Quantum Leap/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Confirmation that Donald P. Bellisario is writing a script for The Movie.
    • The Season 5 DVD not having the original music replaced with generic series music.
    • "Mirror Image" having the original theme song instead of the Season 5 one. Bellisario was reportedly asked by fans for this, and he threw 'em a bone.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The show's Theme song.
  • Dry Docking: Sam did not have a wife waiting for him in the event that he ever returned home. No, he didn't!
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The Executive Meddling-born ending.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In "Permanent Wave," Sam has to save a boy that witnessed a man being shot to death in a matter involving drugs. The character's name was Phil Hartman. It wasn't too many years later when actor Phil Hartman was himself shot to death by his wife, who had a drug problem.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In "All Americans", Al mentions that he's watching Super Bowl XXX and that the Pittsburgh Steelers are trailing by three points. Jump head six years to the real Super Bowl XXX, where the Steelers were playing and did trail by three points until a miraculous comeback in the final minutes.
    • Weathers Farrington's (played by J.G. Hertzler) contemptuous "What do you know of honor Dumont" is absolutely hilarious when you know that he went on to play the Klingon general Martok in Star Trek:Deep Space Nine.
    • Doubly funny as he's saying this to Sam. A few years after DS 9 ended, Hertzler appeared in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Judgment," where his character and Archer discussed honor and Archer helped him rediscover his own sense of honor.
  • It Was His Sled: Al being the one that Beth leaves for another man in "M.I.A.". It's such common knowledge among fans that you'd forget that the way the episode is structured, it's supposed to be a twist - with Sam stumbling upon a picture of young Al in Beth's home about halfway through.
  • More Than Meets the Eye: Al's character, when turning from a vulgar pervert to a heroic woobie.
  • Nightmare Fuel: One particular episode revolves around a villain faking a mummy's curse to steal its treasures, revealing how he did it all in the end. Then said mummy stands up and strangles him while the survivors flee in terror. Sam leaps out before we find out how it ends.
    • It's even scarier because a wall separates them from the villain and the mummy.You don't see it happen; you only hear the screams. Al is able to pass through the wall to check it out, but immediately comes running back out, saying, "He's killing him."
    • There's also the episode where Sam leaps into a death row inmate with only days left before his execution. He's able to complete his mission just in time to leap out while being electrocuted in the electric chair.
    • The Halloween Episode.
      • To clarify, Sam leaps into a horror novelist from The Sixties and, within just a few moments of arrival, a man falls to his death from a ladder, it having been moved by a goat, which seems to appear and disappear throughout the episode, and Sam's the only one who can see it. As time passes, other characters get killed off in increasingly creepy ways - and to bring this Up to Eleven, something is writing the murders in Sam's host's typewriter seemingly as they occur. Then it turns out that the goat is actually Satan, who's essentially been trolling Sam throughout the episode and steadily wearing him down, before taking human form and nearly strangling Sam in an extremely Mind Screw-ish sequence. Thankfully, Sam Beckett Strangles Satan and resets the episode to the very beginning, but without the devil causing meyhem, nobody dies this time around. And then, it turns that the allusions to horror novels from Sam's own time period has effectively inspired their own creation, because the host's assistant was a young Steven King.
  • Retroactive Recognition: The youngest daughter in "Another Mother" (and Bellisario's real-life daughter) later became Spencer Hastings.
  • Tear Jerker: The Imagine scene. Just the "Imagine" scene...
    • The end of "M.I.A."--Beth, Al, and Georgia On My Mind.
    • The end of "Black on White on Fire," where the brother of the leapee dies in his arms and Sam just breaks down.
    • "Jimmy," when Al talks about his sister Trudy and what ultimately became of her.

"I wound up in an orphanage, and she wound up in an institution. When I was old enough, I went back there for her, but it was too late. She was gone, Sam. 'Pneumonia,' they said. How does a 16-year-old girl die from pneumonia in 1953?!"

  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: On the DVD releases, a large number of the original songs were changed for copyright reasons (the songs were usually well known songs from the time period that a particular episode is set it), which caused a HUGE backlash from fans. In particular, the last episode of the second season, "M.I.A.", removed Ray Charles' "Georgia On My Mind" with some generic muzak, ruining what many thought was the best moment of the entire series (Al, in hologram form, dancing with his first wife who left him while he was a POW in Vietnam). This is definitely a instance in which Tropes Are Not Bad.
    • The Season 5 theme song, meanwhile, wasn't very well-received by fans.
  • Voodoo Shark: That "physical aura" thing.
  • What Could Have Been: It's been said that there were plans for a crossover with Magnum, P.I. (which was also produced by Donald P. Bellisario), in which Sam leaps into Thomas Magnum--but the crossover never got off the ground. However, they apparently did film the initial "leaping in" scene, with Scott Bakula in the familiar red Hawaiian shirt turning to the camera and doing Tom Selleck's famous comical eyebrow raise from Magnum, P.I.'s opening credits.
  • The Woobie: Sam and Al so much.
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