This week, it was announced that NBC had canceled this series. It's a shame because I liked the direction of the second season over the first. Yet, as a hardcore fan of the original 1989 series to which this series is a sequel, I have to say that I'm not sure I was on board for a lot of that new direction. The show was compelling enough to keep my interest. Unless another distributor picks up the show, this is the end. As such, I will point out some of my complaints. One of which is this show never addressed what happened to the protagonist of the 1989 science-fiction story, that of Sam Beckett, played by Scott Bakula. This show wasn't totally a reboot. It was a sequel, which acknowledged stuff in that 1989 show. However, Sam Beckett's fate was never tackled, which was a bit of a letdown.
Raymond Lee (Kevin Can F**k Himself and Here and Now) stars as Ben Song, a Korean-American scientist who is this show's Sam Beckett. He works for this top secret government program called Quantum Leap, which is an organization that is studying time travel. Ben picks up the mantle 30 years after Sam Beckett invented the time machine that's being used here called the accelerator. Sam used the accelerator to go back in time. The accelerator is supposed to bring him back to the present, but it never did. Instead, Sam kept leaping to different times. The 1989 series ended with Sam never returning home. It was left a mystery as to what ultimately happened to Sam. How he time-traveled was always a source of confusion or controversy too.
Sam would leap into people in the past. What that meant was Sam would replace those people or he would literally swap places with them. Sam would go into the past and whoever he replaced would go into the future. Sam would then pretend to be whatever person he replaced. Almost magically, the image of the person would surround Sam, so no one would know it was him. How the accelerator did that was never truly explained. One had to suspend disbelief and accept that as the premise.
This reboot or sequel version re-imagined this premise. Ben used the accelerator, but instead of replacing or swapping places with people in the past, Ben would leap into people in a literal way. Again, it's not truly explained, but we are to assume that Ben's mind or consciousness inhabits or is superimposed on the mind of whichever person in the past. Yet, the show never explains what happens to Ben's body if it's only his mind that's time-traveling. The show makes it clear that Ben's body disappears once it goes into the accelerator, but it's not sure what happens to his body once he's "inside" another person.
The show doesn't need to explain it, just as the 1989 series didn't need to explain the specific mechanics of this time-travel premise. What the show fails to do is anything substantial with this concept. The show didn't need to fully explain the mechanics to do something substantial with it. If Ben is literally inside the body of another person, however that might be, the show could still ask the following questions. What does that feel like? How does that affect Ben? If Ben leaps inside a Black person, how does that affect him especially when interacting with others? If Ben leaps into a woman, how does his feelings or behaviors change? The idea of being in a different body is never a factor in any of the episodes when it should be a factor in every episode. Ben has been a man his whole life. All of a sudden, to be in the body of a woman would be a significant thing. The Japanese anime film Your Name (2017) did a better job of this concept.
Mason Alexander Park is a nonbinary actor who goes by they/them pronouns. They co-star as Ian Wright, a computer scientist that works at Quantum Leap. In one episode, Ian talks about the transgender experience and it's a very after-school special kind of episode. However, what the show never recognizes is that with every leap, Ben is also going through what is essentially a transgender experience. Trans-people talk about feeling like they are in a body that is not their own or the one they should be. That idea is basically the premise of this series. Yet, the show never remarks upon that or takes time for Ben to express what that experience actually feels like. The reason this is the case is because the show didn't put much stock in Ben's experiences in the past or not as much as the 1989 series did.
The original show was told exclusively from Sam Beckett's point-of-view. The show hardly ever showed us the future where Sam built the accelerator or the other scientists who worked on the project. This reboot has us spend a lot of time with the other scientists, like Ian, or the others in the future. As such, the show developed a convoluted plot for them. The plot this season concerned how the government was trying to interfere or take control of Quantum Leap.
Given the fact that in 1989 or even in this reboot, the time traveler in question always leaps into an American or some place in the United States, the show could've done something more interesting with its future plot line. Sam never leaped into any person in any foreign country. His leaps never took him outside the USA with one exception when he leaped into a soldier in the Vietnam War. Otherwise, Sam never left the country or leaped into someone who didn't speak English. It's essentially the same here, which is a nitpick, but it shows the limitation of even this reboot. This being the case, it's odd that a story line was never created about another country trying to steal the Quantum Leap technology.
Ultimately, this series was a love story between Ben and Addison, played by Caitlin Bassett, the first female combat veteran-turned actress. Addison is Ben's hologram. In the 1989 series, Sam could communicate to the people in the future by way of a hologram. A person would stand in what was called the "imaging chamber" and that chamber would project a hologram of that person into the past for Sam to see and hear. Addison was the person selected to be Ben's hologram. There was a twist in that Addison was originally meant to be the time traveler but Ben jumped the line. The other difference from the 1989 series is that Addison was romantically involved with Ben prior to him time traveling, which adds an extra layer of drama with which the show occasionally did interesting things. That kind of romance is not what made the original 1989 series special though.
Rated TV-PG.
Running Time: 1 hr. / 13 eps.
Available on Peacock.