My Quantum Leap Reboot/Revival Pitch ( June 15th 2019 )

I just had a dream where I was pitching a reboot of/sequel to Quantum Leap.

I need to share the concept.

Our lead is Samantha Beckett, and the year is roughly nowish. She’s the daughter of Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett (obviously), and we can just retcon that in as never being mentioned (we’ll say she was at boarding school in 1999 during The Leap Back or something). We all remember that her father, Bakula’s Sam, never came home – but because he’s been time traveling for so long, he’s irrevocably altered the timeline. In the new one that exists, there was no time accelerator built, no project. It’s our world technologically and Bakula’s Sam just vanished one day.

Samantha became a quantum physicist, and is a brilliant one at that. One day though, she finds a mysterious package. It’s the handlink left in 1945 in the episode The Leap Back. When she touches it, her childhood memories of seeing her father’s Quantum Leap project in construction flood back from the other timeline.

She remembers being told her father was lost in time.

Samantha is on a mission. She’s going to find her father and bring him home. She knows the science well enough (having already co-authored several papers on “the self repairing timeline theory”) and now remembers some key pieces from her father’s project to build a functional Quantum accelerator. She reaches out to her grad school mentor (who didn’t have a name in the dream, but I’ll call Ed here) for help. He’s gruff, cantankerous, but emotionally supportive.

He thinks she’s nuts until she shows him the math.

He’s going to be her Al.

If the show can afford it (which was being debated in the dream) they find actual Al too. He’s a retired Navy Admiral who has no idea what’s going on until he touches the handlink. Then, like Samantha, he regains his memory. Al uses his Navy connections to find funding for the project – and signs on to save the best friend he forgot he had. Al will remain back at the accelerator, rarely be in episodes, and mostly stay off screen.

And Samantha Beckett steps into the quantum accelerator, to set right what once went wrong, and (budget permitting a Scott Bakula appearance) save her father.

…

Whoever owns the rights, call me.

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