My fanon is ridiculously elaborate
Okay, so I am, like, really good at suspension of disbelief when it comes to whatever bad sci-fi show I'm watching. I can rationalize/handwave away just about any plothole and am more than willing to accept technobabble explanations. I know it's a weak substitute for good writing, but I need to be able to suspend my disbelief more than I need perfect writing to really enjoy something. Sad, but true.
I can handle canon contradicting real world science, what with Clarke's Third Law and all, but what am I supposed to to when the canon blatantly contradicts itself with no easy explanation? Obviously the answer is an internets poll!
Poll
Personally, I'm all about choice number four, because I'm complicated like that, but I'd love to hear how other people deal with this.
Okay, so. I am probably crazy for pouring this much analysis into feel-good early 90s television that never even pretended to be hard sci-fi, but what is being a geek if you can't be horribly pedantic about something largely irrelevant?
Moving on, there are two major contradictions between the first season of Quantum Leap and everything else I've seen so far (through the end of S3):
1) Does Sam take his body with him when he jumps from person to person or just his mind/soul/essence/whatever?
2) Does Al see Sam as Sam or as the person he's inhabiting?
The second one is actually much easier to handwave, so we'll tackle that first. So in the early second season, Al sees Sam's mind in the body of a gorgeous young woman and falls madly in love. It was awesome! However, early on in the third season, Al mocks Sam for looking like a beauty queen on steroids while the latter is struggling with a frilly dress and heels.
I think the easiest off-screen explanation for this contradiction is that Al asked Gushie to alter his programming so that Al wouldn't get incapacitated by lust distracted every time Sam happened to leap into a woman. I think it's a fair assumption, but I'm sure many other hopeless pedants like myself have come up with equally valid (though probably less slashy) explanations for the discrepancy.
This leads right into the problem of what happens to Sam's body during a leap. For me at least, the fact that Al initially saw Sam as his leapee and the displaced person as Sam implies that only Sam's mind makes the trip. The reason we, the audience, still see him as Sam is because Sam still thinks of himself as, well, himself, even if the mirror says otherwise. In addition, this is the more practical approach from an outside-the-show point of view - the audience would probably have a harder time identifying and sympathizing with Sam if he were played by a different actor/actress each week (even if I think that would have been really creative), and the world would be denied Scott Bakula in a dress. It's a lose-lose situation, really.
However, the general fandom consensus seems to be that Sam's body also travels along with him and he projects some kind of aura that makes people around him think he's the person he's displacing, as Al explains it in the third season. I have to respectfully disagree with this - it just doesn't add up.
What the hell powerful kind of aura takes into account a six-inch height difference? Would he still smell the same? Feel the same? Why don't people notice when his accent changes? Does it trick cameras and other artificial eyes, or only human eyes (since we know it doesn't fool animals or children)? How on earth does he fit into the other person's clothes, especially if they belong to a woman half his size? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Okay, so say that it really is only Sam's mind leaping around - why did Al tell him otherwise? This is where the extremely convoluted theoretical bit kicks in, so turn back now if that sort of thing irritates you.
Brief interlude: I refuse to buy the idea that everyone on tv tells the truth all the time, or that if they do lie, they get caught. Books have unreliable narrators, so why not tv too? The exploration of where and why certain characters might choose to hide the truth is my absolute favorite thing to do in fic. Hell, my entire explanation of the Temporal Cold War on Enterprise (ask me about it when you have an hour or three) is based on the singular assumption that Daniels lied.
To apply this to the current conundrum, if we work under the assumption that only Sam's mind is making the trip, and therefore Al misinformed him about how the whole thing works, there are two possible explanations:
1) Al himself is misinformed about how the project works.
2) For whatever reason, Al is hiding the truth from Sam.
The first statement is easy enough to throw out - Al's been working hands-on with the project for presumably years, more than long enough to know exactly what he's talking about. That leaves us with door number two - Al lied.
This isn't as preposterous as it might initially seem. There is a precedent for Al either lying to Sam directly, or more commonly, not telling him the whole truth, for reasons selfish, noble, or unknown. Right off the top of my head I can remember him hiding his relationship with Beth in order to convince Sam to try and fix it. Not long after, he hid the fact that he was among the POWs Sam could have freed in Vietnam, presumably in order to prevent Sam from having to choose between his brother and his best friend. Most interestingly, he blatantly lied about Donna, telling Sam that of course Sam wasn't married, when in fact he had been since that incredibly skeezy episode I'm still pretending never happened.
The groundwork is there, and the reason Al may have chose to lie is one that lies firmly in the hands of fanwriters. My personal theory is based in the context of the explanation Al gave. He was trying to comfort Sam, who had leaped into the body of a woman in labor. Again, the Sam's body moves too explanation falls flat here, as both Sam and a woman he's with feel the baby kick, and the doctor sees the head crowning directly before Sam leaps, so if it really was Sam's body, I reeeally don't want to think too hard about that one.
My thought is that Al reassured Sam he couldn't have the baby in a type of mind-over-matter exercise - if Sam truly believed he couldn't have that baby, then his body would prevent it happening. In addition, Al probably didn't want to shock Sam's mind into triggering the girl's body back into labor.
Wow, my personal fanon is ridiculously complicated, but to me at least, it still makes more sense than the contradictory explanations canon offers. I know show writers aren't infallible, but sometimes the stuff they come up with is brain-breaking to say the least.
My only problem with these theories of mine is that they are very obviously not what the creators had in mind, like, at all. The subject of authorial intent is a tricky one in fandom, and I've always been firmly on the side where what the reader takes away from any story is really what's important. Hell, creative subversion of the text is the basis for much modern literary criticism. Everyone looks at the same story through a lens of their own biases and experiences, and that's what makes fandom so damn cool. That we can all take something so unique and wonderful from the same sources is the human condition in a nutshell, and it's just plain awesome.
I can handle canon contradicting real world science, what with Clarke's Third Law and all, but what am I supposed to to when the canon blatantly contradicts itself with no easy explanation? Obviously the answer is an internets poll!
Poll
Personally, I'm all about choice number four, because I'm complicated like that, but I'd love to hear how other people deal with this.
Okay, so. I am probably crazy for pouring this much analysis into feel-good early 90s television that never even pretended to be hard sci-fi, but what is being a geek if you can't be horribly pedantic about something largely irrelevant?
Moving on, there are two major contradictions between the first season of Quantum Leap and everything else I've seen so far (through the end of S3):
1) Does Sam take his body with him when he jumps from person to person or just his mind/soul/essence/whatever?
2) Does Al see Sam as Sam or as the person he's inhabiting?
The second one is actually much easier to handwave, so we'll tackle that first. So in the early second season, Al sees Sam's mind in the body of a gorgeous young woman and falls madly in love. It was awesome! However, early on in the third season, Al mocks Sam for looking like a beauty queen on steroids while the latter is struggling with a frilly dress and heels.
I think the easiest off-screen explanation for this contradiction is that Al asked Gushie to alter his programming so that Al wouldn't get incapacitated by lust distracted every time Sam happened to leap into a woman. I think it's a fair assumption, but I'm sure many other hopeless pedants like myself have come up with equally valid (though probably less slashy) explanations for the discrepancy.
This leads right into the problem of what happens to Sam's body during a leap. For me at least, the fact that Al initially saw Sam as his leapee and the displaced person as Sam implies that only Sam's mind makes the trip. The reason we, the audience, still see him as Sam is because Sam still thinks of himself as, well, himself, even if the mirror says otherwise. In addition, this is the more practical approach from an outside-the-show point of view - the audience would probably have a harder time identifying and sympathizing with Sam if he were played by a different actor/actress each week (even if I think that would have been really creative), and the world would be denied Scott Bakula in a dress. It's a lose-lose situation, really.
However, the general fandom consensus seems to be that Sam's body also travels along with him and he projects some kind of aura that makes people around him think he's the person he's displacing, as Al explains it in the third season. I have to respectfully disagree with this - it just doesn't add up.
What the hell powerful kind of aura takes into account a six-inch height difference? Would he still smell the same? Feel the same? Why don't people notice when his accent changes? Does it trick cameras and other artificial eyes, or only human eyes (since we know it doesn't fool animals or children)? How on earth does he fit into the other person's clothes, especially if they belong to a woman half his size? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Okay, so say that it really is only Sam's mind leaping around - why did Al tell him otherwise? This is where the extremely convoluted theoretical bit kicks in, so turn back now if that sort of thing irritates you.
Brief interlude: I refuse to buy the idea that everyone on tv tells the truth all the time, or that if they do lie, they get caught. Books have unreliable narrators, so why not tv too? The exploration of where and why certain characters might choose to hide the truth is my absolute favorite thing to do in fic. Hell, my entire explanation of the Temporal Cold War on Enterprise (ask me about it when you have an hour or three) is based on the singular assumption that Daniels lied.
To apply this to the current conundrum, if we work under the assumption that only Sam's mind is making the trip, and therefore Al misinformed him about how the whole thing works, there are two possible explanations:
1) Al himself is misinformed about how the project works.
2) For whatever reason, Al is hiding the truth from Sam.
The first statement is easy enough to throw out - Al's been working hands-on with the project for presumably years, more than long enough to know exactly what he's talking about. That leaves us with door number two - Al lied.
This isn't as preposterous as it might initially seem. There is a precedent for Al either lying to Sam directly, or more commonly, not telling him the whole truth, for reasons selfish, noble, or unknown. Right off the top of my head I can remember him hiding his relationship with Beth in order to convince Sam to try and fix it. Not long after, he hid the fact that he was among the POWs Sam could have freed in Vietnam, presumably in order to prevent Sam from having to choose between his brother and his best friend. Most interestingly, he blatantly lied about Donna, telling Sam that of course Sam wasn't married, when in fact he had been since that incredibly skeezy episode I'm still pretending never happened.
The groundwork is there, and the reason Al may have chose to lie is one that lies firmly in the hands of fanwriters. My personal theory is based in the context of the explanation Al gave. He was trying to comfort Sam, who had leaped into the body of a woman in labor. Again, the Sam's body moves too explanation falls flat here, as both Sam and a woman he's with feel the baby kick, and the doctor sees the head crowning directly before Sam leaps, so if it really was Sam's body, I reeeally don't want to think too hard about that one.
My thought is that Al reassured Sam he couldn't have the baby in a type of mind-over-matter exercise - if Sam truly believed he couldn't have that baby, then his body would prevent it happening. In addition, Al probably didn't want to shock Sam's mind into triggering the girl's body back into labor.
Wow, my personal fanon is ridiculously complicated, but to me at least, it still makes more sense than the contradictory explanations canon offers. I know show writers aren't infallible, but sometimes the stuff they come up with is brain-breaking to say the least.
My only problem with these theories of mine is that they are very obviously not what the creators had in mind, like, at all. The subject of authorial intent is a tricky one in fandom, and I've always been firmly on the side where what the reader takes away from any story is really what's important. Hell, creative subversion of the text is the basis for much modern literary criticism. Everyone looks at the same story through a lens of their own biases and experiences, and that's what makes fandom so damn cool. That we can all take something so unique and wonderful from the same sources is the human condition in a nutshell, and it's just plain awesome.