Dr. Samuel Beckett
Encyclopedia
Dr.
Samuel "Sam" Beckett is a fictional character
and the protagonist
on the science fiction
television series Quantum Leap, played by Scott Bakula
.
Initially, the audience knows very little about Sam, much as Sam knows little about himself due to holes in his memory
dubbed the "Swiss cheese effect."
on August 8, 1953, in Elk Ridge, Indiana
to dairy farmer
John Samuel Beckett and his wife Thelma Louise Beckett. As a child, he had two cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. Sam was a child prodigy
, learning to read at age 2 and do advanced calculus
in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess
. Sam also played piano
in a concert at Carnegie Hall
when he was 19, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor
, and his favorite song is John Lennon
's "Imagine
".
He has a photographic memory
, an IQ of 267, can cook, likes dry or light beer, and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his older brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam
on April 8, 1970, but Sam leaps in his brother's unit and saves him on that day. Tom (Thomas Andrew Beckett) was a good athlete, an All-State basketball
player, an Annapolis graduate, is a Navy SEAL Commander, and has a wife named Mary. Sam has one sister named Katie (Katherine Elizabeth Beckett), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive alcoholic named Chuck. They divorced and she is now married to Navy
officer
Lt. Jim Bonnick. They have lived in Hawaii
with Thelma Beckett since 1974.
Sam graduated from high school at age 16 and, following his brother's advice, attended MIT
in the early 1970s. While at MIT, Sam and his mentor, Professor Sebastian LoNigro, developed a string theory of time travel
("Her Charm"; see below). Sam went through four years of MIT in two years, and continued through various colleges to eventually obtain seven doctoral degrees in Music
, Medicine
, Quantum Physics, Archaeology
, Ancient Languages
, Chemistry
, and Astronomy
, but not psychiatry or law. It should be noted that, in the pilot episode, Sam is told he only has six doctorates; this was later retcon
ned to seven. He speaks 7 modern languages including English
, Spanish
, French
, Russian
, German
, and Japanese
, but not Italian
or Hebrew. He knows four dead languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics. He's proficient in martial arts such as Judo, Karate, Muay Thai, and Taekwondo. He has won a Nobel Prize
field unspecified, but probably for physics. For this, Time magazine called him "the next Einstein". Sam's father suffered a fatal heart attack
in 1974 while Sam was in college; the guilt of his absence during his family's time of need would stay with Sam for years.
As a young adult in the 1980s, Sam was a key member of the Starbright Project (details on the nature of the project were not revealed on the show), where he would meet some of his closest and most trusted friends: Al Calavicci
, a decorated naval officer; a brilliant computer programmer known simply as Gushie; and Dr. Donna Eleese, the love of Sam's life, whom he met in 1984. 5 years after the Starbright Project, Sam and Donna were engaged, but Sam was jilted at the altar on June 5, 1989 and never saw Donna again.
On Sam's third leap, he meets Donna years before he himself gets engaged to her. Realizing that her damaged relationship with her father is the reason why she can never commit to a relationship (as her father left her, she subconsciously feels that any man she meets will inevitably abandon her and thus prevents them from doing so by leaving herself), Sam drives Donna out to her father so that she might get some closure
. We learn later in the episode "The Leap Back" that as a result of this, Donna never leaves Sam at the altar, and they are married to this day.
However, before "The Leap Back" Sam has no memory of Donna and his marriage. The reason for this is twofold. First, Sam's "Swiss cheesed" brain caused him amnesia in regards to his marriage. Second, Donna understood that in some cases, in order for Sam to successfully leap, it would be necessary for Sam to have romantic encounters with various women. In order to spare the "choir-boy" Sam mental anguish (it is established that, unlike Al, Sam takes vows of marriage very seriously) and to facilitate his leaping, Donna forbids Al or anyone else from alerting Sam that he is married.
A few months later in 1989, Sam and Al spearheaded Project Quantum Leap
, a time travel
experiment based on the string theory Sam had developed while at MIT. The PQL facility was located in Stallion's Gate, New Mexico
, in a primarily underground complex. In 1995, after constructing the necessary machinery, including a holographic
imaging chamber and a supercomputer ("Ziggy") with access to vast historical databases, the project's funds were running thin. Eager to prove his theories, Sam prematurely stepped into the nuclear accelerator chamber and propelled himself back in time.
test pilot. He is startled to see a stranger in the mirror as he prepares to shave. Others also see Sam as the person he displaced. As Sam would soon discover, quantum-leaping had an unforeseen side-effect: He was struck with partial amnesia
; he describes his own situation with the analogy of his brain
being like a hunk of Swiss cheese
, with his memory full of holes and lacking some personal information about his past, the most consistently absent detail being his marriage to Donna (with Donna preferring that Sam not be reminded of their marriage so that he can more easily commit to the people his hosts are in love with and thus solve whatever he is there to accomplish).
To lead Sam and the audience from this confusion comes Al, an observer from Sam's own time, except Al has to convince Sam he is not a hallucination
; as a hologram tuned to Sam's brainwaves that only Sam can see and hear, convincing an amnesiac he is real is difficult. Al conveys to Sam a theory to return Sam to the present: that an unknown influence (God
, Fate, or Time
) was using Sam to correct a mistake in the past — in this case, saving the life of the pilot Sam had displaced, who was killed in an experimental aircraft in the original history.
When Sam corrected the timeline, he leaped forward, but not all the way home; this time, he found himself assuming the identity of a minor-league professional baseball
player named Tim Fox. For the rest of his life (an epilogue
in the series finale
tells us Sam never gets home, but in our terms, it was the next four years/five seasons the duration of the show) Sam would continue to travel back and forth through time; swapping identities with various people and as a tagline for the show reiterated, "setting right what once went wrong."
, developed with Professor LoNigro, is based on an expanding, but finite, universe
. A person's life is like a length of string; one end represents birth, the other represents death. If one were to tie the ends of the string together, their life becomes a loop. Next, by balling the loop together, the days in one's life would touch one another out of sequence. Therefore, jumping from one part of the string to another would allow someone to travel back and forth within their own lifetime, thus making a "quantum leap" between each time period. (How exactly these things are accomplished is never explained.)
Keeping this principle in mind, Sam's leaps were generally limited to periods within his own lifetime; he could not leap to a date prior to his birth or into his own future. There were, however, a few exceptions. In "The Leap Back," Sam switched places with Al, who leaped back into 1945, and later in the episode was able to leap himself back into Al's place in the past. The explanation was that the simo-leap with Al had left Sam with enough of Al's genetic coding that he could leap back past his own lifetime (since it was still within Al's). In "The Leap Between the States," Sam was able to leap outside of his own lifetime and found himself in the American Civil War
in the life of his great-grandfather; the explanation was that Sam's close genetic link with his ancestor allowed him to do this. This was also partly due to an "error" that was referenced and then corrected by Ziggy, implying that Sam would not be able to pull off a similar feat again and was once more limited to his own timeline. Two early episodes, "Play It Again, Seymour" (which took place on April 14, 1953) and "The Americanization of Machiko" (which took place on August 4, 1953) had Sam leaping into dates prior to the date later given as his birthday, August 8, 1953. Although these would appear to be continuity errors on the part of the show, creator Donald P. Bellisario has proffered the explanation that Sam's life dates from his conception
rather than his actual birth, and thus dates such as these which are less than nine months prior to August 8, 1953, would be valid leap dates. However, once Sam's proper birthday is established, there are no further leaps prior to that date aside from the exceptions mentioned above.
Al explains the string theory in the pilot episode, and Sam, recovering his memory of the theory, turns around and explains it to Donna in the second episode, "Star-Crossed." This theory is later revealed to have been independently developed by actor and would-be time traveller Moe Stein in "Future Boy," who explains it on his television show in response to a viewer question from young Sam Beckett who, at that time, was still a child living in Indiana
; only his own lack of resources prevented Moe from creating Project Quantum Leap decades before Sam.
Doctor (title)
Doctor, as a title, originates from the Latin word of the same spelling and meaning. The word is originally an agentive noun of the Latin verb docēre . It has been used as an honored academic title for over a millennium in Europe, where it dates back to the rise of the university. This use spread...
Samuel "Sam" Beckett is a fictional character
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
and the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
on the science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
television series Quantum Leap, played by Scott Bakula
Scott Bakula
Scott Stewart Bakula is an American actor, known for his role as Sam Beckett in the television series Quantum Leap, for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama in 1991 and was nominated for four Emmy Awards. He also had a prominent role as Captain Jonathan...
.
Initially, the audience knows very little about Sam, much as Sam knows little about himself due to holes in his memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
dubbed the "Swiss cheese effect."
Backstory
Sam Beckett was born at 12:30 pm ESTEastern Time Zone
The Eastern Time Zone of the United States and Canada is a time zone that falls mostly along the east coast of North America. Its UTC time offset is −5 hrs during standard time and −4 hrs during daylight saving time...
on August 8, 1953, in Elk Ridge, Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
to dairy farmer
Dairy farming
Dairy farming is a class of agricultural, or an animal husbandry, enterprise, for long-term production of milk, usually from dairy cows but also from goats and sheep, which may be either processed on-site or transported to a dairy factory for processing and eventual retail sale.Most dairy farms...
John Samuel Beckett and his wife Thelma Louise Beckett. As a child, he had two cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. Sam was a child prodigy
Child prodigy
A child prodigy is someone who, at an early age, masters one or more skills far beyond his or her level of maturity. One criterion for classifying prodigies is: a prodigy is a child, typically younger than 18 years old, who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding...
, learning to read at age 2 and do advanced calculus
Calculus
Calculus is a branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. This subject constitutes a major part of modern mathematics education. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus, which are related by the fundamental theorem...
in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
. Sam also played piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
in a concert at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
when he was 19, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor
Tenor
The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...
, and his favorite song is John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
's "Imagine
Imagine (album)
Imagine is the second album by John Lennon. Recorded and released in 1971, the album tended toward songs that were gentler, more commercial and less avant-garde than those on his critically acclaimed previous album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The album is considered the most popular of his works...
".
He has a photographic memory
Eidetic memory
Eidetic , commonly referred to as photographic memory, is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume. The word eidetic, referring to extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall not limited to, but...
, an IQ of 267, can cook, likes dry or light beer, and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his older brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
on April 8, 1970, but Sam leaps in his brother's unit and saves him on that day. Tom (Thomas Andrew Beckett) was a good athlete, an All-State basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
player, an Annapolis graduate, is a Navy SEAL Commander, and has a wife named Mary. Sam has one sister named Katie (Katherine Elizabeth Beckett), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive alcoholic named Chuck. They divorced and she is now married to Navy
Navy
A navy is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake- or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions...
officer
Officer (armed forces)
An officer is a member of an armed force or uniformed service who holds a position of authority. Commissioned officers derive authority directly from a sovereign power and, as such, hold a commission charging them with the duties and responsibilities of a specific office or position...
Lt. Jim Bonnick. They have lived in Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
with Thelma Beckett since 1974.
Sam graduated from high school at age 16 and, following his brother's advice, attended MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in the early 1970s. While at MIT, Sam and his mentor, Professor Sebastian LoNigro, developed a string theory of time travel
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...
("Her Charm"; see below). Sam went through four years of MIT in two years, and continued through various colleges to eventually obtain seven doctoral degrees in Music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, Medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
, Quantum Physics, Archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, Ancient Languages
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
, Chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, and Astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
, but not psychiatry or law. It should be noted that, in the pilot episode, Sam is told he only has six doctorates; this was later retcon
Retcon
Retroactive continuity is the alteration of previously established facts in a fictional work. Retcons are done for many reasons, including the accommodation of sequels or further derivative works in a series, wherein newer authors or creators want to revise the in-story history to allow a course...
ned to seven. He speaks 7 modern languages including English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, but not Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
or Hebrew. He knows four dead languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics. He's proficient in martial arts such as Judo, Karate, Muay Thai, and Taekwondo. He has won a Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
field unspecified, but probably for physics. For this, Time magazine called him "the next Einstein". Sam's father suffered a fatal heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
in 1974 while Sam was in college; the guilt of his absence during his family's time of need would stay with Sam for years.
As a young adult in the 1980s, Sam was a key member of the Starbright Project (details on the nature of the project were not revealed on the show), where he would meet some of his closest and most trusted friends: Al Calavicci
Al Calavicci
Rear Admiral Upper Half Albert “Al” Calavicci USN is a fictional character on the science fiction drama Quantum Leap, created by Donald P. Bellisario and played by Dean Stockwell.-Biography:...
, a decorated naval officer; a brilliant computer programmer known simply as Gushie; and Dr. Donna Eleese, the love of Sam's life, whom he met in 1984. 5 years after the Starbright Project, Sam and Donna were engaged, but Sam was jilted at the altar on June 5, 1989 and never saw Donna again.
On Sam's third leap, he meets Donna years before he himself gets engaged to her. Realizing that her damaged relationship with her father is the reason why she can never commit to a relationship (as her father left her, she subconsciously feels that any man she meets will inevitably abandon her and thus prevents them from doing so by leaving herself), Sam drives Donna out to her father so that she might get some closure
Closure (psychology)
Closure or need for closure is a popular psychology term used to describe an individual's desire for a definite cognitive closure as opposed to enduring ambiguity...
. We learn later in the episode "The Leap Back" that as a result of this, Donna never leaves Sam at the altar, and they are married to this day.
However, before "The Leap Back" Sam has no memory of Donna and his marriage. The reason for this is twofold. First, Sam's "Swiss cheesed" brain caused him amnesia in regards to his marriage. Second, Donna understood that in some cases, in order for Sam to successfully leap, it would be necessary for Sam to have romantic encounters with various women. In order to spare the "choir-boy" Sam mental anguish (it is established that, unlike Al, Sam takes vows of marriage very seriously) and to facilitate his leaping, Donna forbids Al or anyone else from alerting Sam that he is married.
A few months later in 1989, Sam and Al spearheaded Project Quantum Leap
Project Quantum Leap
Project Quantum Leap is a fictional, top-secret, government-run science project involving time travel on the sci-fi/drama Quantum Leap, created by Donald Bellisario.-Overview:...
, a time travel
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...
experiment based on the string theory Sam had developed while at MIT. The PQL facility was located in Stallion's Gate, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
, in a primarily underground complex. In 1995, after constructing the necessary machinery, including a holographic
Holography
Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...
imaging chamber and a supercomputer ("Ziggy") with access to vast historical databases, the project's funds were running thin. Eager to prove his theories, Sam prematurely stepped into the nuclear accelerator chamber and propelled himself back in time.
Time traveller
In the pilot episode, Sam awoke in 1956, having exchanged places in time with an Air ForceUnited States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
test pilot. He is startled to see a stranger in the mirror as he prepares to shave. Others also see Sam as the person he displaced. As Sam would soon discover, quantum-leaping had an unforeseen side-effect: He was struck with partial amnesia
Amnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
; he describes his own situation with the analogy of his brain
Brain
The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...
being like a hunk of Swiss cheese
Swiss cheese
Swiss cheese is a generic name in North America for several related varieties of cheese which resemble the Swiss Emmental. Some types of Swiss cheese have a distinctive appearance, as the blocks of the cheese are riddled with holes known as "eyes". Swiss cheese has a piquant, but not very sharp,...
, with his memory full of holes and lacking some personal information about his past, the most consistently absent detail being his marriage to Donna (with Donna preferring that Sam not be reminded of their marriage so that he can more easily commit to the people his hosts are in love with and thus solve whatever he is there to accomplish).
To lead Sam and the audience from this confusion comes Al, an observer from Sam's own time, except Al has to convince Sam he is not a hallucination
Hallucination
A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid,...
; as a hologram tuned to Sam's brainwaves that only Sam can see and hear, convincing an amnesiac he is real is difficult. Al conveys to Sam a theory to return Sam to the present: that an unknown influence (God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, Fate, or Time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
) was using Sam to correct a mistake in the past — in this case, saving the life of the pilot Sam had displaced, who was killed in an experimental aircraft in the original history.
When Sam corrected the timeline, he leaped forward, but not all the way home; this time, he found himself assuming the identity of a minor-league professional baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
player named Tim Fox. For the rest of his life (an epilogue
Epilogue
An epilogue, epilog or afterword is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama, usually used to bring closure to the work...
in the series finale
Series finale
A series finale refers to the last installment of a series with a narrative presented through mediums such as television, film and literature. In many Commonwealth countries, the term final episode is commonly used in regards to a television series...
tells us Sam never gets home, but in our terms, it was the next four years/five seasons the duration of the show) Sam would continue to travel back and forth through time; swapping identities with various people and as a tagline for the show reiterated, "setting right what once went wrong."
Dr. Beckett's string theory
Sam's theory of time travelTime travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...
, developed with Professor LoNigro, is based on an expanding, but finite, universe
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
. A person's life is like a length of string; one end represents birth, the other represents death. If one were to tie the ends of the string together, their life becomes a loop. Next, by balling the loop together, the days in one's life would touch one another out of sequence. Therefore, jumping from one part of the string to another would allow someone to travel back and forth within their own lifetime, thus making a "quantum leap" between each time period. (How exactly these things are accomplished is never explained.)
Keeping this principle in mind, Sam's leaps were generally limited to periods within his own lifetime; he could not leap to a date prior to his birth or into his own future. There were, however, a few exceptions. In "The Leap Back," Sam switched places with Al, who leaped back into 1945, and later in the episode was able to leap himself back into Al's place in the past. The explanation was that the simo-leap with Al had left Sam with enough of Al's genetic coding that he could leap back past his own lifetime (since it was still within Al's). In "The Leap Between the States," Sam was able to leap outside of his own lifetime and found himself in the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
in the life of his great-grandfather; the explanation was that Sam's close genetic link with his ancestor allowed him to do this. This was also partly due to an "error" that was referenced and then corrected by Ziggy, implying that Sam would not be able to pull off a similar feat again and was once more limited to his own timeline. Two early episodes, "Play It Again, Seymour" (which took place on April 14, 1953) and "The Americanization of Machiko" (which took place on August 4, 1953) had Sam leaping into dates prior to the date later given as his birthday, August 8, 1953. Although these would appear to be continuity errors on the part of the show, creator Donald P. Bellisario has proffered the explanation that Sam's life dates from his conception
Fertilisation
Fertilisation is the fusion of gametes to produce a new organism. In animals, the process involves the fusion of an ovum with a sperm, which eventually leads to the development of an embryo...
rather than his actual birth, and thus dates such as these which are less than nine months prior to August 8, 1953, would be valid leap dates. However, once Sam's proper birthday is established, there are no further leaps prior to that date aside from the exceptions mentioned above.
Al explains the string theory in the pilot episode, and Sam, recovering his memory of the theory, turns around and explains it to Donna in the second episode, "Star-Crossed." This theory is later revealed to have been independently developed by actor and would-be time traveller Moe Stein in "Future Boy," who explains it on his television show in response to a viewer question from young Sam Beckett who, at that time, was still a child living in Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
; only his own lack of resources prevented Moe from creating Project Quantum Leap decades before Sam.
Changes in his own life
Though explicitly forbidden by his own guidelines to alter the past for his own benefit, Sam did alter his own history and those of his loved ones on a number of occasions:- In the second episode of the series, "Star-Crossed", Sam reunited his future fiancée, Donna, who was 19 at the time, with her estranged father (while simultaneously unknowingly exposing the Watergate ScandalWatergate scandalThe Watergate scandal was a political scandal during the 1970s in the United States resulting from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement...
). As a result, Donna's fears of being abandoned by the people she cared for never became an issue, resulting in her not leaving Sam at the altar, and the couple was married (as discovered in later episodes, such as the next entry). This union would bring Donna onto Project Quantum LeapProject Quantum LeapProject Quantum Leap is a fictional, top-secret, government-run science project involving time travel on the sci-fi/drama Quantum Leap, created by Donald Bellisario.-Overview:...
and, through her father's military connections, assure government funding, thus replacing the Project's private funding oversight committee with a government oversight committee. - In the second season premiere "Honeymoon Express," the government oversight committee tried to shut down PQL by rejecting its multi-billion dollar annual budget. In an attempt to prove that Sam had leaped, Al tried to get Sam to prevent the downing of the U-2U-2 Crisis of 1960The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on May 1, 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and during the leadership of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union.The United States government at...
since he leaped in two days before the event. Sam was unable to prevent the U-2 mission, but by saving the life of a young woman and subsequently helping her pass her legal exams, he saved the Project when history changed and the same woman now led the oversight committee and approved the Project's budget. - In the episode "M.I.A.", Al tried to get Sam to save his first marriage, which nearly cost the life of the man Sam was really there to save (Although this occurred only because Al hadn't run other scenarios through Ziggy rather than out of a deliberate omission). In the end, Sam leaped, but was unable to save Al's marriage (see final entry).
- In the third season premiere "The Leap Home," Sam leaped into himself as a teenager to win a basketballBasketballBasketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
game his team originally lost (The victory will allow his coach to go on to become a professional coach while also giving two of his teammates the chance to go to college on the subsequent scholarships). While there, he tried unsuccessfully to save the lives of his father and brother- his father being destined to die of a heart attack and his brother during a mission in VietnamVietnamVietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
-, but Al suggested that, in the end, he was only there to have an opportunity to say goodbye to them. When Sam leaped, he found himself in his brother's SEALUnited States Navy SEALsThe United States Navy's Sea, Air and Land Teams, commonly known as Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy's principal special operations force and a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command as well as the maritime component of the United States Special Operations Command.The acronym is derived from their...
unit in Vietnam. While there, Sam saved his brother's life. Sam missed a chance to free a young Al and two other POWsPrisoner of warA prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
from their Viet-Cong captors, although Al assured him that he understood due to Sam ensuring that photo evidence that Al was still alive came back to the government. - In the fourth season premiere "The Leap Back," Sam and Al exchanged places as Leaper and Observer, leaving Al in 1945, apparently on the very day of his birth, and finally returning Sam home. When Al is incapacitated in the past, Sam once again enters his time machine to exchange places with Al.
- In the episode "Trilogy, Part II," Sam fathered a child, Samantha Josephine 'Sammy Jo' Fuller. Like her father, Sammy Jo was a child prodigyChild prodigyA child prodigy is someone who, at an early age, masters one or more skills far beyond his or her level of maturity. One criterion for classifying prodigies is: a prodigy is a child, typically younger than 18 years old, who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding...
with a photographic memory. She would grow up to join the staff of Project Quantum Leap. - In the series finale "Mirror Image," Sam learned the truth that he was, and had always been, the one in control of his journey through time (albeit only via his subconscious mind up to this point). Though initially unable to accept that fact, Sam returned to a single point in time, and ensured that Al's marriage to his first wife, Beth, would survive Al's years as a POW in Vietnam.