Greetings to all our Leaping Listeners… Or is it Listening Leapers? While watching “Blind Faith” something stuck out at me, and in my mind it branched off into a number of theories, which I felt deserved discussion in this segment. We are told by Al that Michelle was the fourth victim of the strangler and that Sam is there to prevent her murder. Why is it that Sam leapt to save Michelle and only Michelle, when if he had leapt to a slightly earlier point in time, he could have attempted to stop the strangler before he killed anyone? I’m sure if Sam had known that the sexy French lady was to be a victim, for example, he’d have done something to try to save her (he certainly liked perving on her while he was disguised as being blind – a scene I loved by the way because it showed that Sam is human and has human urges, a fact which is diminished as time goes on…) I am sure there are numerous behind-the-scenes reasons for Michelle being the only one saved, such as the writers wanting to make the story more personal by focusing on Michelle and her long-suffering mother, while Sam has to pretend to be blind (which, by the way, is more proof that it is Sam’s body leaping around, and not just his mind or consciousness, since if he was stuck in Andrew’s body, he’d be using Andrew’s useless eyes and so would not be able to see…), and to give Scott Bakula a chance to show off more of his musical skills, but because we all get so engrossed in the Quantum Leap Universe, I wanted to come up with some in-universe answers…
In my mind, there appears to be two factors which affect the missions which Sam attempts. The first is what God/Time/Fate/Whatever (GTFW) wants changed, and the second is what Sam is actually capable of doing. From each of these, numerous other minor things come into play as well.
Starting off with GTFW, we need to consider whether there is some sort of “Grand Design”, and whether each person has some destiny that needs to be carried out, or whether all of history is just a mass combination of each person’s choices. It might seem odd to talk about destiny and things being predetermined, on a show that is all about changing history for the better. But when we say that Sam “puts right what once went wrong”, it is worth wondering if there had originally been something that was planned (considered right) by some outside force (GTFW) and that there is some outside force messing things up (for example, the Devil)? And if that is the case, then Sam would be more like the space-time-continuum’s clean-up crew. If there is not any Grand Design then that would mean that Sam is more like a teacher, or a guide, helping people to make better decisions and preventing or punishing those who are determined to do the wrong thing…
I’ll come back to the idea of a Grand Design later, but if there is something that is supposed to be carried out, which for some reason didn’t, that would mean that GFTW had plans for Michelle, and that her destiny hadn’t been carried out yet – maybe she was destined to do something major herself, or influence another person to do so. This is not to say that the other three lives were any less important, just that perhaps their destinies had already come to pass. I personally believe that since Michelle was studying to be a nurse, and this is something she seemed passionate about and was one of the few things that her mother approved of, that she did end up becoming a great nurse and ended up helping to save a lot of lives. Getting back onto the topic at hand, which is “why couldn’t Sam save everyone?” we have to remember that saving Michelle’s physical life wasn’t the only thing Sam was there to do. He also had to make sure that Michelle could live her life as she chose. If Sam had leapt into the area some time earlier and HAD managed to stop the strangler earlier, then he would not have been in any position to carry out this secondary mission, which would be vital should Michelle have some destiny that needs to be carried out.
The ripple effect is prevalent in Quantum Leap, and to use a quote from the show, “the lives Sam touched, touched others, and those, others…” so Michelle probably did end up touching the lives of many that she encountered, and while we’re on the subject of ripples, let’s consider all the other people that were affected by Sam’s intervening as well. First, there’s Michelle’s mother. All she really had in her life was Michelle, which is probably why she was so smothering to begin with. It is said that death is always hardest on those who are left behind, and in the original history, she would have had to deal with her only daughter’s murder. She would probably have ended up with severe depression, could have turned to alcohol or drugs to try to numb the pain, or even ended up as a vigilante, her life now consumed with bringing the strangler to justice. What sort of a life is that to live? Then in the brief period after Michelle is saved but before Sam talked to her about how she was treating Michelle, she probably had just gone back to smothering Michelle, maybe even more-so considering the near-death experience. Nothing will change until Sam does something to change it after all. But finally, now that Andrew and Michelle are together, she is liberated of her responsibility of taking care of Michelle. I would hope that she would use her new spare time to enjoy her life, and do some good, because ultimately she is a good person. Speaking of Andrew and Michelle, if (as Sam had predicted), they did end up married, then they probably had children, and with such good people as their parents, how could they not end up doing good things too?
To finish on the discussion of the ripple effect, there is always the possibility of a negative ripple. In time-travel works, it’s often referred to as the “Killing Hitler” risk. The idea is that if you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he could rise to power, then theoretically you would save over six million people. But who’s to say that one of those people is not worse than Hitler, and would end up doing even worse things? The same thing could happen here, it’s possible (however unlikely) that one of the strangler’s first three victims was a complete psychopath and if allowed to live, could perform monstrous acts even worse than those of the strangler. I personally do not subscribe to this theory in the Quantum Leap universe, because it would invalidate the basic message of trying to change history FOR THE BETTER, but it is still not impossible. A conversation between Stewie and Brian from Family Guy comes to mind – they have travelled back in time ten years and Stewie warns Brian not to change anything because it could have consequences neither of them could imagine, and when Brian asks where he learnt that, Stewie replies “Quantum Leap”, which baffles Brian considering the fact that Sam changed history all the time…
The other major factor that comes into play when it comes to what Sam is able to change, is Sam’s own abilities and limitations. It is lucky that he is in peak physical health, with full vision and hearing, has training in martial arts, and is incredibly intelligent. That puts him in a better position to get through adversity than a lot of the people he has replaced. But he still has some limitations. The first is the situation itself which leads up to the event to be changed. The first three victims were murdered while walking alone in the park. With nobody else around, there was nobody for Sam to leap into to protect these women, and also if he had leapt into the victims themselves, then HE risks being the one who is murdered. Theoretically he could just stay home, but with the strangler determined to kill, that just means some other innocent person would become his target.
The other major limitation is the information that is available in his own time that Ziggy is able to access. It’s very likely that in the original history, the strangler was never caught (if he was, then surely Al would have told Sam who it was…) and so how would Sam know who to look out for and to try to stop before they went on their rampage? So it makes perfect sense that Sam would leap into Andrew Ross. As the closest person to Michelle at the time, maybe Andrew had originally tried to walk Michelle home, but without his eyesight, couldn’t do anything to stop the strangler when he attacked? Even though Sam was blind when he saved Michelle, he had two extra sets of eyes to see for him (Al’s and Chaupin’s) and so this really was the only possible way to stop the strangler. Now this brings up another good point, once Sam did catch the strangler, it would show up in the records, so why couldn’t Sam then leap back and try to stop the strangler earlier? Why, for the same reasons listed above – the Killing Hitler risk, the fact that there was nobody to leap into, and his secondary mission of saving Michelle’s emotional life. It really does appear that there is method to the madness of this Grand Design (if it exists).
This brings me to the final part of my segment, and I’d like to discuss how I see the Grand Design. There are four physical dimensions (length, breadth, depth and time), but since in the Quantum Leap Universe, time is able to be manipulated, I think there must be some fifth dimension, which the controller of the Grand Design must be in (and whoever is messing it up). If you have trouble picturing this, I’d advise you to watch “Men In Black 3”, there is what they call a “fifth dimensional being” who can see all possible events in all possible times over any area. Sam’s theory on time travel is what he calls his “string theory”, that each life can be thought of like a string, with one end being birth, and the other, death, and that by joining the ends and then balling up the string, the days of one’s life cross over each other, enabling days to be skipped over. I think that the Grand Design might also be a string, with everything that happens, in ALL timelines, already printed on it. The time-travel aspect could simply be the same as Sam’s theory, with the string being joined and balled up, or rather, smaller loops being created. When Sam travels in time, the string moves back over itself, and once Sam changes history, a loop in the string appears. Everyone in the string only experiences going over the leap caused by the string crossing over itself, and the history that is erased or changed ends up in the resulting loop that gets skipped over.
So that is how I view the Grand Design, everybody has a destiny to fulfil, it’s just that sometimes GTFW needs help cleaning up the mess that something else is creating, which is where Sam comes in. The “destiny string” is balled over, and the part of history that needs fixing is just skipped over. Sam can’t help everyone, but those he does help end up touching others in ways we can’t even imagine.
Thank you to Sarah for sharing her thoughts with me when I asked for input on the Facebook page, she too believed that Michelle was destined for greatness. If you have any thoughts about something I’ve talked about or will talk about, please let me know, I’d love to hear from you. Also if you have any suggestions for something to discuss, I’d love to hear that too. ‘Til next time, may you all take a “Leap of Faith” and fulfil your roles in the Grand Design ~Hayden
