Diksha Sundriyal
NBC’s Quantum Leap follows the story of Ben Song, who travels through time to the past. The show builds up the mystery around Ben’s motivation to travel in time, something that he has forgotten because memory loss is one of the side effects of time traveling. Back home, his team, which includes his fiancee, desperately tries to get him back. Their worst fear is that if they don’t act in time, Ben might never return home. Their fear is not irrational because something like this has already happened before. ‘Quantum Leap’ is a continuation of the original series of the same name that ran from 1989 to 1993. It follows the story of Sam Beckett, who travels in time, much like Ben. It is his fate that works as a cautionary tale for time travelers, who are warier of leaping without looking. If you are wondering what happened to Sam Beckett, then here’s what you should know about him.
The Mysterious Fate of Sam Beckett
For a show as loved as ‘Quantum Leap’, the series finale of Sam Beckett’s story is considered one of the most unsatisfying ends in television. The fact that the main characters’ fate was given to the audience in the form of title cards shows just how untimely and uncooked the end of Beckett’s tale was. The reason behind it is the last-minute axing of the show. Despite being a critical success and enjoying a cult following, ‘Quantum Leap’ never managed to amass the audience that would convince the network to keep it going. By the time the end of Season 5 came around, NBC had decided to call quits on it. However, the creator of the show, Donald Bellisario, had already created plans for the sixth season, so he set up the finale in a way that would wrap up the ongoing story of the show, but keep the door open to be explored in the coming season. This is why the ending left the audience with more questions than answers.
In the final episode, titled ‘Mirror Image’, Sam Beckett finds himself on the day that he was born, in his own body. Previously, he’d been leaping from one time to another in the bodies of other people. But now, it turns out, that his journey has taken a different turn. A mysterious bartender tells him that from now on, he will make his leaps in his own body. Beckett also discovers that all this time he’d been wrong in thinking that he was not in control of the leaps. He’d been doing it subconsciously and was motivated by the need to help others, which is also why he’d created the Quantum Leap project. The bartender also warns Beckett that his leaps from now on are going to get harder and advises him to take a sabbatical before embarking on his journey.
Knowing now that he can control his leaps, Beckett decides to right a wrong. His partner Al had been separated from his wife when he was held as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. She thought he was dead and later remarried. When Beckett had been in that timeline in a previous episode, he had deliberately refrained from telling Al’s wife that he was not dead for the fear of tinkering with the events in his own timeline. But now, he decides to change that. He meets Al’s wife and tells her to wait for Al because he is still alive and will eventually come home. His actions have the intended impact and Al reunites with his wife and has four daughters, one of whom appears in the new iteration of ‘Quantum Leap’.
In the end, a title card reveals Beckett’s fate, stating that he never came back home, which is continued in the new version of the show. Because no one knows what happened to Sam Beckett and because it has been thirty years since his fate turned into uncertainty, there is no way to know whether he is alive or dead. For all we know, Beckett is still out there, leaping from one timeline to another, helping people, changing history. This is what he had set out to do from the beginning and it looks like he kept at it.
Over time, it is possible that Beckett finally decided to come home but chose to keep the others in the dark because by then, according to the new ‘Quantum Leap’, the project had been abandoned. Or, perhaps, he leaped into a timeline where he found love or something else that made him want to stay there rather than come back to his original timeline. Or, perhaps, one of those leaps, which were supposed to get more difficult, took their toll on him, and Beckett died. Any of these things could have happened to him. The new ‘Quantum Leap’ might address Beckett’s fate eventually. But for now, his status remains MIA.
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