‘Quantum Leap’ EPs on How That Time Jump Affects Ben, Addison & Team

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Quantum Leap Season 2 premiere “This Took Too Long!”]

The hope was that the end of the first season of Quantum Leap would result in Ben (Raymond Lee), who has been jumping through time and into various people, finding his way home. However, as the Season 2 premiere shows, it’s not quite time for that yet. Instead, after a leap that lands him in Russia, almost alone the entire time without any word from the team, he finds out just what he’s missed — before it’s off to the next jump.

It’s at the end of the episode that Ian (Mason Alexander Park) appears to Ben, who immediately asks why they look so different. It’s been three years, Ian informs him. Ben has been considered missing and presumed dead, and Project Quantum Leap has been shut down. Ben leaps before they can share anymore.

Having it be three years that passed “came from the writers’ room,” executive producer and directing producer Chris Grismer tells TV Insider. “I think it was a great way for us to not have to sit in all the fallout from the original story and just sort of get ahead to the meat of what’s going on. I really liked that it wasn’t three years for him and to watch that contrast, that struggle between two people experiencing time differently.”

NBC

Adds executive producer Deborah Pratt, “the big question is, what happened to everybody in those three years? The fact that Ben has no recollection of three years passing is a true — I could go nerd out on you and talk Einstein’s theories of time-space continuums, but the reality is he now has to deal with everybody else’s life went on. Where is Addison [Caitlin Bassett]? What is she dealing with? That mourning and that loss or the belief of that loss and how she kept herself together and the fact that she now has to face somebody that she thought was gone forever is a huge journey for not just Addison, [but also] for Ian, Magic [Ernie Hudson], and Jenn [Nanrisa Lee] because suddenly they have a chance to bring him home.”

Now, the team has “this renewed vigor of, ‘OK, we’re not going to let this happen again,'” she continues. “Each time that conundrum comes back to the storytelling, I think it opens some great opportunities of, how do we keep him alive in this sometimes dangerous situation that he could, if he does the wrong thing, die in that time? It opens a lot of doors, it opens a lot of what-ifs, and those are the things that I think are going to keep pulling people back. And I think that they will take sides on certain situations. They’ll like what they see, they’ll be angry what they see, depending on how they love or don’t love a character.”

It’s going to be an adjustment period, for Ben and the entire team, to have him back. It’ll be the easiest for Magic to adjust, Pratt says, explaining, “he, in his mind, never gave up. Just like he’s never given up on finding Sam Beckett [Scott Bakula in the original series]. And so Magic has fought very hard and made some backdoor deals to keep the project going, to get him home. That brings in Tom [Peter Gadiot] as an officer who’s now leading the Quantum Leap team. They have somebody new to answer to in that sense. What does that mean, and what does that dynamic go forward into who else is kind of in danger emotionally?”

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Season 1 saw Ben jumping through time without his memories and pieces coming back to him. The premiere saw him have flashbacks to key moments from his and Addison’s history, including him voicing his concerns about her leaping, as had been the original plan, and asking her out to dinner.

“There are various flashbacks throughout the season, for sure,” Grismer teases. “They appear when they’re needed.”

What’s (still) needed now: a way home for Ben.

Quantum Leap, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC