3 Timeless Life Lessons from 90’s TV Show “Quantum Leap”
Quantum Leap is a science fiction adventure drama show that ran from 1989 to 1993.
It’s also one of my favourite TV shows of all time.
In classic 90’s TV fashion, the introduction to each episode summarises the show’s premise perfectly:
Theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished.
He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear.
And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap…
…will be the leap home.
Each episode presents Sam bouncing around various scenarios across history, in the body of an unknown person. He has to perform some kind of task in order to correct history, the completion of which triggers a leap to do it all over again for somebody else in the next episode. Assuming that next leap isn’t his leap home.
Here are 3 timeless life lessons that have I taken from the show. Let’s go!
1. Trust your intuition.
Sam Beckett was a smart guy as far as protagonists go.
He held seven (!) doctorates, in: quantum physics, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, ancient languages, archaeology and music. Whilst this undoubtedly places him at an advantage in various situations throughout his leaps, even despite the acute memory loss he suffered from leaping (his brain being ‘Swiss cheese’ according to the show’s vernacular) — it was often not his impressive intellect in isolation that saved the day and put right what once went wrong.
It was also his intuition.
Sam was an extremely well-rounded individual in terms of the more subjective personality traits. He was compassionate, personable, a good listener, versatile, and down to earth. It was often these traits that helped him to triumph, even during moments where Sam’s actions would be — according to Al — overwhelmingly likely to fail from a statistical point of view.
The idea of trusting your intuition, and using it in tandem with your intellect - not necessarily against it or in place of it, has stuck with me.
(…I’m not claiming to have the intellect of someone with seven doctorates. Unless puns count as intellect?)
2. Compassion can change the world.
The show was science-fiction on the surface, but each episode was really a human story.
It was about people.
It was about how the fabric of our individual lives are interweaved with one another across the world and across time, in ways that we cannot possibly begin to fathom.
It was about how having compassion for people – by literally walking in their shoes –can be the gateway to making the world a better place.
My favourite part of each episode would be when Al would tell Sam about the life a given character would go on to lead, and what the consequences of Sam’s actions were to that person and to the wider context of history. Some things were big, some were small, but all of them were meaningful in their own way.
The very premise of being a compassionate human first and foremost, helping someone in their life, and the impact it can have on them, others and ultimately the world is one of the key tenets of the show.
And I am here for it.
3. It’s the journey, not the destination.
The entire premise of the show revolves around Sam hoping that each leap will be the leap home.
However, due to the show being cancelled and in an attempt to wrap up the overall narrative fairly quickly — the final episode of the show is a slightly bizarre and self-referential one that ends with a final title card showing the following:
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.
(Sidenote: technically the text actually shown was “Dr. Sam Becket [sic] never returned home.” — but we can forgive the occasional tyop, right?)
My initial reaction when I first watched it was that this was a sad ending. He never returned home?! He was stuck leaping from life to life, forever?!
Would this ending have stayed with me had Sam leaped back into his own body, hung up his quantum slippers and patted himself on the back for a job well done?
I don’t think so.
I’ve come to appreciate since then that there is a poetic beauty to the ending of the show (despite the fact that there are various alternate ending tidbits that have surfaced since this was originally aired).
I took the ending to mean that it was never really about an ultimate destination, or an objective resolution. Doing good, changing people’s lives, and putting any kind of value out into the world is not some linear one-and-done (or five-seasons-and-done) thing. It’s an unending endeavour that has no real beginning or end.
It’s the journey, not the destination.
