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Quantum Leap was one of those shows that brought my whole family together in the evenings. It was clean, emphasized a lot of wholesome values, and incorporated humor and the better parts of human nature in a show that dealt with varied topics (and times) so that the show remained fresh and original every week. Science fiction aside, Q-Leap was simply about making people's lives better.

The general premise of the show was pretty simple, and they summed it up during the opening credits. "Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap... will be the leap home." (Quote found at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Q uantum_Leap)

As you can see, that left things pretty wide open for the writers. Sam would take the place of a person in some other time (while they were kept in a holding room back at the research facility - however that worked) until he accomplished whatever correction he was there to make. Sometimes the goal was obvious, other times not - after all, people's lives are generally screwed up in more ways than one, and the fix can be complicated. Interesting twists included the fact that children and dogs (being innocent) could see Sam (Scott Bakula) for who he truly was, as well as being able to see Al (Dean Stockwell). Sam might (and did) "Leap" into any person who had lived during his own life, including a boxer, a pregnant woman, and Kennedy's assassin. All this, and Sam had to contend with a "Swiss cheese memory" while he tried to solve everyone's problems. Unable to remember details of his own life, he was very much a displaced person. Of course, that worked to advantage on more than one occasion, as Sam was a highly moral individual, and had he remembered his wife, he would have had a very difficult part to play in many of his Leaps.

Aside from the general idea of leaping through time with an unseen advisor, little about the show involved science fiction. Quantum Leap took the time to help us understand how people can be trapped in bad

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