Its been the fashion of late, to reinvent once popular shows without any conception of what made them popular to start with. Calling a show Quantum Leap, isn't a magic totem, it doesn't make the show automatically work.

Such is the case with this "new", old series. The original series starring Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell worked in large part, because of the great chemistry and wry humour, these two shared, as much as it was, the shows time travelling adventures.

The reinvention isn't utterly awful but its a long way from being the original.Indeed, aside from the name this show could have been called anything. It bears only a superficial semblance in terms of overriding story.

To my mind, its not helped either by this incessant need, on the part of contemporary entertainment, to push social justice and woke ideologies on the viewing audience. Its not as if we don't notice and speaking for myself and no doubt many others, its tiresome.

If people don't believe in something or are not interested (I'm in the latter category) incessantly trumpeting the message, if I'm anything to go by turns people off and I suspect, hardens resistance.


In summary, moderately watchable, The chemistry between the leads found in the original series is largely absent, as is the humour.Usual dreary woke messaging does nothing, in my opinion, to enhance this series enjoyment.

Watching a couple of episodes of this re-boot has just made me want to watch the original series again.

Don't know why they bothered with this 2022 version of Quantum Leap... the characters are insincere, the stories are hollow, the drama is over inflated. It's just not interesting.

Watch the original... it still works as well today as the first time I watched it. The adventures (leaps) are totally engaging and the chemistry between Al and Sam is magic.

This really is Quantum Leap in name only. I really wanted this to be good. For years, I said all reboots are unnecessary but QL actually made a kind of sense. You could cover a whole new era (and the time between the original series ending and now has certainly been... busy enough to fill a series). But this is just... not that. It's aggressively mediocre. They insist on splitting time between the leap and the project, where everyone is obsessed with a Big Conspiracy MacGuffin that really just eats up the run time. And because they keep shifting to that story, Ben's leaps are half-baked and rushed. Every emotional beat happens because "Well, we're almost at our quota of script pages, they should make up now." There's no emotional connection to anything Ben is doing in the past because the writers are more interested in filling in the blanks of the cliche conspiracy plot that has been done in every single scifi show of the past decade or so.

[spoiler]I appreciate that they got Susan Diol back for the second episode[/spoiler] but at this point it just feels like they're hanging placards on things as a shortcut to making us care. They drop the name DR SAM BECKETT so they don't have to do any work to make you like drbensong. They think uttering the name CALAVICCI will connect you to janice.

It's generic as hell, the dialogue is bad, the characters are cardboard, and it's not going to last long enough to lodge in your memory even if it hasn't been swiss-cheesed.

I didn't finish the pilot episode because I didn't care about the time traveling man solving random strangers' problems.


They said the computer chooses where he time travels, but also tried to say he chose to travel to the man who the needed help for a reason. It can't be both!

And him being stuck in time loses its point when they say he chose to go to the past on his own and he knew memory loss was likely to occur. Add to that, the sudden changes he made to the time travel computer system without telling or explaining to anyone caused his problems.

They tried really hard to create a scenario where you have to just accept this bad situation and hopefully watch every week. Unfortunately, it's unrealistic and not believable. For example, no one would run to a getaway car to be the driver, when he didn't even know the criminals with guns who robbed the bank. Any other law abiding citizen would have run the other way!

And since he doesn't remember anything about who he is, he actually doesn't even know he's trapped in time. He could just stay where he is, find a job and be happy!

Theory

I think Ben's target is the Bar from S05E22: Mirror Image of the original Quantum Leap project.

In the series finale episode, Al left him at the Bar to figure out what's happening and why the Bar was weird… as per Sam's explanation to him. After that, they never met again.

So, officially, Sam's was marked as 'lost in time' and 'never went home'. But Ben and Al's daughter probably have a theory where to start their search, and that is the Bar, the last known location Al saw Sam.

The only question is, was not that why the Quantum Leap project was restarted? To find and rescue Sam? If so, don't they have a record of Sam's last known location?

[spoiler]It is starting to appear, as of Episode 3, that Al hid the information about the Bar from the records, and years later his daughter figured it out and she convinced Ben to do it her way -- reach the Bar and start their search from there.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]This is an interesting twist. Why? If Quantum Leap 2.0, or at least Ben, learns that they can leap whenever and wherever the Leaper wants, it can open up a whole new different plot for this sequel. Instead of it being 'random', they can start adding stories about a real attempt to change the past … and Ben will struggle between following the orders of the Pentagon or fighting back.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]It will also open an opportunity to explore what the "Mirror Image" series finale episode hinted at, there are other Leapers.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]With that knowledge about Leapers actually controlling their leaps, would it not be amiss if the Pentagon doesn't make use of the opportunity [to start a Temporal (Cold) War]?[/spoiler]

Then we have Ben, and his team, trying to correct or stop them?