Quantum Leap Details That Help To Explain The Show's Puzzling Finale

The show would have been canceled in its third season if not for its fans organizing a campaign. Christina Mavroudis, who edited fan publication Quantum Quarterly, got readers to send in letters demanding the show be renewed. The group Viewers for Quality Television also got involved, and apparently, about 50,000 letters eventually appeared at the NBC offices.

When fans started up their letter-writing campaign to save the show, some of the letters went way overboard. According to Entertainment Weekly, which reported on the incident in 1991, one fan wrote to NBC entertainment president Warren Littlefield and said, “Here’s the deal, Mr. Littlefield: Move [Quantum Leap] back to Wednesday night and your family is safe.” Yikes.

If you've ever wondered why the series finale was so confusing, it could be because it wasn’t actually meant to be the last episode of the show. The cast and crew were told Quantum Leap would continue — but then NBC pulled the plug anyway. The studio heads blamed the low ratings for season five. Then the finale was hastily re-edited, changing it from creator Donald P. Bellisario’s original vision.

Unsurprisingly Bellisario wasn’t happy when NBC pulled the plug on Quantum Leap. The producer told the Los Angeles Times in May 1993, “This is especially sad for me because it feels like it is being cut off in its prime. Someone dies at 95, you say, ‘Okay, it was time.’ But this show hasn’t even reached middle age. It feels to me like watching someone young die.”

“I wasn’t going to write a this-is-it kind of episode because I don’t think that Quantum Leap is finished,” Bellisario told the Los Angeles Times in May 1993. “So I wrote a show that gives some of the reasons that he’s been leaping around. You find out who has been leaping him. It offers a philosophy for the series that I believe in: that we are all responsible for our own lives no matter how much we think fate or God or whatever imposes on us. Sam rights a wrong that has to do with his dearest friend, Al. That’s all very satisfying, I think, but at the end, it’s wide open as to what he’s going on to next.”

In 2017 Bakula got a chance to speak about the finale at Comic-Con Los Angeles. He said, “It was a great episode. Last episodes are always controversial.” According to him, even with the difficult situation Bellisario had been in while writing it, the series creator still nailed all the important things. He also told the Los Angeles Times in May 1993, “It’s vintage [Bellisario], a fascinating twist on what you might expect of a final episode.”

The finale features a bar — and a special one at that. Bellisario had it designed to exactly resemble the bar his father once owned, down to the last detail. He told the Television Academy in 2008, “I created Quantum Leap, my dad created me, so I made it in my dad’s bar… I did it as an homage to my dad, and I did it because I wanted to sit there and be back there.”

During the final episode, there is a bartender called Alberto Bellisario (portrayed by actor Bruce McGill) who appears to know everything there is to know about Bakula's Sam. It gets so weird that Sam even asks the bartender whether he's God. In reality, though, the bartender shares a name with Quantum Leap creator Don Bellisario's father — and apparently looks a lot like him too.

After Quantum Leap was canceled, the cast hoped a movie would allow them to reprise their roles. In 2000 fans rejoiced at the news that Syfy had commissioned a film — but it never happened in the end. In 2017 Bellisario said he had a whole script completed for a reboot... But, as we now know, nothing happened until 2022 when a whole new series was commissioned.

In 1993 Bellisario told the Los Angeles Times he thought NBC had treated Quantum Leap badly, bouncing it around between time slots where it was destined to fail. When it was put against the four-quadrant show Full House, it lost out badly. Bellisario lamented, “Had we won that over-50 audience, we would have been a huge hit.”

Fans desperate for more Quantum Leap after the show ended did actually get their wish – just maybe not in the way they expected. Though there were no more episodes of the show, there were a series of novels and comic books that featured Sam leaping into even more strange situations. The comics were short-lived, but the novels continued being published until 2000.

Years and years after the show’s cancelation, in 2019, fans suddenly got a big surprise. An alternate ending — its existence long thought to have been a myth — suddenly made it online. This one featured Al and Beth continuing to search for Sam, who’s no longer fated to leap between people but can live as himself. The footage is very grainy — but at least it’s there.

Comedian Dennis Wolfberg played wacky scientist Gooshie in almost every season of the show. He was in both the series premiere and the series finale. Sadly, though, while the finale was being filmed he was fighting cancer, and he passed away just a year after the episode aired. He was only 48 years old. 

If the show had continued, things might have got even weirder for Sam Beckett. There were some wonderfully odd ideas pitched before the cancelation. These included Sam leaping into a newborn baby, into a cartoon character, and — perhaps weirdest of all — into Thomas Magnum for a crossover episode. To film that, Bakula would have had to spend time as Magnum, P.I.’s Tom Selleck.

Quantum Leap involved a fair amount of stunt work, and Scott Bakula was happy to take it on himself. He did horse-riding, trapeze performing, boxing, and more over the course of the show, and definitely suffered for his art, sustaining loads of knocks and minor injuries. Show producer Donald Bellisario was very impressed, and he told Entertainment Weekly magazine in 1991, “Scott no longer surprises me. I always just assume he can do anything.”

In 2016 Screen Realm asked Bakula if the Quantum Leap cast ever considered whether the show would be so beloved by fans decades into the future. He answered no, saying, “We knew we were doing good things, and we felt good about it, but projecting ourselves ahead 20 years or whatever, I don’t think any of us contemplated that, or what we were going to be.”

The pilot episode of the show gave some facts about Sam’s backstory, such as him having a sister married to a man named Jim. But, as often happens with TV shows once they get past their pilots, facts changed before too long. Things were later retconned so Sam’s sister was married to a man called Chuck and Sam also had a brother named Tom who died in Vietnam.

Deborah Pratt wasn’t seen much in Quantum Leap, but behind the scenes, she was one of the biggest players. She was the wife of Donald Bellisario at the time the show was created and served as its co-executive producer. She also played the title character in the episode A Portrait For Troian. The voice of Ziggy the computer was her, too.

Quantum Leap did more or less its own thing when it came to time-travel science, and this apparently really annoyed some viewers. Bakula told Screen Realm in 2016, “We got a few angry letters from people saying we were violating the space/time continuum and laws of time travel, and they were upset with us. It was as if Spielberg had written the laws, and we must obey them. So we used to chuckle about those things.”

Bakula ad-libbed “Oh boy!” during the filming of the first episode, and everyone liked it so much that it became the character’s catchphrase. Throughout the show, Sam would say it every time he leaped into a new body. Bakula wasn’t the only one ad-libbing by the way. He’s said Dean Stockwell, who played Al, did so too.

Al Calavicci could have been quite a different character if auditions had gone another way. Malcolm McDowell, the star of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial movie classic A Clockwork Orange, auditioned for the role. But Bakula liked Stockwell a lot upon meeting him and wanted him to play Al. And that obviously turned out well for the show.

In 2008 Bellisario told the Television Academy how he’d decided on the name for Quantum Leap. He said, “I was reading a book called Coming of Age in the Milky Way and it took man from when he looked up at stars and all the way to quantum physics, and it gave the history of everything. And the quantum leap is a physical thing that happens that you can’t explain.”

In one especially iconic episode of the show, Sam leaps into the body of a chimpanzee who’s due to be sent into space. Writer Paul Brown got in touch with famous primatologist Jane Goodall to ask for assistance, and she was happy to help. She sent him multiple articles about how animals were treated in research labs.

In 1998 Bakula told Entertainment Weekly, “I was at the Jefferson Memorial, and a load of teenage kids got off the bus. It’s a respectful, quiet place, then all of a sudden I hear these screams and people started running at me for autographs. I was like, ‘What’s happening here?’ It kind of destroyed the mood there.” More sweetly, other fans came up with the phrase “What Would Sam Beckett Do?” to show their love for the show.

In the show, it was a rule that Sam wasn’t meant to leap into any timeframe in which he wasn’t alive himself. He does, though, and often. You can forgive him for leaping to 1953, since that was the year he was conceived. But other episodes have no explanation. He definitely shouldn’t have been able to go back in time to 1862!

In 2019 Bakula spoke to Vulture magazine about how Stockwell got progressive ideas into the show. He remembered, “Dean, coming out of the ’60s, had a lot of social issues that were front and center to him – quite prominently the environment and the ozone layer, which was a big deal at that time.” He went on, “He’d find a way inside the story to make a little social commentary. We just got in the habit of looking for it.”

Bellisario was constantly in awe of his leading man. After all, Bakula was technically playing multiple characters on the show as Sam leaped into different bodies. And they were characters who weren’t always of the same gender. The producer told the Television Academy in 2008, “There's not a doubt in my mind that man deserves an Emmy.” Bakula was at least nominated for one four times, though.

In the 1990 episode “All-Americans,” Al informs Sam that Super Bowl XXX is on and the Pittsburgh Steelers are down by three points. And when the actual Super Bowl XXX rolled around six years later, that’s what actually happened! It’s always nice when a time-travel show gets it right — even if it's just a coincidence.

When deciding what the year of Sam’s birth was, Bellisario simply took the year of his own birth – 1935 – and switched the digits around. That's why Sam was supposed to have been born in 1953. But the math doesn’t always add up. In the episode “How the Tess Was Won,” Sam claims he was ten in 1965 — and that can’t be right.

Occasionally during Quantum Leap, Bakula was called upon to sing, and he had no problem whatsoever doing so. That’s because he grew up in a musical family, singing in the St. Louis Symphony ensemble and even starting his own rock band as a youngster. What’s more, his first acting parts were in musical theater.

Quantum Leap’s costume designer was Jean-Pierre Dorleac, and his job was rarely easy. Not only did he have to create female costumes into which Bakula could fit, but every period costume also had to be historically accurate. And there were often hundreds of them per episode. Dorleac told Entertainment Weekly in 1991, “This is like putting on a Cecil B. DeMille production every seven days.”

There are bound to be some mistakes in a show that ran for five seasons, and Quantum Leap is no exception. But one of the biggest ones was that the show occasionally forgot that Al was supposed to be a hologram. Sometimes he interacted with things in the vicinity as if he were a flesh-and-blood human.

When Quantum Leap turned 30 years old in 2019, Bakula revealed his three favorite episodes to TV Insider. These were the first part of “A Leap Home,” along with “Shock Theater,” and “Catch a Falling Star.” Fans love these episodes too, and they all have high ratings on IMDb. In fact, “A Leap Home — Part 1” is the highest-rated episode on IMDb. The finale, “Mirror Image,” came in second place.

Often one of the most fun things about time travel shows is seeing the main character interact with famous historical figures. Yet the timelines didn’t always match up with real history. For example, Sam tries to prevent the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1960, but she actually died in 1962. Another episode references Margaret Thatcher in 1954, but she didn’t become the British Prime Minister until 1979.

Finding the right leading man for a TV show isn’t always easy, but it was in the case of Quantum Leap. As soon as Bakula read for Sam Beckett, Bellisario knew he would be perfect. He told the Television Academy in 2008, “He walked out and the door closed. And I went, ‘That’s the guy.’”

In 1990 Stockwell told Emmy magazine, “From the moment I read [the Quantum Leap script], I thought it was perfect, that it was going to be a success.” He added, “My idea going into Quantum Leap was to get stranded in it for five or six years.” He was correct on all counts: the show lasted five years. 

In 2021 Bellisario explained some of the show’s finer points to the Unsolved Mysteries. The people into whom Sam leaped, he said, were kept in a waiting room: “I don’t think they remember anything Sam felt when he was in their body, but I think they leap back into their body and remember being in the waiting room.” He added, “It could drive someone crazy now that I come to think about it.”

Bakula and Stockwell stuck together even after Quantum Leap came to an end. In 2002 they appeared alongside one another in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. And then in 2014, they co-starred in an episode of NCIS: New Orleans helmed by one of Quantum Leap’s directors, James Whitmore Jr. Bakula told TV Guide magazine that year, “It was a good day for the old guys. We laughed and reminisced... It’s so much fun.”

The world was a very different place in 1992. During that year, Quantum Leap did an episode about homophobia, with Sam snapping, “Get out and don’t come back until you’ve joined the 20th century!” at Al when he also expresses bigotry. This was enough to get companies to pull their ads, and the show lost $500,000. But it got to be on the right side of history.

Watch Quantum Leap from the beginning, and you’ll spot some future stars in there. A young Teri Hatcher pops up early on and she’s followed by Neil Patrick Harris, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and perhaps most delightfully of all, Jennifer Aniston. Just two years later, Friends would premiere and make her an A-lister.

In the episode A Portrait For Troian, the titular character is played by Bellisario’s then-wife, Deborah Pratt. But the name came from Bellisario and Pratt's daughter, Troian – and you’ve probably heard it before. Troian Bellisario is now a successful actress in her own right, having shot to fame with Pretty Little Liars.

One big part of Al’s character was his never-ending supply of cigars. This was all Stockwell’s idea, and he had some good reasoning behind it. Well, sort of good reasoning. He revealed later that really, he just wanted free cigars. And what better way than to make sure his character always had one?