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This article contains spoilers for Quantum Leap’s season 1 finale.NBC’s Quantum Leap season 1 came to a spectacular end, with Ben Song succeeding in his time travel mission – saving the entire project. Nostalgia is all the rage in modern popular culture, and everything old is new again. That means it was only a matter of time before NBC relaunched Quantum Leap, the science-fiction / social commentary series that originally starred Scott Bakula and the late Dean Stockwell as time traveler Sam Beckett and his holographic adviser Al Calavicci. The Quantum Leap relaunch continues this story, set 30 years after the original project, and it’s taken a completely different narrative approach. Its story has been split between Raymond Lee’s Ben Song and the project team in the present day (with a focus on Caitlin Bassett’s Addison Augustine).
This iteration of Quantum Leap has been something of a mystery story, as the project team struggled to figure out why Ben stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator in the first place. Quantum Leap season 1 gradually revealed Ben had learned of a threat from the future, an impending tragedy that he was attempting to avert. Quantum Leap episode 17’s cliffhanger ending saw Ben finally reach the future, where he encountered a future version of Mason Alexander Park’s Ian Wright. This seemed to be setting up a dramatic finale in a dystopian future timeline, but instead that turned out to be nothing more than a pit stop, ahead of a much more intimate finale.
Quantum Leap’s Future Timeline Explained
NBC’s Quantum Leap has rewritten its rules of time travel, revealing it is actually possible for Ben to leap into the future. It seems it’s possible for a leaper to build up a sort of temporal momentum, something compared to a slingshot maneuver where a spacecraft builds up momentum by orbiting around a planet or a moon. Ben’s leaps were carefully programmed to give him three attempts to stop another leaper, Walter Perez’s Richard Martinez. Should he fail in these encounters – as he has in fact done – he will then leap to the year 2051. There, Ian has prepared a failsafe.
The future timeline Ben visits is a broken one, with the United States now in a nuclear war – one that has leveled Los Angeles, so much so that Ian struggled to find a potential host for Ben to leap into. Ian reveals the U.S. government blamed the Quantum Leap project for their dystopian present, using time travel as a scapegoat for its own bad decisions. They sent Martinez back in time to destroy the project before it could begin, explaining why they originally targeted Addison, the original leaper. Ian used the Quantum Leap accelerator to try to stop them in 2041, changing the timeline – leading to Ben stepping into the accelerator instead of Addison. He gave Ben the code to leap through time, initially trying to stop Martinez, and ultimately meeting with Ian ten years later – in 2051.
Quantum Leap’s Failsafe Code Explained
Ian has spent a decade working on what’s essentially a cheat code, one that will give Ben a second try to fix a leap. It’s only possible in specific circumstances, though, making it fiendishly tricky – and a one-time deal. When Ben leaps into the past, he links the flow of time between these two periods. When he leaves Ian and travels back to 2008, ready to try to save Addison, he therefore links 2008 and 2023 – two iterations of the project, both of which have a quantum accelerator. This unique scenario allows for the cheat code, which must be input in both quantum accelerators “simultaneously” to function.
Martinez is essentially Quantum Leap‘s villain, and unfortunately it seems he’s escalated his plan – having interacted with his version of Ziggy, who rightly calculated that killing Addison wouldn’t be enough to stop the project. He has traveled to 2008 to stop the project before it properly got started, by causing a meltdown of the quantum accelerator. Ben fails in his mission to stop Martinez, with the accelerator becoming increasingly unstable, making the cheat code necessary.
How Ben Defeats Martinez In Quantum Leap’s Finale
Ben and Martinez soon wind up in a brawl, one that takes them into the Quantum Leap accelerator himself. This triggers a series of time jumps, as both travelers leap into bodies they inhabited in previous episodes – continuing their battle across time. Both are aiming to take advantage of Quantum Leap‘s oldest rule, the fact that a leaper will be lost if the body they are inhabiting dies. Their fight takes them to the town of Salvation from episode 5, where the Wild West setting initially seems to play to Martinez’s advantage – until he’s shot dead. He is lost in time, his journeys at an end. When the cheat codes are subsequently entered, Martinez is erased from the timeline, not part of the reboot at all.
Will Ben Song’s Adventures Continue In Quantum Leap Season 2?
Quantum Leap‘s season 1 finale ends with Ben apparently leaping back into his own body, his adventures at an end. This decision was no doubt made when the show’s future was unclear, but NBC has renewed Quantum Leap for season 2, making it an odd way to end the story. This may simply be misdirection, but it’s also possible season 2 will pivot, with another leaper entering the timeline to right historic wrongs. This was originally supposed to be Addison’s role, after all, with Ben as the adviser – which would make for a fun flip.
Meanwhile, it’s important to note the threat of this dystopian future timeline has not necessarily been erased. It’s likely future Ian believed his entire timeline would be destroyed, replaced with a completely different one, but this may not be the case. Although Quantum Leap‘s season 1 finale continually draws Terminator parallels, the closest match is actually with a classic X-Men comic book story “Days of Future Past,” in which a future Kitty Pryde tried to erase her dystopian timeline by traveling back and preventing a tragedy. Her attempt was unsuccessful, simply because she’d established a paradox by linking the times far too strongly. Ian could well have accidentally done the same thing.
Making matters worse, it’s entirely possible Ian was wrong to believe the U.S. government was simply using the project as a scapegoat. The original Quantum Leap featured “evil leapers“ who strove to turn history in a worse direction, and the apocalyptic future Ben visited may be a result of their actions. It’s surely no coincidence Quantum Leap season 1, episode 16 name-dropped the evil leapers, as though reminding viewers of their existence. The project team may well find themselves engaged in another time war going forward, this time against classic enemies of Sam Beckett himself.
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