Trey Callaway interview

MikeKraken

Project QL Intern
Dec 20, 2002
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Canada
mikekraken.canadianwebs.com
"Thank you"s go to Sharon and Jo for allowing Brian to post the interview with Trey Callaway, the writer of "A Bold Leap Forward"!! I think some of our questions have been answerd...

S: Well, as I recall, Deborah Pratt, who created Sammy Jo, told me that in the "present day" Sammy Jo would be in her thirties. I really hate to be the one to initiate a debate before this project even gets off the ground, but Leapers are probably bigger sticklers for detail than even Don, who established Sammy Jo?s birthdate around March 1967.

Trey: Long Live The Leapers! And while you?re absolutely correct about all the fine print details of the show?s timeline, there are really only two ways in which I?m at
liberty to respond: 1) Time has a funny way of altering itself?or better yet, in the QL continuum, of being altered by someone else. So please keep in mind that some objects may eventually appear younger or older in the rearview mirror. ;-) and 2) It was an absolute mandate for everyone involved that the next chapter of Quantum Leap have its characters rooted in present day?and then limit our leaping to Samantha?s lifespan?at least as long as our audience initially believes her life to be.

I think we already discussed this in the main forum at some point, but now that we have some hard facts from the source, I wonder how they will explain Sammy Jo's age. "Time has a funny way... of being altered by someone else." Are we going to see more of Lothos and his crew? Maybe Ziggy saw the need to find Sam and somehow, someway did something to Sammy Jo?

How could she be a "kid" in 1992 and in her mid-20s in 2006, when she was born in 1967? Those are answers I guess we'll have to wait for, whenever the movie comes out. I don't want to wait that long, though. :lol

... Mike. ^_^
 
She is a leaper after all...

Is there any kind of mention in the series about how "long" Sam has been leaping?

I know there are inconsistancies about whether or not Sam/Al are completely concurrent (just watched "Pool Hall Blues" which suggests that they are.)

Either way, Sammy Jo could leap out of her timeline a few times so that her personal age has nothing to do with her real-time age. Gosh, confusing innit?

So she's "born" in 1967, but leaps in early childhood (perhaps due to the "evil" leapers but more likely due to some connection with Sam's leaping) to circa 1992. She is adopted, but starts to wonder about her "real" past, when a mysterious stranger appears from nowhere. He attempts to gain her trust, but at the critical moment when he wants to reveal everything to her, fizzle, he leaps out, and she's left questioning her sanity.

Fast forward (but no leaping this time) to 2006, when Al finds a way to unearth these disturbing memories...perhaps some trauma befalls someone else close to her, perhaps the only person she feels she can be close to, and Al picks up the pieces. She then goes on a quest to find her "real" father, the mysterious stranger. In the process she gets waylaid by people who need her help, and she realizes that helping them is reward in and of itself, but she won't give up on Sam...

Ok I'll stop now...this is very exciting!!!
 
Re: She is a leaper after all...

When I read the interview after receiving the issue a while back, my idea was that Sammy Jo was still born in 1967, but when she first Leaps, she Leaps into a girl in 1992, gets stuck, and has to live that girl's life until she's old enough to go work at the Project. Then she tries to Leap one more time, having had enough time to figure out what went wrong when she Leaped the first time...

Just a thought...

Joy
 
Re: She is a leaper after all...

I just posted a similar idea in the thread announcing the new site on the general board. It actually is far less complicated than I thought at first. Same idea as if one of the people Sam leaped into got stuck at the Project in the future. Their technical age would still be when they were born. But physically they would be much younger.
You can tell that Trey Calloway really knows his Quantum Leap. If we are right this is not really the out of left field techno babble explanation I was at first afraid of. More a loop hole in the rules of Leaping that was always there.
 
Re: Re: She is a leaper after all...

My theories have been posted on the General Discussion section.

I'm just really hoping that there isn't some stupid explanation for this: something like, "History was altered by someone else, and Sammy Jo was born 10 or 15 years later than she was supposed to be." If that's Trey Callaway's "scientific" explanation, then I think I'd have to hunt him down and murder him!

But seriously, there needs to be some logic behind it, even within the confines of science fiction. Let me use Sliders as an example (which had also started on network television, Fox, and moved to the Sci-Fi Channel). The main character, Quinn Mallory (played by Jerry O'Connell) was written out of the series when Jerry decided to leave after the 4th season (supposedly to pursue his "movie career"... yeah, how's that going, Jerry?) In reality, he left because he wanted his brother to continue having an active part in the series, but the other producers wanted to fire him because... well, he couldn't act to save his life. But I digress...

Anyway, this is where Peckinpah logic came into play (David Peckinpah was the executive producer that Fox hired in the 3rd season to take control of the show away from its creator, Tracy Torm?; Peckinpah is singlehandedly responsible for ruining the show by blatantly ripping off movie ideas and placing the characters into those situations.) He was still a consultant during the 5th and final season, and I believe he's one of the people responsible for the concept they introduced to keep Quinn in the show, but explain why he was now being played by a different actor, Robert Floyd. Basically, something happens during their slide and Quinn gets merged with a "fraternal double" from another world. "Our" Quinn is still alive, but he's trapped within the "composite" Quinn Mallory (who everyone called "Mallory" to distinguish between the two). The reason why Mallory looks different is because he has the same father, but a different mother... hence the term "fraternal double."

Now, I'm no genetics expert, but to me, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If he has a different mother, then that means his genetic makeup is completely different. He cannot BE Quinn Mallory, period. Just because his name is the same doesn't mean he's the same person genetically. Each individual human being exists due to a specific combination of DNA from a specific man and a specific woman, and fertilized within a specific frame of time. You take any of those factors out of the equation, and you've got a completely different person that is conceived.

Which brings me back to Quantum Leap... if they end up explaining that Sammy Jo is younger because she was born in 1980 as opposed to 1967, then I will be extremely disappointed, and will probably not bother watching it at all. It is not possible for someone's birth to be "delayed," because conception at a later date would simply result in a different person with a different genetic makeup being born. Sammy Jo HAS to have been born in 1967 for "A Bold Leap Forward" to make any kind of sense.

Time-travel paradoxes and conundrums, I can deal with. Defying the laws of science, I can't... :p
 
Re: Re: She is a leaper after all...

Excellent point, Damon. And I have a way out of it to make it possible. Sammy Jo still is born in 1967 as a result of Sam and Abigail's night together, but somehow, some way, history is rewritten and she could be leaped into say 1980 for example as an infant or small child. Yes, that could become a huge mess to explain all of the circumstances around this. But I'm not really focusing on tying the loose ends here, just possible explanations so that Sammy Jo can genetically be the same person yet age the same rate as anyone else. Technically Sammy Jo will then actually be in her 30s, but will have actually only aged 20 years or so depending on whatever year the movie/series is set. Just another idea!
 
Re: Re: She is a leaper after all...

Or... what if an Evil Leaper Leaps into the hospital just after Sammy Jo was born and kidnaps her. For some reason or another, Sammy Jo as a baby ends up in 1980 and lives her life either being raised by someone associated with the EL project or by foster parents, so that in 1992, she is 12 years old.

Joy
 
No evil leapers, please

Well, despite the fact that I do like the evil leaper aspect of the original series and would like to see the idea revisited in a new series, I don't want the two-hour film to be complicated with throwing them into the mix. This movie should be about Sammy Jo trying to find her father, along with her learning the ropes of leaping on the way.

I like the idea that younger Sammy Jo accidentally gets leaped back to PQL and gets trapped in her older aura, but we still see her as the real her (and so would Al, perhaps?). I figured that if Don has had anything at all to do with Trey's script (either reviewing it or actually giving suggestions/writing small parts), we Leapers will be satisfied.

... Mike. ^_^