Oh boy. Should you leap into the Quantum Leap reboot?

Caitlin Bassett and Raymond Lee in the reboot of the sci-fi TV series Quantum Leap.

I’ve always considered the predicament that Dr Sam Beckett of the old TV sci-fi series Quantum Leap found himself in to be hell. Not just because he’s trapped in time and desperately trying to get home, which is bad enough, but because the only way to accomplish that is to “put right what once went wrong”.

If the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre was correct when he wrote, “hell is other people”, then having to endlessly help other people can only be considered a cruel and unusual punishment found only in the deepest, darkest, flaming-hottest pits of hell.

That said, it does make for one of television’s all-time great premises. It allowed for endless ideas and perspectives each week as Beckett leaped around the timeline and straight into another sticky predicament.

You don’t have to flick back too far through the ol’ history books to find an abundance of things that went very wrong indeed. Not only did he have to puzzle out what went wrong and how to right it, usually within a compressed time limit, but he also had to learn how to navigate the foreign circumstances he found himself in.

During the course of its 100-episode run, Beckett leaped in the body of a murderer holding a mother and daughter hostage, an African-American living in 1950s racist Alabama, a mental patient undergoing electro-shock therapy, a boy with Down syndrome and, strangely enough, a chimpanzee.

In a particularly scarring episode I watched as a young ‘un back in the early 90s Beckett even faced off against the ultimate big bad, Satan himself, who was almightily peeved that the wayward time traveller was going through history undoing all his bad work.

I haven’t watched Quantum Leap since it went off the air in 1993 but I look back on it fondly. Like I reckon many young Gen Xers/older millennials do. I remember it as smart and funny and exciting and would watch it every week. The modern reboot, which is now streaming on Neon, was leaping right into these high expectations. Fortunately, it sticks the landing. Mostly.

Acting as a direct sequel the show picks up 30 years after the original. The OG series courageously ended on a downer note, with Beckett staying lost in the mists of time, forced to do good for eternity, never returning home and inadvertently proving Oscar Wilde’s thesis that “no good deed goes unpunished” entirely accurate.

The revival sticks close to the winning formula, with another earnest and good-hearted doctor taking an unauthorised chance using the government’s highly classified Quantum Leap machine before promptly getting stuck in time. Like the original, he has a holographic guide aiding him. While Beckett had his cigar-chomping, wise-cracking best friend Al aiding him from the future, Dr Ben Song has his fiancee Addison beaming in from the lab to point him in the right direction.

The opening episode works quickly to get Song out of the present and into the past, with him sneaking off from a party to make his fateful leap. The reasons are mysterious and left to those back in the present to uncover as the time travel causes him to develop amnesia. When the team finds him inhabiting the body of a bank robber in 1985 they can’t be sure of the reasons for his covert leap.

Thus the show splits into two timelines: Song in the past fixing history in the hopes of leaping home and his colleagues in the present trying to uncover his motives. It proves an interesting hook, especially as this plotline directly links into the beloved original characters, but the fun of the show remains the fish-out-of-water quandaries of the leaps.

Episode two takes things up a notch, literally, by having Song leap into an astronaut on a doomed space mission where his “corrections” keep making things worse.

Pleasingly, what I remember of the tone of the original has carried over. It’s perhaps a little more serious, befitting our current era, but it’s captured the drama and humour of the original. I appreciate that it manages to be a “predicament of the week”-type show, with Song’s leaps making it almost like an anthology series, while also having a series arc to invest in as the folks back in the future try to work out what he was up to before jumping.

As Song, Raymond Lee is a great fit, capturing much the same essence as Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett. The series wisely avoids even attempting to fill the great Dean Stockwell’s shoes as Al by having Song’s guide be his fiancee.

It’s clearly not a prestige show. Some of the effects would have looked ropey even back in the original, but it is a breezy watch and a solid family show. It’s good and if you have fond memories of the original, it’s worth leaping into.