Sam Beckett

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Samuel Beckett

Dr. Samuel Beckett (right) with Rear Admiral Al Calavicci
First appearance March 26, 1989
Genesis
Last appearance May 5, 1993
Mirror Image
Created by Donald P. Bellisario
Portrayed by Scott Bakula
Information
Nickname(s) Sam
Species Human
Gender Male
Age 42 (at the beginning of the series)
Date of birth August 8, 1953
Occupation Scientist
Time traveler
Spouse(s) Donna Eleese
Children Samantha Josephine "Sammy Jo" Fuller
Relatives Jonathan Beckett (father; deceased), Thelma Beckett (mother), Tom Beckett (brother), Katie Beckett (sister)

Dr. Samuel "Sam" Beckett is a fictional character and the protagonist on the science fiction drama Quantum Leap, played by Scott Bakula. Initially, the audience knows very little about Samuel Beckett, much as Samuel Beckett knows little about himself due to holes in his memory dubbed the "Swiss Cheese Effect".

Contents

[edit] Backstory

Sam Beckett was born August 8, 1953 in Elk Ridge, Indiana to dairy farmer Jonathan Beckett and his wife Thelma. Sam was a child prodigy, learning to read at age 2 and do calculus in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess. He also played piano in a concert at Carnegie Hall. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his elder brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam.

Sam graduated high school at age 16, and following his brother's advice, attended MIT. While at MIT, Sam and his mentor, Professor LoNigro, developed a string theory on time travel ("Her Charm"; see below). Sam went through four years of MIT in two years, and continued through various colleges to eventually obtain seven doctoral degrees in Music, Medicine, Physics, Archeology, Ancient Languages, Chemistry, and Astronomy. During his college years, Sam's father suffered a fatal heart attack; the guilt of his absence during his family's time of need would stay with Sam for years.

As a young adult, Sam was a key member of the Starbright Project (details on the nature of the project were not revealed on the show). It was on the Starbright Project where he would meet some of his closest and most trusted friends: Al Calavicci, a decorated naval officer; a brilliant computer programmer known simply as Gushie; and Dr. Donna Eleese, the love of Sam's life. In the years after the Starbright Project, Sam and Donna were engaged, but Sam was jilted at the altar and never saw Donna again.

On Sam's third leap he meets Donna years before he himself get engaged to her. Realizing that her damaged relationship with her father is the reason why she can never commit to a relationship- as her father left her, she subconsciously feels that any man she meets will inevitably abandon her and thus prevents them from doing so by leaving herself- he drives her out to him so that she might get some closure. We learn later in the episode "The Leap Back" that as a result of this Donna never leaves Sam at the altar and are married to this day.

A few years later, Sam and Al spearheaded Project Quantum Leap, a time travel experiment based on the string theory Sam had developed while at MIT. The PQL facility was located in Stallion's Gate, New Mexico in a primarily underground complex. In 1995, after constructing the necessary machinery, including a holographic imaging chamber and a supercomputer with access to vast historical databases, the project's funds were running thin. Eager to prove his theories, Sam prematurely stepped into the nuclear accelerator chamber and propelled himself back in time.

[edit] The Time Traveler

In the pilot, Sam awoke in 1956 having exchanged places in time with an Air Force test pilot. He is startled to see a stranger in the mirror as he prepares to shave. Others also see Sam as the person he displaced. As Sam would soon discover, quantum-leaping had an unforeseen side-effect: He was struck with partial amnesia, describing his own situation with the analogy of his brain being like a hunk of Swiss cheese, with his memory full of holes and lacking some personal information about his past (The most consistently absent detail being his marriage to Donna, with Donna preferring that Sam not be reminded of their marriage so that he can more easily commit to the people his hosts are in love with and thus solve whatever he is there to accomplish).

To lead Sam and the audience from this confusion comes Al, an observer from Sam's own time. Except, Al has to convince Sam he's not a hallucination. As a hologram tuned to Sam's brain waves, that only Sam can see and hear, convincing an amnesiac he's real is difficult. Al conveys to Sam a theory to return Sam to the present: that an unknown influence (God, Fate or Time) was using Sam to correct a mistake in the past -- in this case, saving the life of the pilot Sam had displaced, who was killed in an experimental aircraft in the original history.

When Sam corrected the timeline, he leaped, but not all the way home; this time, he found himself assuming the identity of a minor-league pro baseball player. For the rest of his life (an epilogue at the series finale tells us he never gets home, but in our terms it was the next four years/five seasons, the duration of the show), Sam would continue to travel back and forth through time, swapping identities with various people, and, as a tagline for the show reiterated, "setting right what once went wrong."

[edit] Dr. Beckett's String Theory

Sam's theory of time travel, developed with Professor LoNigro, is based on an expanding, but finite, universe. A person's life is like a length of string. One end represents birth, the other represents death. If one were to tie the ends of the string together, their life becomes a loop. Next, by balling the loop together, the days on one's life would touch one another out of sequence, thus allowing one to travel back and forth within their own lifetime, thus making a quantum leap between each time period. Thus, Sam's leaps were always limited to time frames within his own life; he could not leap to a period prior to his birth, or into his own future. However, in one episode Sam was able to leap outside of his own lifetime and found himself in the American Civil War in the life of his great grandfather. It was because Sam shared the man's genetic traits by being a direct descendant that he was able to accomplish this. This was also partly due to an "error" that was referenced and then corrected by Ziggy, implying that Sam would not be able to pull off a similar feat again and was once more limited to his own timeline.

Al explains this theory in the pilot episode, and Sam, recovering his memory of the theory, turns around and explains it to Donna in the second episode, "Star-Crossed." This theory is later revealed to have been independently developed by actor and would-be time traveler Moe Stein in "Future Boy", who explains it on his television show in response to a viewer question from the younger Sam Beckett who at that time was still a child living in Elk Ridge, Indiana; only his own lack of resources prevented Moe from creating Quantum Leap decades before Sam.

[edit] Changes in his own life

Though explicitly forbidden by his own guidelines to alter the past for his own benefit, Sam did alter his own history and those of his loved ones on a number of occasions:

  • In the second episode of the series, "Star-Crossed", Sam reunited his future fiancée, Donna, who was 19 at the time, with her estranged father. As a result, Donna's fears of being abandoned by the people she cared for never became an issue, resulting in her not leaving Sam at the altar, and the couple were married (as discovered in later episodes, such as the next entry). This union would bring Donna onto Project Quantum Leap and, through her father's military connections, assure government funding, thus replacing the Project's private funding oversight committee with a government oversight committee.
  • In the episode "Honeymoon Express", the government oversight committee tried to shut down PQL by rejecting its multi-billion dollar annual budget. In an attempt to prove that Sam had leaped, Al tried to get Sam to prevent the downing of the U-2. Sam was unable to prevent the U-2 mission, but by saving the life of a young woman and subsequently helping her pass her legal exams, he saved the Project when history changed and the same woman now led the oversight committee and approved the Project's budget.
  • In the episode "M.I.A.", Al tried to get Sam to save his first marriage, which nearly cost the life of the man Sam was really there to save (Although in Al's defense, he simply never bothered to check for alternative reasons for Sam's presence rather than deciding that his need took precedence over that of the person they were there to help). In the end, Sam leaped, but was unable to save Al's marriage (see final entry).
  • In the episode "The Leap Home", Sam leaped into himself as a teenager to win a basketball game his team originally lost. While there, he tried, without success, to save the lives of his father and brother, but Al suggested that, in the end, he was only there to have an opportunity to say goodbye to them. When Sam leaped, he found himself in his brother's SEAL unit in Vietnam. While there, Sam saved his brother's life, but missed a chance to free a young Al and two other POWs from their Viet-Cong captors, although Al assured him that he understood.
  • In the episode "The Leap Back", Sam and Al exchanged places as Leaper and Observor, leaving Al in 1945 and finally returning Sam home. When Al was incapacitated in the past, Sam once again entered his time machine to exchange places with Al again.
  • In the episode "Trilogy, Part II", Sam fathered a child, Samantha Josephine "Sammy Jo" Fuller. Like her father, Sammy Jo was a prodigy with a photographic memory. She would grow up to join the staff of Project Quantum Leap.
  • In the series' final episode "Mirror Image", Sam learned the truth that he was, and had always been, the one in control of his journey through time (albeit only via his subconscious mind up to this point). Though initially unable to accept that fact, Sam returned to a single point in time, and assured that Al's marriage to his first wife, Beth, would survive Al's years as a POW in Vietnam.

[edit] Trivia

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The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • Sam's many accomplishments and abilities are reminiscent of the classic hero Doc Savage. Some of the few things Sam cannot do, he also shares with Savage, such as drawing/painting and cooking (Sam's attempts at which usually met with disaster). Often his limits are exactly things Al can assist with, Italian being just one example. Unlike most heroes, Sam takes on a lot of different roles.
  • Sam leaped into nine women: a glamorous secretary, a divorced mother of three, a beauty pageant contestant, a pregnant teenager (During which he actually appeared to be pregnant himself), a rape victim, a singer in a girl group, a housewife during the women's movement, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and an inmate in a women's prison.
  • Sam leaped into people in the military (or veterans) ten times.
  • Sam leaped into two non-humans: a chimpanzee and, apparently, a vampire.
  • Sam leaped into nine people in law enforcement, including a PI and a bounty hunter.
  • Sam leaped into people in jail or prison four times.
  • Sam leaped into children or teenagers six times.
  • Sam leaped into college students (including military cadets) six times.
  • Sam leaped out of the United States seven times: Vietnam, Egypt, a plane over the Bermuda Triangle, Japan, the Soviet Union, a raft in the Aegean Sea (and later a deserted island), and England.
  • Sam never leaped into an openly gay person. One leapee ("Running for Honor") was suspected of being gay, but his homosexuality was never confirmed. In the comic book issue "Up Against a Stonewall", he would leap into a lesbian parolee (a character from the television episode "Good Night, Dear Heart").
  • While leaping, Sam kills between 9 and 12 people in self-defense.
  • Sam was unable to remember his marriage to Donna while leaping. Only in the Fourth Season opener do we learn and he remember that he did marry her. ("The Leap Back") He had several romances before and after that time. Donna accepted this as a consequence of the good he was doing, and swore Al not to tell Sam when he didn't remember. Sam became seriously involved with psychic Tamlyn Matsuda ("Temptation Eyes"), who could see him as he really was, and made love to his former piano teacher Nicole ("Catch a Falling Star"), who couldn't. He sired Sammy Jo on Abigail Fuller in "Trilogy, Part II" (see above), and there were several other trysts during his time as leaper, some of which appear in the show's opening credits for each season.
  • Sam's sister's name is Katherine ("Katie") [born during a flood in 1957] who left her abusive alcoholic first husband Chuck and now lives happily in Hawaii with Navy Lt. Jim Bonnick and his mother Thelma Louise Beckett.
  • Sam strongly dislikes the 1970s; he hates disco music, and once described the decade as the time when "everyone had the morals of a stray dog in heat". ("Disco Inferno")
  • Sam's SSN is 563-86-9801 and his Department of Defense Umbra Clearance Code is 004-002-02-016.
  • Sam's birthday, August 8, is the same as series creator Donald P. Bellisario.
  • Sam's father's name is Jonathan. Scott Bakula, who portrays Sam Beckett on the series, later stars as Captain Jonathan Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise. Furthermore, Bakula half-jokingly suggested that Captain Archer's middle name is Beckett.
  • Sam Beckett shares his name with Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett. Sam's father John Beckett also shares his name with the playwright's cousin.
  • The character Danny from the 1997 movie Cats Don't Dance also comes from the state of Indiana (albeit from Kokomo instead of Elk Ridge), and is also voiced by Scott Bakula.
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