NBC’s New Quantum Leap Offers A Lot Of Promise In Its Series Premiere July 13th, 1985

“Oh, boy”- Sam Beckett

It may be a new cast and new era, but the new Quantum Leap certainly has not forgotten its roots. While the new series is set in modern times with new stories to explore the same challenges, heartaches, humor and hope that made the original Quantum Leap so magical is very much alive and well in the reboot.

Dr Ben Song (Raymond Lee) along with his team (pictured above) have been working on potentially restarting the Quantum Leap project just as soon as they’d worked all the quirks out of the program and fix all of Dr Sam Beckett’s missteps because no one wants to go chasing after another physicist (or lose their funding.) Unfortunately, Dr Song decides, under potentially poor advice, to upload new coding for their quantum accelerator and pull off a first jump without his team knowing and things get weird. Again.

Dr Song finds himself back in 1985 with near total memory loss and stuck in the middle of a bank heist but by this time the team has figured out where Ben is and sends in Addison (Caitlin Bassett) via hologram (a new and improved Al of sorts) who is not only on the team but Ben’s fiancé, to help Ben figure out why he’s there and more importantly, help him remember who he is. The inner struggle in Addison to not just blurt out who she is extremely palpable but so is all of the character interactions. Nothing feels forced or coerced.

While Addison is busy keeping the team in the loop about Sam, computer genius and impeccable dresser Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) is busy trying to make sense of the new coding Ben uploaded to Ziggy. The new codes keep crashing Ziggy making it, so far, impossible to bring Ben back home much less anticipate where he’ll leap next. The show ends with Dr Ben finishing his task in 1985 and heading straight into the great unknown and it’ll be a blast to watch what happens next.

The writers have done a brilliant job of filling in a few plot-holes from the original series while adding their own spin on things and it’s working really, really well. The cast interacts seamlessly, the FX is gorgeous, and the storyline is flowing quite well.

The new Quantum Leap premieres Sept 19th at 10/9 Central on NBC and is available to stream on Peacock the following day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3I0SpwjVK8