blue enigma said:
We never forget that Beth was Al's true love. She's a part of him. Whenever he talks about his other four ex-wives he messes up the order, mixes up their names, etc., but he never makes those mistakes with Beth. And in the Star Light, Star Bright episode when Sam, under the influence of truth serum, is giving his real name and talking about Quantum Leap, Al calls out to Gooshie that if he disappears from existence he wants to leave everything to his first wife Beth - which is really something when you think about how divorced people usually behave when it comes to property, they don't want their ex to have anything.
Brilliant points. These are the types of little tidbits we never get from Sam though it would have been entirely possible even with his having no memory of her as they could use that he remembers the original timeline when she'd stood him up at the alter.
blue enigma said:
Yep. They didn't follow through with it. Sam didn't remember Donna after the opening of The Right Hand of God, not until The Leap Back, which has always bothered me because there are many things Sam does remember, even without Al reminding him. He also fell in love with other women very easily. The Trilogy is the most extreme and obvious example, but even way before that, Sam pretty regularly had feelings for women in leaps, even as early as Season 1 post Star Crossed (Alison in Play It Again, Seymour for example). And part of that can be rationalized as the mind-merge with the leapee, so the feelings he had were partly the leapee's, not entirely his - but it still gets kind of messy.
It's established that Sam's memory is scrambled differently with each leap, we see this in regards to his simo-leaping with Al. At the end of
The Leap Back Al tells Donna that Sam doesn't remember Simo-Leaping with him let alone her, in
Dreams he obviously does as he himself brings it up when theorizing mind-merging to Al, then in
LHO if memory serves he once again does not remember it when Al uses it to try to explain their attempt to leap his neurons and masons to him.
Thus it's quite possible that he could remember who Donna is without remembering that he'd manipulated events so that he was married to her.
We actually see this concept used with Tom.
In
Rebel Without a Clue Sam seems to struggle with whether or not Tom had died in Vietnam. Later you could tell by his expression that he was getting the confirmation he'd been looking for in
Rebel... by the elderly couple in
The Promised Land who mention the Becketts having a son who'd just returned from Vietnam.
It's evident that initially his memory hadn't altered after what he'd changed in the Magic Williams leap then in
Rebel... the new version was triggered but seemed unable to surface completely.
So it's quite evident that there was simply a lack of a lot of interest in Donna by the writers even before
The Leap Back when Pratt decided to mentally delete her. Looking at it this way thank to you Blue, there were a ton of missed opportunities to establish her as the love of Sam's life.
Almost as though the whole
Star Crossed thing had been intended simply as an excuse to introduce the no effecting his personal timeline rule but had accidentally ended up trapping themselves when they actually had Sam go through with his personal agenda.
Backtracking for a moment to the tidbits you pointed out that remind us that Beth was a different love for Al, The line in
Starlight, Starbright was also quite interesting considering it had been almost 50 years since he'd seen Beth. If
Pulitzer were canon, she wasn't even implied to have shown any interest in seeing him when he got home from Vietnam.
On another point made, there are certainly a lot of leaps where the attraction is completely Sam's. Recall Nicole in
Catch a Falling Star and Tamlyn in
Temptation Eyes who were both quite personal love interests unrelated to the leaps. Nicole in particular also causes an angle of Donna not being entirely believable though it's Scott's belief that she understands what's required of Sam out there and doesn't hold anything against him. Nicole seemed like something that should have stung her however as she was his own boyhood crush. Far more intament a feeling than someone in a relationship with the leapee (though Nicole did happen to also have a romantic past with the leapee so perhaps Donna was blind to the fact that Sam was acting for himself).
Let's look at Diane McBride in
Honeymoon Express, you could tell that she'd aroused him when he gave up his bit where he'd tried to reveal himself to her and his voice became unfocused as he called himself by the leapee's name and announced he was about to have sex with the most beautiful woman.
He was also about to at the end when he leaped.
"Either leap me out of here or look the other way."
In any cause other than Nicole and Tamlyn however you can argue that the leapee could be in some control even if it's not evident.
Abigail is a little of both. While she is the strongest example of Sam having feelings for someone in a leap she was also the most pronounced example of the leapee being in control of those feelings regardless of the fact that what portion of the feelings had been Sam's dominated the leapee halfway through the episode.
Sorry I've steered us off topic, I have a bad habit of that. >_<
