, so he leaped rather than being stuck there indefinitely
as a result of this possible failure.
Thanks to Steve Lazzar for the Bellisario quote, and to Adina Ringler for
her posted conversation with DPB.
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/12/97)
The handlink is the hand-held "computer remote" Al uses to access data from
Ziggy, talk to Gooshie, and operate the Imaging Chamber and its door. The
paperback-sized box of multicolored panels and flashing lights--or "rotten
pile of gummy bears" as Al once called it--is at least the fourth handlink
design in use at Project Quantum Leap. The one in the pilot episode was flat
and clear, like a futuristic calculator. The small, round black buttons on
it made a modest "beep" when pressed--or no beep at all. The second design,
introduced in "Double Identity," was still mostly clear but larger, in the
boomerang shape that was to become familiar in the third design. "Double
Identity" was meant to be the second episode but shown later, by which time
the third design had appeared. The handlink did not appear at all in the
second aired episode, "Star-Crossed."
The third design, used in the remaining first and second season episodes,
was similar to the second but less transparent, dark with winking buttons,
flashing multicolored lights and what appears to be a small liquid crystal
display screen for reading out data. This third handlink died at an inconvenient
moment during "The Great Spontini" (Season Three) and was replaced before
that leap ended with the now-familiar "gummy bear" design.
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The first handlink was small, |
The second was larger and |
And the third is the "rotten pile of |
Dean Stockwell has stated rather adamantly that he prefers the previous handlink
design to the multicolored version.
Please note that there may have been other modifications along with way,
but these are the changes large enough to detect by watching the episodes
carefully. Even so I may be wrong. For example, the "Lego" design may have
changed at least once, adding lights outside the flashing colored boxes.
The "gummi bear" design, reminiscent of Ziggy herself, does not seem to have
a data readout screen. Instead, the data is most likely holographically projected
to a point just above the handlink for Al to read. This is a logical supposition
considering that a) we've seen the handlink project holographic images in
"A Little Miracle" and elsewhere, and b) this would make it possible for
Al to read data that Sam can't see. We know from numerous episodes ("A Portrait
for Troian," "The Leap Back," etc.) that Ziggy and Gooshie can speak to the
Observer through the handlink (any version)-- and yet the leaper cannot hear
this, hearing only the handlink's characteristic bleeps and whines as the
Observer accesses data. The invisible data screen and the inaudible audio
link may be deliberate attempts to limit Sam's access to data that he "shouldn't"
have. Or maybe not. We also know that there are times when Sam or someone
else in Sam's time can see readouts (the answer to how to stop Fred at the
end of "Good Morning, Peoria") and projected data (dinosaurs in "Another
Mother").
If the above theory is correct, Al can indeed talk to Ziggy in the Imaging
Chamber--through the handlink. The reason we never hear this except
in "The Leap Back" is that as viewers we are generally shown only what Sam
experiences, since Sam is the viewpoint character. Early episodes are told
almost exclusively from Sam's pov, with relatively few scenes taking place
in his absence. Later on, especially after "The Leap Back," our point of
view widens to take in Al's side of the story more often than before (eg,
scenes in the Waiting Room). Since we usually only see and hear what Sam
sees and hears, we don't hear Ziggy because Sam doesn't hear Ziggy through
his neurological/holographic link with Al. But Al himself does hear Ziggy
through the handlink. And when Sam wears the wristlink in 1998, or holds
the handlink in the Imaging Chamber as he checks on Al, he can hear Ziggy,
too.
Al also hears Ziggy in his car in "Killin' Time," while using a just-recorded
CD-ROM of data downloaded from Ziggy for briefing purposes. From the natural
give-and-take of the dialogue between Al and Ziggy in this scene, it seems
likely that Ziggy, via handlink, was commenting "live" on the pre-recorded
data Al was accessing.
The handlink that Al was using in "Shock Theater" somehow physically leaped
with him to 1945 as seen in "The Leap Back," probably due to the massive
power discharge that precipitated the simo-leap. When Sam replaced Al as
Tom Jarret and then leaped himself, the handlink stayed in 1945. Sam used
a back-up handlink while home, and presumably Al uses either the same back-up
handlink or another one. Either way, all handlinks used from "The Leap Back"
through "Mirror Image" have been of the same colored boxes design.
It has been suggested that the handlink left behind in 1945 could have changed
history, since it almost certainly uses microchip technology. But since the
handlink didn't work 50 years before Ziggy existed--and since Al as Jarret
had called it useless--it seems likely that nobody in 1945 investigated it
closely enough to figure out what the microcircuitry was. There's also the
question of how well scientists could decipher technology that many years
ahead. If you gave Leonardo DaVinci a VCR (and no tv!), would he comprehend
what it was? I think not! This is a less extreme case, but even if the real
Tom Jarret gave it to the Pentagon, and they didn't say, "We didn't ask you
to evaluate anything," and throw it away, their scientist would see a
multicolored plastic box, filled with unlit lights and strange cards of plastic
and metal, covered with microscopic designs. And it doesn't even do
anything! There is no Ziggy to connect to, so there is no way to determine
what the microchips are supposed to do, or how they work. Nor has the scientist
any resources with which to reproduce the technology. That hasn't been invented
yet, either! So unless the guy is a well-funded super-genius, I think history
is safe from anachronistic breakthroughs in technology.
But suppose I'm wrong, and microchip technology gets started early. How would
that affect PQL? Not as much as you might think! Ziggy might be even more
amazing than she is now, but G/T/W would still have taken a hand in Sam's
experiment, and Sam would still be out there leaping around until he accepts
responsibility for his leaping and allows himself to leap home.
"Real world" aside: the handlink props included "working" models that lit
and non-working models that didn't, the latter being used for scenes in which
the handlink wasn't required to do anything. Some of the handlink props have
since been sold to lucky leapers at QL convention charity auctions, fetching
hundreds of dollars each.
(Thanks to Jackie Vansuch for restoring this "lost" CQ Answer to my archives.)
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/19/97)
A "kiss with history" is Don Bellisario's term for a historical event or
person with which Sam accidentally interacts. Kisses involving celebrities
are as follows:
Some event-oriented kisses with history are as follows:
Many others deal directly or indirectly with historical events and trends:
streaking and anti-war protests ("Animal Frat"), the civil rights movement
("The Color of Truth"), the U-2 incident ("Honeymoon Express" and "Lee Harvey
Oswald"), the Sylmar Earthquake of '71 ("A Portrait for Troian"), the Watts
riots ("Black On White On Fire"), the Cuban Missile Crisis ("Nuclear Family"),
etc., but these are more "context of the times" backdrops for the action
than actual "kisses." The first two lists of examples are more correctly
"kisses with history" than these others, because in a true "kiss with history"
Sam helps to precipitate the historical events. Still other episodes have
Sam "coining" anachronistic phrases ("nerd," "an offer I can't refuse" and
so on), but these hardly constitute kisses because a) we don't know whether
Sam's use of an expression was picked up and spread into general parlance,
b) Sam's changing reality is sufficiently different from ours that in
some cases we don't really know whether Sam's slang expressions are anachronistic
or not, and c) even if Sam did coin a phrase retroactively, it's hardly a
major contribution to history.
Deborah Pratt told us in a 1993 interview that when an episode had to be
cut for time, the kiss with history was usually the first thing to go. In
"A Single Drop of Rain," for example, the script calls for the piano player
at the picnic to be a young man named Jerry Lee, who is later berated with
the words "Goodness Gracious, great balls o'fire!" And in "The Driver," a
staff-written script (by Robert Wolterstorff) that was never filmed, Sam
suggests to Bartles & James that they add wine to their fruit coolers:
and is promptly thanked for his support.
What is the purpose of a kiss with history? The real-life purpose is
simple: it's mean to entertain, amuse, and/or provide historical ambiance
to a story. Within the context of the laws of quantum leaping, kiss
with history concept is a tricky one. As mentioned above, Sam usually
does not change history in a kiss so much as fulfill history. The whole
purpose of leaping is to "change history for the better," so what is the
point in suggesting lyrics to Buddy Holly, who, in our reality at least,
wrote "Peggy Sue" without Sam's help in the original history? What is the
point in showing the Heimlich maneuver to Dr. Heimlich, who in our reality
developed it on his own? How can Sam change history to what it is anyway?
(This, by the way, is precisely the problem that ruins my enjoyment
of the early issues of the Quantum Leap comics once published by
Innovation. They had Sam fulfilling history rather than changing it, which
betrays a profound lack of understanding or the basic premise of the show.)
Perhaps the answer lies in the tricky variation on the Quantum Leap
premise that Don Bellisario introduced in "Lee Harvey Oswald" when Sam saved
Jackie's life. In Sam's original history, Jackie died. In Sam's original
history, Marilyn Monroe didn't live long enough to make The Misfits.
So who is to say that Buddy Holly and Dr. Heimlich didn't need Sam's
help in the original history that Sam changed with his kiss? True, "Peggy
Sue" and the Heimlich maneuver to stop a person from choking must have been
invented even without Sam's help, or else Sam wouldn't know about them.
But perhaps by helping these people when he did, Sam helped them to
come into existence sooner and more easily. Buddy Holly might have
had more time to write hit songs because he wasn't busy trying to finish
that one he started back when he was a vet's assistant, and Dr. Heimlich
would have had an opportunity to start saving the lives of choking victims
sooner rather than later.
© 1992-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/13/97)
In considering these questions, it is important to keep in mind the order
of the episodes. Sam messed around with his own past (i.e. Donna) in the
second episode ever aired ("Star-Crossed"), with Al's reluctant help. It
was not "all right" for Sam to do this; he was breaking the rules
even then. Al actually got fired over it, but blackmailed his way back in.
In a choice between what Sam thinks is right and his love for his family,
his family tends to win, even though Sam generally gets stomped for it--his
father still dying and so on. Much as he cares about Al, changing Al's past
isn't as vital to Sam as helping Donna and his own family, and Sam's ethics
tend to hold unless he has an intensely personal stake in the situation.
So any further changing of Sam's own past is very much in keeping with Sam's
character, and not a "changing the rules" situation so much as Sam learning
that sometimes he can succeed and sometimes he can't (or can he?). In "M.I.A.,"
it became increasingly apparent to Sam that his attempts to keep Beth and
Dirk apart were doomed to failure. Every time Sam tried to keep Beth and
Dirk apart, G/T/W put them back together. So Sam concluded that keeping them
apart wasn't meant to be. Al himself had reached the same conclusion by the
time of "The Leap Home." Although Beth obviously missed Al and mourned his
probable death, she did not seem to consider her marriage to him all that
successful even before Al went M.I.A. Sam showed a lot of compassion for
Al, but once he knew who Beth was he couldn't jeopardize his real mission
to do what seemed impossible. For all Sam knew, Al staying with Beth might
have prevented Project Quantum Leap from ever happening, although we now
know from the end of "Mirror Image" that this was not the case.
Sam finding out that he can change some things and not others was the whole
point of "The Leap Home" and "Vietnam," taken as a whole. Equally significant
to this theme is the fact that "The Leap Home" was the next episode after
"M.I.A." "The Leap Home" showed that Sam can try to change history for himself
and fail, just as he couldn't ultimately help Al to stay married to Beth.
At the time of "The Leap Back," Sam believed--or wanted to believe--that
he was being rewarded for his efforts. Much as Al has given to Sam and the
Project, ultimately it's Sam whose whole life has been given over to putting
right what once went wrong. He deserves the occasional perk--and he usually
doesn't get it. Sam tried and failed to save his dad from a heart attack
and Katey from her first marriage. But in "Vietnam" he succeeded in saving
Tom--at a price. (Maggie's ultimately responsible for her own death, though.)
We don't really know what effect Tom's survival had on John and Katey Beckett,
or on Sam himself. The only thing we know for sure that Sam remembers is
that he personally saved Tom in Vietnam. In "Rebel Without a Clue," Sam mentions
that "I got him back," and in "Promised Land" he is thrilled to hear from
his family's neighbors about Tom's homecoming from Vietnam.
It's not that Sam is privileged and Al is not; it's that some things Sam
is meant to change and some he apparently can't. Al came to terms with this
in helping Sam to save Tom instead of his younger self. Until "Mirror Image,"
however, there really did seem to be a discrepancy in how much of Sam's past
has been changed compared to Al's. Perhaps this is fair, since Sam is the
one who is making the greatest personal sacrifice, adrift from his own life
and the people he loves. Al has had Tina (and now Beth), and his friends
and associates, and he can go home at night. Sam doesn't and can't. In
compensation Sam's gotten back the woman he loves (although he doesn't know
it and isn't with her), talked to his father repeatedly and told him that
he loves him, saved his brother and gotten the love and gratitude of hundreds
of former strangers along the way. By the time he's through (if ever!), Sam
may have fixed just about everything that's ever gone wrong in his life,
or at least come to terms with what he couldn't fix. Whether Sam ever gets
home or not, he's had "a wonderful life" in the Capra sense, with memories
of people and events he never would have experienced in the original history,
and the knowledge that he's done some good in this world. As Sam concluded
in the pilot, it's "not such a bad deal after all."
On the other hand, Al didn't get Beth back the first time, or keep his mother
from leaving (which is beyond the scope of Sam's lifetime anyway), get home
early from Vietnam, save his sister Trudy or see his father again. Al seems
to have come to terms with his memories of Vietnam, though, and Lisa didn't
die. Now he even has Beth, whereas Sam doesn't really have Donna because
he's not home and doesn't remember. I'd like to see Sam save Trudy eventually
in a Quantum Leap movie, but it may not be possible. As with Beth
(although we lucked out there), and the timing of getting out of Vietnam,
Trudy's survival would be such a fundamental change in Al's past that it
could endanger the very existence of the Project. If, for example, he had
to devote a lot of time to her care, Al might not have been able to go to
M.I.T., join the Navy, or go to Vietnam. He might never have met Beth, let
alone married her. Virtually everything we know about Al's adult life and
career could be wiped out, including heading up Star Bright, meeting Sam,
and fighting to get funding approved for Quantum Leap. On the other
hand, if Trudy became as self-sufficient as Jimmy appears to be, then Al
might have been free to pursue a career after all.
There may be another reason why Sam failed to save Al's marriage to Beth
in "MIA" only to succeed in "Mirror Image." Before "The Leap Home: Vietnam,"
before "Dr. Ruth" and "The Leap Back" and "A Leap For Lisa," Al wasn't
emotionally ready to make his marriage to Beth work over the long haul. Maybe
now he is, so G/T/W let it happen. Maybe Al has now earned that second chance.
Yeah, I know, the 1967-1973 Al hasn't, but even in that era he now has a
history in which Lisa lived and didn't reveal their relationship, and he's
potentially the Al who has matured a lot since Sam stepped into the Accelerator.
Yes, there's a lot of paradoxical memories to deal with, but nevertheless,
Al in the year 2000 has finally earned and gotten a revised past, and maybe
this time he didn't mess it up!
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It also seems unlikely that Sam is deliberately putting his own needs ahead
of Al's in this way. We know from "Trilogy" (and from an interview with Deborah
Pratt) that what Sam remembers, even about prior leaps, varies from leap
to leap. Sam may honestly not realize the parallel between changing Al's
past and changing his own. Also, Sam has no idea that his efforts in
"Star-Crossed" succeeded, even if he remembers that leap at all. As for Beth,
Sam doesn't even seem to recognize her name in "The Leap Home," indicating
that at that moment of that leap Sam's memory of Beth was hazy at best. Yet
in "Mirror Image," Sam remembered the situation with Beth all too well--and
did something about it. |
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Some fans have suggested that in helping Al by leaping in to talk to Beth
at the end of "Mirror Image," Sam gave up his chance to go home. I think
that one has very little to do with the other. In changing Al's past so
radically, Sam could conceivably have endangered the existence of the Project,
but based on the script version of "Mirror Image" and comments by Don Bellisario,
we know that Sam lucked out and that didn't happen. As it turned out, helping
Al vs. going home was not an either-or situation, and the choice Sam made
between the two was more by way of deciding where to go next rather than
whether to go home at all. Now that he knew he could do it, Sam
felt a special responsibility to make up for having let Al down. Having done
this, Sam can now go home if he lets himself. But how can he deny the next
person his help, and the next? Sam finds it easier to believe that he "has
to" make the next leap and help the next person, and so that is exactly what
he continues to do, leap after leap. |
The other end of the "changing the rules" question concerns the Bellisario
Laws of Quantum Leaping, which have evolved over the course of the series.
In our reality, this was inevitable as each new story raised questions the
producers hadn't previously considered, and Don Bellisario reinterpreted
the rules to make the story work. On the other hand, many things about Leaping
that we learned only after many episodes had aired are concepts that Don
Bellisario had worked out very early on without mentioning them on the show.
An example of this is the infamous "body theory" which so many fans fought
against for so long. Don Bellisario said at the Hitchcock Theater screening
in 1991 that a mind-only leap "was never the concept," and yet Scott Bakula
himself was telling fans the opposite just six months earlier. As Deborah
Pratt remembers in a 1993 interview, "That was pretty well worked out in
the very very beginning. In the premise of the show, I mean very early on,
Don sat down and he and I talked, and he said he physically leaps. I said
'No, no, he can't physically leap.'
"He said, 'No he has to physically leap because then he won't be young and
he needs to be strong.' And we would get in huge, huge arguments. So he had
it very clearly set in his mind how quantum leaping worked."
All this has its parallel in Sam's reality, too. Aside from the gaps in Sam's
memory, Sam and Al undoubtedly know a lot about leaping that never made it
onto our tv screens. But Sam and Al never counted on the astonishing variety
of leaps and situations Sam's been in over a period of five years or so (Al's
time), nor on G/T/W's influence, nor on any number of other factors which
have little to do with physics equations on paper. Sam knows a lot more about
quantum leaping than he did that evening in 1995, and he's still learning.
Who knows what more Sam--and the viewers--may learn about quantum leaping
when he eventually leaps into a feature film?
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (revised 3/13/97)
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We know from "Lee Harvey Oswald" that the Project is located in Stallions
Gate, New Mexico, but where exactly is that? Until very recently there were
two schools of thought on this question. Many fans, including Julie Barrett,
author of Quantum Leap A to Z, believe that Stallions Gate is near
Alamogordo in south central New Mexico. (The Los Alamos reference in Julie's
book instead of Alamogordo was the result of a proofreading error.) The main
basis for this locale is the comment by the "Other Tina" in the pilot: "You
know, that's about where they set off the first atomic bomb." The first atomic
bomb was set off near Alamogordo, according to most encyclopedias, although
that's a gross oversimplification of New Mexico geography, as we shall see
below.
However, until I finally visited the relevant parts of New Mexico in May,
1997, I favored another location for Stallions Gate: outside of Los Alamos
in northern New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project was
based, and a lot of the early atom-splitting and testing was actually carried
out. |
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Starting in 1943, Los Alamos was the home of the Atomic Research Laboratory
(now called the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory). The first atomic
bomb and the first hydrogen bomb were both produced there. Significantly
(or so I thought), Grolier's Encyclopedia says that the Manhattan Project's
weapons laboratory "was built on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, N.Mex."
Sound familiar? Los Alamos is not too far from Gallup New Mexico and Monument
Valley, Utah, an area littered with red rock mesas similar to those shown
in various episodes and saga cells. The fact that the Imaging Chamber is
in "a cavern somewhere" supports either local. Alamogordo is not in a red
rock are. Also, the zip code on Sam's driver's license (in Stallion Springs
NM) begins with 87...; it looks like 875... something to me. The zip code
for Alamogordo is 88310, whereas Los Alamos is 87544, making it probably
much closer to Stallion Springs (and by implication Stallions Gate) than
Alamogordo is. One further reference places the Project not too far from
Destiny, NM where Roberto Gutierrez works, but since Destiny is as nonexistent
on New Mexico maps in our reality as Stallions Gate, that's not terribly
helpful.
There's also a reference in the Quantum Leap Story Guideline to Sam
and Donna's first date taking place in Taos, which is considerably closer
to Los Alamos than to Alamogordo. However, this is significant only if Star
Bright was situated on or near the eventual site of Quantum Leap, and the
only evidence for that is the "Other Tina's" speculation in the pilot that
the secret government project near where the first bomb was set off had something
to do with "a deep space probe."
The above conclusions sounded pretty good to me until I had a chance to actually
explore New Mexico in May 1997. It didn't take long to find out that I'd
been wrong. As I soon learned on that trip, the northern approach to Trinity
Site, where the first atomic bomb was set off, is called Stallion Gate. Trinity
Site and Stallion Gate are over 80 miles from Alamogordo, but not too
far from Socorro, New Mexico (zip code: 87801), near the northern edge of
White Sands missile range. Access to Trinity Site via the Stallion Gate is
open to the public two days a year, on the first Saturdays in April and
October.
State route 380 runs from east to west along the northern boundary of White
Sands. It's a straight, lonely, two lane road. 53 miles west of the town
of Carrizozo (12 miles east of San Antonio, NM) is a green road sign labeled
Stallion Gate. This sign directs the traveler to a small southbound road,
NM 525, which leads to an area called Stallion Range Center. Trinity Site
is 17 miles south of the Stallion Gate, and 85 miles northwest of Alamogordo.
As one looks down route 380 near the 525 turnoff, toward the San Mateo and
Gallinas mountains, one can almost see Al's "experimental model" car speeding
toward destiny. This is undoubtedly the place where, in Don Bellisario's
mind and Quantum Leap's fictional reality, Al picked up the stranded
motorist in the series pilot.
According to a novel I purchased that weekend by Martin Cruz Smith (author
of Gorky Park) the name Stallion Gate predates the bomb site, although
I was unable to determine the name's origin. The title of the book, amazingly
enough, is Stallion Gate, and it's about love and intrigue at the
Manhattan Project in 1945.
Further north in the state of New Mexico is a scenic drive to Los Alamos,
headquarters of the Manhattan Project. This slow but beautiful journey leads
the intrepid traveler up state route 44 to route 4 and route 501, through
Pueblo Indian reservations marked by spectacular red rock mesas, steep curving
roads and finally a pine forest. At over 7000 foot elevation, seemingly in
the middle of nowhere (and well past the red rock mesas) isthe first of many
turnoffs to various buildings and research sections of the Los Alamos National
Scientific Laboratory. In between these research sites is the small city
of Los Alamos itself, on a remote plateau that was little more than a boy's
school when Dr. Robert Oppenheimer et al arrived there in 1942. This historic
locale is well worth visiting, but there is nothing there to suggest that
Project Quantum Leap could ever be headquartered there: no red rocks, no
lonely highway, and no place name with a stallion in it. If Project
Quantum Leap existed in our reality (which it doesn't!) it would be near
the road at Stallion Gate, not at Los Alamos.
Where does that leave us in our geographical placement of Project Quantum Leap? Clearly, the Stallions Gate mentioned in "Lee Harvey Oswald" is at or near the Stallion Gate east of San Antonio. The name discrepancy could refer to a distinct and highly secret place near Stallion Gate called Stallions Gate, or a colloquial misnomer used by Project staff (and Don Bellisario!). Alternatively (and this is my preferred theory), the Stallion Gate in what we prefer to think of as the "real world" is really called Stallions Gate in Sam and Al's fictional reality, just one of many minor variations between their reality and ours. In any case, the Project is not in a red rock area. This means that the shot of red rock mesas in the saga cell is exactly what it looks like: an aerial view of Monument Valley near the Arizona - Utah border. When "Dr. Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert," they probably flew over Monument Valley. As for Star Bright, it could still be at Stallions Gate, but only if Sam and Donna drove over 200 miles for their first date in Taos, or is the reference to that date in the Story Guideline is discounted as non-canonical since it was not mentioned on screen. Los Alamos is a more likely locale for Star Bright, being a town full of secret government research that's only about half as far from Taos at Stallion(s) Gate.
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"Led an elite group of scientists |
"...to form a top secret Project |
A later view of the Project, from |
Now that we know where the Project is, there's still the problem of what
it looks like, since views of it vary wildly in different seasons of the
series. Even so, there's no reason why the ultramodern white office building
in early saga cells, the electric mountain of "The Leap Back" and the flashing
mesa of "Lee Harvey Oswald" can't be different views of the same complex.
Each of the three eras show mesas, although in the "electric mountain" shot
they are harder to see because it's night time. Any changes made to the site
since 1995 can be no more than cosmetic, nor can the Project have been moved
to another site. For one thing, they could not afford to rebuild the Imaging
Chamber, the Waiting Room and the Accelerator Chamber, each with its own
complex equipment and built-in safeguards. For another, we've seen from "Killin'
Time" that it's dangerous to let the leapee out of the Waiting Room because
it affects Sam's ability to leap--so trying to move the operation elsewhere
would be incredibly dangerous. The third reason is that moving Ziggy would
involve down time for the hybrid computer, and they can't afford to do that
because they a) might lose data, and b) might need Ziggy at any given moment
to help Sam. In short, no way are they gonna move the Project!
Down ten levels from the surface outside where the cars are parked, as revealed
in "Killin' Time," is the Waiting Room, in which the leapee is sequestered.
From a description in the script to "The Leap Back" (and from Sam's comings
and goings in that episode), we know that the Waiting Room is adjacent to
three other crucial locations at the Project: the Imaging Chamber, the
Accelerator Chamber and the Control Room. The Imaging Chamber is the vast
underground cavern in which Al contacts Sam holographically via brainwave
transmissions. The Accelerator Chamber, from which Sam leaped in the pilot
and in "The Leap Back," is "a nuclear accelerator chamber," probably Sam's
variation on a particle accelerator (a device used to increase the energy
of electrically charged atomic particles). The Control Room is where Gooshie
operates the Project equipment from a colorful table-sized console that looks
like a giant handlink. The Control Room is also where Ziggy (or at least
Ziggy's primary voice interface) is.
A few further revelations concerning the Project's layout--and Ziggy in
particular--appear in the script version of "The Leap Back." Here's the quote
from Don Bellisario's script: "Sam stands near the perimeter of a circular
ceramic room with three exit tubes and an elevator. The tubes are marked:
Imaging Chamber, Waiting Room and Accelerator Chamber. The elevator leads
to the surface. The shimmering blue light is emanating from a glass sphere
floating without visible support above the center of the room. The sphere
is filled with living brain tissue immersed in a nutrient solution. THIS
IS ZIGGY." We didn't see any brain tissue, however, so it is possible that
the idea of Ziggy having a biological component may have been dropped. (Ashley
McConnell postulates something similar in the first QL novel, but the books
are not directly overseen by Don Bellisario as the show is and therefore
cannot be considered canonical.) Nevertheless, the physical layout of the
Project as described above seems to be borne out by what we've seen. Watch
"The Leap Back" carefully!
The script for "Mirror Image" mentions that Al has an apartment with Beth
on-site at the Project. It is not known whether or not Sam and Al have off-site
homes as well (Sam's home in "The Leap Back" is certainly within sight of
the white mountain), but the address on Sam's driver's license is a post
office box in Stallions Springs, presumably nearby. As best I can tell from
my researches, there is no Stallion Springs in our reality, so the name probably
refers to a mail drop at or near Stallions Gate--possibly even those postal
boxes I saw!
© 1993-1997 Karen Funk Blocher (major revision 5/12/97)
