Thursday, August 28, 2008
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4:27 p.m.
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Recently, after battling with many used DVD outlets to no avail, I finally managed to buy the last two seasons of Quantum Leap from Amazon.com (which is the best place to buy from... not .ca... but .com. Much cheaper).Why is this a noteworthy achievement? Well, despite being a cheesy late 80s/early 90s TV sci-fi series about a man who jumps back and forth within his own lifetime fixing things that went wrong, it is also my own personal white whale.
This show represents something special to me. I remember when it first aired I was sitting in my basement at Skye Place. My dad wanted to watch the show and I wanted to stay up late. The first episode was two hours long and would allow me an hour longer awake than normal. I wasn't expecting much, but very quickly I was hooked. It was just about the coolest show I had ever seen.
I was genuinely thrilled to see the weird situations in which Sam Beckett would be thrown. I was stunned when he was a woman, mystified when he was a monkey, and just plain curious about many of the other oddball moments. Not only was the nature of the show something special, but it was who I got to watch it with.
My father and I share many things, but one thing we've often seen eye-to-eye on was our love of certain shows. This was a ritual to me to be able to see this show with him. Another show that was similar in this regard was Star Trek: The Next Generation. But Quantum Leap represented an earlier version of me that just loved the unexpected and the fun that the show had. I don't know that it would survive in the guilt-ridden angsty world of TV today as Sam was just so good-natured, but for a kid growing up it was amazing.
So how did it become a white whale?
The last season aired in 1991/1992. I didn't know it was the last season at the time and for whatever reason I was out of the house the night the last episode aired. I wasn't as conscious of air dates or even what seasons of television were so I didn't think anything of it. But when I got home, my dad told me that it had ended.And he didn't tape it for me.
I'm still ticked to this day about that. My best friend at the time, Tom Beisel, saw it and repeated to me what happened. I know what happened, but I've never seen that final episode. This has bothered me for more than 16 years. Think about it. That's a huge amount of time to have wanted to see something. It's more than half my life.
When it was on in re-runs, they stopped showing it just before the finale. They're airing it again now on another channel, but odds are I'd miss it again. I tried to find it for download once the internet finally could accomplish something like that and only recently did I spot it.
Of course it doesn't matter now. I own the DVD. That final episode is sitting on my TV shelf in the next room. I could go over right now, pick it up, put it on and see the episode I've been hunting for 16 years.
But I'm not going to do it.
There are few things in life we have left to experience for the 'first time' by your early 30s. Many of my friends are married, most have fallen in love (and all the fun stuff with it), and a few have started to have kids. I made a list once of the things that I want to do before I die. I put things on it that I never expected to do, hence I would live forever. I wrote 'front row at a U2 concert' and managed it not once, but twice since then. I left the first concert and thought "well, I've had a good run" and expected to be hit by a bus.
Watching this episode is on that list. In fact, there isn't much else that I can think of before the end of my life as I know it that seems important. I almost feel obligated to hold on to this show until I'm on my deathbed (ideally in my early 100s). That seems silly though, doesn't it? Instead, I've decided that my life as I know it will cease belonging only to me the day that I have children. Catherine has my heart, but it will be my kids who own my life. Catherine isn't pregnant and though we're talking about kids soonish, I know how I'll spend the night before I become a father. I'm going to watch that episode. I'm going to finish what I started with my own father and use it as a starting point to my own entry to fatherhood.
Maybe it's sentimental nonsense. A few of you are probably thinking "all this over a TV show?" But for those of you who get me, you'll get why this is important to me.
Sam Beckett would understand.
"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."
Posted by
Parallel
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