May 21, 1966

Sam leaps into an old man who has been seeing UFOs. Of course, this is chalked up to him being a crazy old man, however, Sam sees the UFOs personally. This episode flirts with being a much more important piece of the overall plot of the story, but backs away from it. While taking a personal interest in the UFO situation, Sam’s actual job is to repair his grandson’s relationship with his own son. It doesn’t take much convincing, but Sam basically tells his grandson to not run away from home and to not smoke grass. NBC, early 90s, I get it, but looking back… come on. Whatever, Sam is the archetypal good guy. This has to take place, I suppose.

The real interesting part is when government agents track Sam down and are fully aware of the whole UFO thing being real, and work on silencing him. They first dope him with truth serum to do this, which means they are doping Sam, not the grandfather that he has leaped into. Sam begins relaying secrets of the Quantum Leap projects to these two agents, complete with clearance codes. It felt like we were about to take the meta plot of the show and alter it, but we don’t. Sam’s family (son and grandson) rescue him. While running away from the hospital, an alien ship re-appears, Al tells Sam to hop on and go for a ride and we leap out.

There was a good foundation for this episode, but they didn’t push it up that extra notch that would have made it a really good episode for the ages. During part of the episode, Sam is explaining to Al how amazing it would be if he is the person responsible for both achieving time-travel as well as confirming alien life on Earth. Still, it was entertaining and the family story is compelling. I would probably B-list this episode.