Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?
I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.
supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?
Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)
New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.
Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*
JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?
Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?
Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.
Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.
Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?
It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.
You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.
And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.
What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…
…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.
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Your Quantum Leap Idea is just genius. Where do I Sign?
Damnit. Now I’m tearing up because that movie doesn’t exist. You suck.
With all due respect to the idea of Doctor Doom and the Elements of Harmony …
… because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.
Is where you drop that mic! Because nothing is going be more awesome sauce then that ever. Bravo sir! Brav-f***kin-o!
I would kickstart that Quantum Leap movie!
I love that Quantum Leap sory idea but at the same time, I still think the series ending was perfect
*insert slow clap here*
I would watch the shit out of that.
It even works with how Leaping works! Unless Al has a kid out there, she’d be the only one capable of using either system, and even then possibly imperfectly. And like Al, her own timeline is pendent on the program and Sam’s actions.
And given that QL, like Forrest Gump, is a giant pile of Boomer Boomerism about how important the Boomer era is, now, with the Boomers aging out, is the time to tell a story like this.
One Reasons Why MGK Should Write Quantum Leap.
“… because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.”
Killer. Fucking killer.
but we all know that
Dr. Samuel Beckett never found his way home.
“Ziggy says you need to work the shaft!”
As zz says.
HELL. YES.
Feh. I think that the last seasons already pushed things too far in giving Sam an apparently happy marriage: if he had a daughter as well, he would never have been so consumed with regret and the need to change what went before to have ever stepped into the Chamber in the first place.
Also, if Sam ever stops leaping, PEQL wins.
Ah, but you forget in the season four premiere, Sam temporarily returned home and got to spend a night with his wife again.
Sam’s never met his daughter.
Then I call shenannigans on the word ‘back’ in your stinger.
(Honestly, though, by the end of the show it’s gotten really, really difficult already to say why Sam went into the chamber, considering that he got to fix his brother, his sister, his best friend, his own love life…I mean, what’s left? Everyone’s parents eventually die, and that doesn’t make them step into unlicensed quantum accelerators.)
Ouch. Big emotional ouch.
Thank you for bringing back Major Disaster, in your imagining. If enough of us believe, it just might happen.
(And the same goes for QL.)
I’m another person who would watch the HELL out of your QL movie. Wow.
I just miss Quantum Leap. Your idea sounds good and all, but I would even settle for a shitty continuation at this point. It’s not like Total Recall that was already full and complete, but is getting remade because why the hell not.
While we’re at it, I miss Sliders before it stopped making sense.
I’ve only seen portions of QL, and almost all of it the first two seasons, but my impression was that Sam’s timeline can’t work if you think about it too much (a little like Back to the Future). Things he does affect his own past to a degree which, in a hard scifi setting, would result either in destroying years of his personal history or actually result in his landing in multiple parallel universes Sliders-style.
Which gives you three options with MGK’s idea: one, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, the narrator’s “never came home” was altered and yay, Sam is home free. Two, Sam doesn’t actually get home but some other kind of resolution is found Tron Legacy style. Three, we harden up the scifi a little and make it evident that Sam HAS been hopping parallel universes (and possibly converging with the other Sams on the way, which could help account for the messed-up memory). Somewhere out there is a universe where Sam never married Donna, the universe where he originated. He never gets home to that one. He gets a new home in the universe he wants to be in.
The same sort of logic would have to be applied to Al. I suspect his history would be quite different if his marriage to Beth had remained stable. I’d be rather surprised if he were still so closely involved with Sam’s work – unless someone actually brought up any of a thousand possible explanations.
I’ll say. I was driving with my (French) boss, playing some La Bottine Souriante, and after listening for about five minutes, he said “Wait, this sounds like French!” Then a few seconds later “Oooh, Québécois. That’s why I can’t understand it.”
Also, I would watch your Quantum Leap movie, continuity objections notwithstanding.
How would you say Canada compares to Scotland? (You didn’t comment on the UK as a whole, and it’s hard to discern to what extent Scotland is/isn’t as aware of class as the UK as a whole. Seems a natural comparison to make.)
I always assumed Sam carried on without Al, having fixed Al’s marriage. Mainly because during the episode when Sam actually leapt into Al and nearly got him incarcerated/killed, there was that moment when Al disappeared in favor of a different hologram supported by Alpha (not Ziggy).
I honestly figured that the finale’s bartender gave Sam autonomy, so that he would be lost to the Project (there were several times the Project couldn’t find him for quite a while after he’d leapt) but would continue to leap, and would understand–either by instinct or some other sort of guidance–how to set right what had once gone wrong, no longer hoping his next leap would be the leap home.
On the other hand, I dig the epic nature of your idea a lot, and I guess Al could still join Project Quantum Leap even were he happily married.
Sorry for not talking about Quantum Leap, but one of the recent Hickman Fantastic Four issues ended with the cliffhanger that Doom was going to get an Infinity Gauntlet from one of those dead alternate-Reeds.
In other words, you may just get your wish.
I suspect that MGK read that issue.
@MattDuarte: They should seriously just let Hickman write any event comics from here on out.
Dr. Beckett never returned home.
It is, while the bitterest of bittersweet endings for a television series, the perfectly apt way of ending a show like Quantum Leap.
Seriously, I would watch the HELL out of that Quantum Leap project. Kickstarter or an online petition, or something, please. We probably can’t actually make this happen, but it’d be fun to try!
“because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back”
You are the master at the final sentence tear jerk.
********************************************
For the non-QL die hards….Sam has a daughter in the series…during the final season, iirc, there’s the Trilogy, where he jumps several times into the life a girl/woman. During part 2, he’s her fiance. In part 3, he meets his daughter from the previous leap, who Al reveals grows up and joins Project QL.
Also, Sam saving Al’s marriage in the end of season 5 doesn’t prevent Al from joining QL. Bellasrio had that they still meet, and Al champions the project as the liason, just without the boozing and womanizing.
In the end, he, in theory becomes unbound in time, free to leap where he will. The rumored season 6 would have begun with Al’s search for Sam.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the finale, and there are several ways to interpret it- and I don’t put much stock in what Bellisario says, because he’s kind of a crazy hack who loves baiting his audience. Sam never getting home seemed like nothing but a mean tease, just like ten years of Harm and Mac never getting together.
My theory about the finale is that it’s been established that if you remove Al from the equation, Sam’s adventures are only slightly altered. The end of Al’s marriage to Beth was a defining moment in his life; she was The One, the end of the Playboy Al, the key to his life. Once she had moved on, the Playboy came back, and Al’s life led him to the Quantum Leap project.
In the finale, Sam makes a decision, because he has discovered the will to do so, that there are no rules governing him (and there never have been, which implies, interestingly I think, that Sam only leapt once he, subconsciously, was satisfied that he’s put right what once went wrong, and not some cosmic force) to tell Beth the truth about Al, that he’s alive. The next to last shot is of Al’s picture leaping. Then we get a title card that says Al and Beth are still together in 1999 and have a couple of kids.
That implied, to me, that Al Calivicci never joined the Quantum Leap project. He never met Dr. Sam Beckett. Their friendship never existed. And maybe that’s why Sam never got home; without that tether, that bond, he had lost his anchor. Sam Beckett destroyed his future for a friend and a friendship that technically did not happen. It’s amazingly sad and brilliant. So brilliant, I doubt it’s what Bellisario intended.
However, there’s still that strange man Beth Calivicci once met who knew, just KNEW that her MIA husband Al was still alive and well and told her if she just held on a little longer… and one day, one of their kids is watching a tape of a university lecture by a man named Dr. Sam Beckett. Beth immediately recognizes the man as the “friend” of Al’s she spoke to… but wouldn’t he be much, much older than that? And Al sees the man and something… SOMETHING chews at the back of his brain, as if there’s some connection between the two men.
He tracks down the Quantum Leap project, and it turns out they’re well aware of him: When Beckett leaped into Calivicci years ago, Alpha, for the first an only time, spit out two completely different personal histories for him. He’s the only person in the history of the Project.
Crap, MGK, look what you made me do! 😉
Isnt’ that interesting?
(MGK’s is better, though)
Oh, and I think Being Erica pretty much left Quantum Leap in the dust in “How is their timeline not completely altered” sweepstakes. It worked in season one, but from the season 2 finale on, Erica’s altering of events in her own timeline usually led to her having information that would have led her to make different decisions.
Also, Dr. Tom is creepy.
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I didn’t even know Geist the Twilight Man existed until I read this. For that matter, I didn’t quite know how many people died in Infinite Crisis, either.