Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. 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, Dr. 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.

Honeymoon Express

• Season 2 opens with Al testifying in front of a senate committee, trying to prove that Sam is, in fact, in the past putting right the things that once went wrong.
• He’s having a hard time convincing the senators that Project Quantum Leap is worth funding.
• They can only go on Al’s word that Sam is in the past, since he’s the only one who can communicate with Dr. Beckett.
• The chairman thanks Al for his testimony and says they will reach a decision to be delivered on Friday.
• I assume that’s a few days away…
• Somewhere in the past, Sam is a fire fighter who is trying to save Ginger the cat, who is stuck in a tree.
• Al says it’s 1957 and wonders if Sam can do anything about Castro before he takes over Cuba.
• But Ziggy says he’s there to make a heroic rescue.
• So when Sam saves the cat, he leaps.
• Let the record show that when Sam leaped out of the Humphrey Bogart lookalike, he leaped into a woman in a bubble bath.
• But that’s just now where we are in this season premiere.
• Makes me wonder if some things were aired out of order… Certainly wouldn’t be the first time a network pulled that kind of stunt.
• April 27, 1960
• Sam then leaps into a man who is furiously making out with a woman on a train.
• Seems a little awkward.
• Especially when they’re interrupted by a porter who tells them not to be embarrassed…
• He’s seen a lot more than kissing on the Honeymoon Express… which is what they call the trip to Niagara Falls.
• Sam makes an excuse to get away from his amorous new wife and slips into the bathroom.
• He apologizes to the man in the mirror for not getting the honeymoon he was expecting.
• Then he discovers he’s a cop named Tom who brought along his gun and handcuffs on his honeymoon…
• When he comes back out, his wife thanks him for supporting her dream of becoming a lawyer by sneakily packing one of her textbooks so she can study to pass the bar exam.
• Al arrives and is envious of Sam suddenly finding himself attached to a gorgeous woman.
• Sam leaves Tom’s wife, Diane, to study for a while so he can talk to Al about why he’s there.
• Al says he’s there to convince Eisenhauer to cancel the top secret Russian surveillance mission that would result in the U-2 spy plane being shot down.
• But Sam doesn’t see how a New York cop could make that happen.
• Al suggests that he reach out to his new father-in-law, a senator and presidential golfing buddy.
• But Ziggy says that he’s most likely there to help Diane successfully pass the bar.
• After Al leaves, Sam heads back to his compartment and sees Diane being abducted by a strange man.
• Sam goes after Diane and gets her away from her abductor, who then pulls a knife.
• Sam pulls a gun… so the other guy decides to de-escalate.
• Turns out this dude is Diane’s French ex-husband, Roget
• Later, she apologizes for not telling him about Roget, but she hoped that by omitting that part of her history, maybe it would no longer exist.
• Back in the senate hearing, Al asks for a 48 hour continuance, giving Sam a chance to save the U-2 spy plane, thereby changing history on a global scale.
• The chairman of the committee tells him that if no changes are made to history, Al will have to accept that Project Quantum Leap is a failure.
• Al visits Sam again, trying to convince him to call Diane’s father about the U-2.
• Sam tells him that Diane’s ex tried to kidnap her.
• Al had no idea because they had to pull Ziggy’s database offline because funding is running low.
• He agrees to go back and get Ziggy back online with the research while Sam heads back to the compartment to spend time with his wife.
• Sam’s not feeling great about being expected to sleep with another man’s wife, even if she sees her husband, Tom.
• Any hesitance he feels melts when he sees Diane in some wedding night lingerie.
• He decides to tell Diane that he’s not Tom… he’s Sam Beckett, quantum physicist.
• So Diane decides she’s Lara, the KGB’s most desirable agent.
• Diane glances out the window as the train comes to a stop at a station and swears she saw Roget again.
• Sam goes through the train to see if Roget got back on the train.
• As he passes through the dining car, he bumps into a man pretending to be drunk who is able to steal Sam’s gun without him knowing it.
• Sam then finds Roget, who very calmly threatens to kill him.
• Al arrives and tells Sam that Tom McBride was found dead on this train, stabbed through the heart.
• Sam’s ready to make his move, but then realizes his gun is missing.
• Al tells Sam to go to the conductor and have him radio ahead and have the police ready to arrest Roget at the next station.
• Then Al continues to insist on trying to cancel the spy plane mission because they need to prove to congress that Sam is in the past making a difference.
• If they can’t, then the project will get shut down.
• Sam hastily says he doesn’t care about that since the project isn’t leaping him around in time, God is.
• But then he realizes that without the project, he won’t have contact with Al anymore.
• He returns to the compartment and tells Diane they just need to stay locked inside until they get to the next stop.
• Sam then asks Diane to call her father when they get to Niagara Falls, but she reminds him that he and another senator left for a fishing trip in Canada right after the wedding and will be out of contact for weeks.
• Roget’s accomplice (the one that stole Sam’s gun) knocks out the conductor before he can radio the police.
• Sam helps Diane study, but then they see a shadow under the crack in the compartment door.
• So Sam pulls the emergency stop and jumps out the window, hiding Diane in the upper bunk.
• Roget and his sidekick follow Sam.
• Sam and Roget duke it out until Sam is able to get away and get to the front of the train to instruct the engineer to start the train back up again.
• Roget’s accomplice gets pulled under the train and is run over.
• Roget rolls under the train and hangs on under one of the cars.
• Sam returns to the compartment to tell Diane it’s over… but then Roget holds Sam at gunpoint.
• Diane tells Roget to let Tom live and she’ll go with him wherever he wants to go.
• Just as Roget is about to pull the trigger, Diane moves his hand as Sam quickly turns and stabs Roget with his own knife.
• Back in the senate hearing, the chairman reads from a history book, proving that nothing changed on a global scale.
• But Al insists that Sam did change history, just in a more localized manner.
• He mentions Diane by name, which rings a bell with the chairman, who once worked for Diane’s father and was elected to his senate seat when he died in 1965.
• So the senator thinks that Al is trying to get sympathy points by mentioning Diane and her father.
• Turns out Diane ran against this guy for her father’s seat and lost all those years ago.
• Before Sam can leap, he’s still helping Diane study.
• He corrects her when she answers a question incorrectly… and that makes all the difference.
• And Sam leaps.
• Just as the committee chairman is about to deny funding, his voice changes and a female voice approves funding for another year.
• The chairman has been replaced by Diane…
• History changed thanks to her passing the bar, allowing her to win her senate election and influence the committee’s decision.
• Incidentally, she seems to remember coming across a quantum physicist name Sam Beckett at some point, but she can’t quite place why the name is familiar.
• Next, we see Sam leap into a dance club where he’s mostly just looking confused while a woman does all the dancing…
• Oh boy.