Quantum Leap to return. NBC picked up the sequel
- Thread starter Moviefreak
- Start date
So a couple of cool things to come out of the show:
1. We got to hear what it's like for someone to have Sam leap into them from the old show (which didn't necessarily discount the waiting room, as Al said those who leapt into Sam's body had just as much swiss cheese brain)
2. They've given a way for Ben to leap beyond his lifetime, which really opens up possibilities. I wonder if the original stuck to Sam's timeline for budget reasons? I know they used to use sets from other shows/movies after they wrapped but before they were torn down to have higher production value/save money.
Overall, the show is either getting better or growing on me. These last three episodes have been fun. Not perfect, but a bit more classic QL and some fun. Acting and writing can be a bit shoddy at times, but it's fun popcorn tv. Maybe I'm just really in the mood for any new "Quantum Leap" stuff after I started rewatching the original last week.
The effects have definitely gotten better, so I'm glad someone over there now knows how to rotoscope properly.
And for how this weeks episode ended:
1. We got to hear what it's like for someone to have Sam leap into them from the old show (which didn't necessarily discount the waiting room, as Al said those who leapt into Sam's body had just as much swiss cheese brain)
2. They've given a way for Ben to leap beyond his lifetime, which really opens up possibilities. I wonder if the original stuck to Sam's timeline for budget reasons? I know they used to use sets from other shows/movies after they wrapped but before they were torn down to have higher production value/save money.
Overall, the show is either getting better or growing on me. These last three episodes have been fun. Not perfect, but a bit more classic QL and some fun. Acting and writing can be a bit shoddy at times, but it's fun popcorn tv. Maybe I'm just really in the mood for any new "Quantum Leap" stuff after I started rewatching the original last week.
The effects have definitely gotten better, so I'm glad someone over there now knows how to rotoscope properly.
And for how this weeks episode ended:
Place your bets, was that an evil leaper or was that Sam at the end? Maybe Janice was actually trying to go back to be Sam's hologram, and wasn't trying to go back to Ben (which was the direction I thought they were going, not evil leaper stuff). Either way I am, at this point, convinced that's what the secret reason is for Janice and Ben's hijacking of the project: to get Sam back.
I don't know if anyone has watched SurrealEstate, but, with the passing of Dean Stockwell last fall, I keep looking at Tim Rozon as he appears in that show and seeing a young(er) Dean Stockwell, and find myself wanting some sort of interaction with Al in the past, before the project...
It's not every shot, but I keep seeing it, and more than I see it in him in anything else he's been in. There's something about this show where he seems to be channeling Dean.
It's not every shot, but I keep seeing it, and more than I see it in him in anything else he's been in. There's something about this show where he seems to be channeling Dean.
Don said it was to avoid the cheesiness of stories in ancient Rome or on the Titanic or the like. Too much temptation for the writers to be lazy and stick Sam in some big historic event. The only time he really indulged that was with Oswald, and he didn't want to get into the habit of too many things where we knew the outcome because it's in our history books.
p51
Sr Member
I TRIED watching the 'Atlantis' episode, I really did.
I couldn't get past the poor writing. a 'shuttle' set that looked roomier than the ISS and all the other cringe-worthy aspects.
Hey, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them ("Space Cowboys is one of my favorite movies and it's filled with silliness), but I just couldn't take any more than about 15 minutes of that.
I couldn't get past the poor writing. a 'shuttle' set that looked roomier than the ISS and all the other cringe-worthy aspects.
Hey, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them ("Space Cowboys is one of my favorite movies and it's filled with silliness), but I just couldn't take any more than about 15 minutes of that.
Rewatching the old show and seeing the fun ways Al helped Sam do some things (like hold the sheet music when he was a blind pianist) I think it would be a missed opportunity for them not to have Addison do something like hold up a youtube tutorial on her phone for Ben when he has to do something he doesn't know how to do— or something of the like.
Playing with the creative ways an invisible hologram could help you was one of the funnest part of the original series, they toyed with it a little bit, I think, with the boxing episode, I'd love to see them do more of that in the future.
Playing with the creative ways an invisible hologram could help you was one of the funnest part of the original series, they toyed with it a little bit, I think, with the boxing episode, I'd love to see them do more of that in the future.
Still no sign of this making it to any UK streamer. Doesn't bode well when a beloved series gets a reboot and isn't officially released outside the U.S.A
I love the original and while I know the remake likely won't hold a candle to it, I am still curious to give it a watch.
I love the original and while I know the remake likely won't hold a candle to it, I am still curious to give it a watch.
Starganderfish
Active Member
I used a VPN to watch it on the NBC site - didn't need a subscription or anything.
I watched the first four episodes I think. They were okay I guess, nothing spectacular but also nothing disastrous. Like most modern reboots of classic programs, it simply failed to replicate the charm of the original. In QL's case, a lot of that charm was the chemistry between Bakula and Stockwell. Sadly, no-one in the new series seems to have much charm, charisma, or chemistry with their cast mates so everything falls a bit flat. It's ended up more "generic streaming-service light sci-fi" instead of the original's "quirky, clever character drama". It's not awful by any means - it's not much of anything. It's ... meh.
After watching the first four episodes, I completely forgot it even existed or that I was watching it, till I saw this thread pop up again, and thought "Oh yeah, Quantum Leap reboot. That's a thing."
It looks like it's been renewed for a 2nd season, so if I get bored enough, I may finish out the season and see if it got any better. Looks like its available to stream on one of our local Aussie Free-to-air channels.
I largely agree, Starganderfish…
The show definitely picked up later in the season, but I still felt it fell short of the original…
As the big arc in season 1 wrapped up, not sure where season 2 is gonna go, but I guess we’ll find out…
Sean
The show definitely picked up later in the season, but I still felt it fell short of the original…
As the big arc in season 1 wrapped up, not sure where season 2 is gonna go, but I guess we’ll find out…
Sean
Starganderfish
Active Member
Hmmn. Good to know it picks up, but I'm not sure I can make it through. Just watched 3 more episodes last night... or two and a half.
Spoilers below I guess?
The Old West one was seriously dragging - Ben constantly waffling on about pacifism and he didn't want to kill the guy... you're a super genius from 150 years in the future, I think you can come up with a way to stop him without killing! Even Marty McFly worked that one out!! And when he's finally told how to solve it (note he doesn't figure it out himself, he's told by the mannequin playing his love interest) all I could hear over the final act was the theme song to the A-Team!
The Earthquake episode was actually on the right track. It felt like a classic QL story - saving a small broken family against the backdrop of a larger disaster - tight and focussed. Except we only meet two characters in the past - and the mum's out of the picture after maybe 10 minutes of screen time while the son barely cameos in the last 5 minutes. The rest of the episode is split between at least 20 minutes of "present-day drama" and a bunch of interpersonal relationship stuff between Ben and his cardboard cut-out fiance. By the end I couldn't even remember why the son was angry at the mum!!
As for the Halloween episode... I bailed halfway through.
The fiance is so wooden I end up skipping half her scenes, the present-day stuff feels very generic "government agent/action-thriller", and the past stuff, which is meant to be the heart of the show, gets treated as incidental half the time.
And worst of all I can't believe my semi-tongue-in-cheek speculation after the 3rd or 4th episode was right and they've jumped on the Evil Leaper trope, and done it barely fiv5 episodes in. Less than 5 episodes and we're abandoning most of the core premise - leaping into the distant past, having the leaper's memories return, tying up half the show with the modern-day stuff and now... an evil leaper. urrrgghh
This has given me a bit of a personal revelation though.
So often with these reboots/remakes of classic shows we see all this talk about the showrunners having to walk a fine line between doing something original versus just repeating the old show. Worse, a lot of modern-day TV writers simply aren't skilled enough to do something truly creative, let alone doing it within the bounds of an established concept. When they try, it ends up completely missing the show they're meant to be homaging.
I don't want them to walk that fine line. You know what? Just re-do the old show. I don't care if it feels derivative or isn't "new". I don't want new. There are a hundred half-baked light sci-fi shows on every streaming service - if that's what I wanted to watch, I'd watch one of those. I want Quantum Leap. So give me Quantum Leap. The actor playing Ben is good enough to play a passable Sam Beckett-style "genius with a heart-of-gold" character. The non-binary actor playing the techie would make a pretty decent Hologram foil to bounce the Leaper's naivete off. Dump the rest of the guff and just re-do Quantum Leap. Don't care if it's derivative. At least it might be good.
With reboots, the ones that actually hit the mark are one in a million - Battlestar Galactica and maybe some Doctor Who episodes are ones I can think of off the top of my head, and Doctor Who is barely clinging to its position on that very short list. The best episodes of the modern run of Doctor Who are the ones that captured the charm of the old series. When it went modern angsty drama it went completely off the rails and ratings suffered.
Every show-runner is trying to do what Battlestar did and make a "fresh" reboot, but honestly, that was almost a miracle and it's unlikely to be repeated. Instead, we get Star Trek Discovery, Teen Wolf, Bionic Woman, Charlies Angels...
Studio's need to just accept that the appeal of these old shows IS the old shows and maybe try sticking to the formula. I don't need a talentless modern TV writer to put their creative stamp on it. I don't need everything to be modern angsty drama.
Sometimes you just want nostalgia.
Ooof. Sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant. I really miss the fun of these old shows and I hate how disappointing these new reboots are. Think I'm gonna go fire up my old Quantum Leap DVD's and "set right what NBC made wrong". LOL
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JediG60racer
Sr Member
Just watched the Navy episode.
What. In. The. Serious. Heck.
Did they not have a single person relatively near Hollywood with even the smallest bit of Navy experience they could ply for a tad of realism?
1) The USS Montana class battleships were never built *at least in our timeline* and if they had, the hull number would have been BB-67 not 77
2) Not usual for the command of a flag ship to include multiple 05 level officers, (XO was usually an 05 and often the CO could even be an 05 these days, but in the battleship days, it was usually a clear cut chain of seniority with Flag Admiral/Commodore = 07, CO = 06, XO = 05, and OPS is usually an 04. Where was the 07 whose flagship this would have been? Decisions as seen in this episode would *not* have been made by an 06, and while it's certainly possible for someone mentally unhinged to make rank like that, it's within regulations to relieve such a person of duty. Again, it's a flagship... the presiding Admiral would have made that call. Who was mysteriously missing from this battleship.
3) Firing the main guns would seriously injure anyone on deck in front of the guns, from the concussion itself destroying ear drums, let alone what it would do to a mess of crew members scrambling around ON THE GUNS without hearing protection, who would all fall and get injured. Firing even the 5" cannons with crewman on deck without hearing protection would have seriously injured them.
4) 5" guns are not used against aircraft
5) Ordnance drills are done with a great deal of communication and safety protocols, not ever with crew members above deck without having first made sure they are safe.
6) Captains do not have authority to order their ships to engage an enemy without being fired upon without direct orders from above, and the entire bridge crew knows this.
Sorry, the Navy in me just groaned about every 30 seconds through this episode. At least it wasn't quite as beat me over the head with particular agendas as the preceding several episodes. Please spend more time developing characters we will actually care about. Not stereotypes and tropes we're expected to root for just because.
At this point, I'm more interested in the evil leaper than the main characters. There are barely any redeeming qualities about any of the main QL team members... it's like watching LOST all over again and getting annoyed at each character as we go along, to the point that when they killed off the actual likeable ones, the show lost all interest.
If this is the best the Writers Guild members can come up with, wow. Just wow. I mean it's a sci-fi show but come on. Throwing the old 80's show vibe in a blender with millenial virtue signaling is not working to create a likeable show. And I want to like it. It's just... I don't. And like a train wreck in progress I can't look away.
Make a crossover with A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf and Magnum PI in one super episode final and let's be done with it.
What. In. The. Serious. Heck.
Did they not have a single person relatively near Hollywood with even the smallest bit of Navy experience they could ply for a tad of realism?
1) The USS Montana class battleships were never built *at least in our timeline* and if they had, the hull number would have been BB-67 not 77
2) Not usual for the command of a flag ship to include multiple 05 level officers, (XO was usually an 05 and often the CO could even be an 05 these days, but in the battleship days, it was usually a clear cut chain of seniority with Flag Admiral/Commodore = 07, CO = 06, XO = 05, and OPS is usually an 04. Where was the 07 whose flagship this would have been? Decisions as seen in this episode would *not* have been made by an 06, and while it's certainly possible for someone mentally unhinged to make rank like that, it's within regulations to relieve such a person of duty. Again, it's a flagship... the presiding Admiral would have made that call. Who was mysteriously missing from this battleship.
3) Firing the main guns would seriously injure anyone on deck in front of the guns, from the concussion itself destroying ear drums, let alone what it would do to a mess of crew members scrambling around ON THE GUNS without hearing protection, who would all fall and get injured. Firing even the 5" cannons with crewman on deck without hearing protection would have seriously injured them.
4) 5" guns are not used against aircraft
5) Ordnance drills are done with a great deal of communication and safety protocols, not ever with crew members above deck without having first made sure they are safe.
6) Captains do not have authority to order their ships to engage an enemy without being fired upon without direct orders from above, and the entire bridge crew knows this.
Sorry, the Navy in me just groaned about every 30 seconds through this episode. At least it wasn't quite as beat me over the head with particular agendas as the preceding several episodes. Please spend more time developing characters we will actually care about. Not stereotypes and tropes we're expected to root for just because.
At this point, I'm more interested in the evil leaper than the main characters. There are barely any redeeming qualities about any of the main QL team members... it's like watching LOST all over again and getting annoyed at each character as we go along, to the point that when they killed off the actual likeable ones, the show lost all interest.
If this is the best the Writers Guild members can come up with, wow. Just wow. I mean it's a sci-fi show but come on. Throwing the old 80's show vibe in a blender with millenial virtue signaling is not working to create a likeable show. And I want to like it. It's just... I don't. And like a train wreck in progress I can't look away.
Make a crossover with A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf and Magnum PI in one super episode final and let's be done with it.
Starganderfish
Active Member
Ironically, I think Airwolf is the only show in that list (incl QL of course) that hasn't been rebooted in one form or another and AFAIK, they were all pretty terrible. I did see rumors that Peacock where looking at an Airwolf reboot too so... uurrggghhh.
Reboots are a weird thing. It's a form of creative bankruptcy to just rehash an old idea, but no-one wants to embrace that and just go whole-hog with re-making things properly. It's always got to have a "new spin" or a "fresh take" or just "make it dark or edgy" and it never works.
Every time I think of reboots I remember that classic Stargate SG-1 episode "200". The whole episode was just mocking the entire studio reboot concept.
drusselmeyer
Master Member
Actually, Airwolf was rebooted while it was still on the air... It was an air-disaster!
The inclusion of Barry Van Dyke was as much of a signal of doom as moving a show to Friday night back then.
The inclusion of Barry Van Dyke was as much of a signal of doom as moving a show to Friday night back then.
Riceball
Master Member
To be fair, Hollywood has always had a problem with portraying flagships correctly. I don't think I've seen one show or movie where a flagship operated like a proper flagship and the Admiral in charge wasn't commanding his own flagship. So it's not surprising that they didn't have an Admiral aboard, that, along with Admirals commanding their own flagships, is par for the course for Hollywood. It's also certainly a budgetary thing, one less actor to costume and pay for. You see this all the time when they adapt books to movies and combine certain characters or delete certain characters and give their lines to others in an effort to keep the number of cast members down.
As fo the 5 inches being used for AA, IIRC, the 5 inch guns on the Iowas, and may be some preceding BBs were classified as dual purpose guns. So in addition to the usual shore bombardment and attacking other ships, they could also be used for anti-aircraft duties, likely with proximity fused rounds. They would have provided more of an anti-aircraft punch than the next largest AA guns, which would have been 40mm Bofors. Hell, the Yamato class BBs even had AA shells and capability in their 18 inch main guns. Given that, using 5 inchers as AA guns by the US would have seemed conservative by comparison.
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