by Tenebris

Created on: April 16, 2008

The arrival of the film 'Star Wars' (1977) marks the beginning of the end of the 1970s moral quagmire. Science fiction/fantasy (SF/F) television was finally ready to let go of the twin spectres of Vietnam and Watergate, in favour of a renewed certainty of purpose, destiny, success in the face of overwhelming odds ... and, curiously, fear: corresponding with the rise of 24/7 news programming and also the point when many mark the earliest beginnings of an American culture of fear.

'Quantum Leap' (1989-1993) may well have had the most original premise of the decade. The opening narration explains it best:

"Theorizing that one could time-travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert, to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Dr. Beckett prematurely stepped into the project accelerator, and vanished ...

"He awoke to find himself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not his own. Fortunately, contact with his own time was maintained through brain-wave transmissions with Al, the project observer, who appears in the form of a hologram, that only Dr. Beckett can see and hear. Trapped in the past, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next Leap will be the Leap home."

... all of which is simply background to the real story of 'Quantum Leap', the intensely human desire for one human being to help another. This, we are told, is Sam's destiny but a destiny which he himself continues to choose for himself, making this series also perhaps the most optimistic of any 1980s SF/F television series. Thus 'Quantum Leap' seems to hold relatively little of SF/F, even despite its premise being strongly enough grounded in traditional SF/F trappings for fans to continue to actively debate whether the series conclusion constitutes a temporal paradox.

Especially, the 1980s was the decade of alien invasion, sometimes even unrecognised invasion. 'The Tripods' (1984-5) plays upon a variant of 'War of the Worlds': what if the invaders aimed primarily to enslave rather than kill? In 'V' (1984-5), humans walk willingly into enslavement and even become a food crop for the Visitors, aliens who seem utterly beneficent on the surface. Only a few rebels recognize the truth, fighting to expose it and free the human race. Even in 'Alien Nation' (1989-90), where the

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