- Ziggy, what have you got for me? [mysterious music]

- [Ziggy] Theorizing that one could create a time-travel series set within his own lifetime, Don Bellisario created a groundbreaking television series, "Quantum Leap". Now nearly 30 years later, Don finds himself answering the unsolved mysteries of Dr. Sam Beckett's journey striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next answer will be the leap home. [gentle techno music]

- Oh boy.

- [Ziggy] Was Sam really leaping or was he imagining it all?

- Wasn't in Sam's mind. He was actually leaping. That's what I felt, anyway. It wasn't something he was imagining. It was real.

- [Ziggy] What do people in the waiting room do while Sam is in their bodies?

- It's interesting to think about the waiting room. The waiting room came from a novel that I had read that had a waiting room in it, different sense of "Quantum Leap," but in "Quantum Leap," people in the waiting room would be a little disturbed by what had happened, would not understand what was going on, of course. Their interactions with each other would have been interesting. I don't think that they know or remember anything that Sam felt when he was in their body, but I think that they leap back into their body and remember being in the waiting room and don't understand what has happened. At one point, I thought about maybe that's where all the stories come from about aliens, that people felt there were aliens when they came back. I think that when Sam leaps into someone's body, doing his thing, when he leaps back out and they are there left without Sam, they don't remember what Sam did, but they do have a sense of confusion about what's gone on with them during the time that the leap happened. It could drive somebody crazy, now that I think about it.

- [Ziggy] When did you decide that Sam was married? Did adding Donna to the series create complications for the characters moving forward, besides me?

- Adding Donna created complications for Sam because suddenly he has a wife and that's complicated in itself. Donna was very much in love with Sam in a way he could do no wrong. She understood what was going on with his leaping. She wasn't very happy with him sleeping with other women, but she understood why. Sam was the love of her life and I think she went on and lived her life but she didn't hook up with anybody again, Sam was it. And I think she always hoped that Sam would return, but Sam was too busy helping other people than to help his own wife.

- [Ziggy] What were your touchstones in designing the future?

- Lights in blue boxes and red boxes and yellow boxes [laughing] work very well for the future. The technology in the future was, of course, far in advanced of where we were. Sam designed "Quantum Leap," that was his baby. Al was part of it.

- [Ziggy] You always have answers, Don. When designing the near future, why does everyone wear glowing lights?

- Well, it was the future. So you had to have something glowing, like here in front of me now. And in the very first episode Sam's accoutrements, I had some part of it glowing and flashing.

- [Ziggy] We know Al spends much of his time covering for Sam. But when, or if the details ever got out, would the "Quantum Leap" project be considered a success?

- The government see it as a success? Well, they kept financing it. So it had to be successful to the government on some level. Al was very good at raising funds from Congress and he had to explain "Quantum Leap" to them on a level they could understand. And he had to put out some teasers that in "Quantum Leap" uncover something that would be very positive for the government and for the country. He kept on that track when he met with Congress and that's how he got the money. He was a good talker

- For $43 billion he could at least have altered the results of the last presidential election.

- I didn't tell any stories where he would radically change history because we know what goes on in history. And that would have been as if the show was a pure fantasy, which, I didn't want the audience to feel that way. I wanted the audience to feel that there really was Sam out there leaping through time. There were certain things, he could only leap into people that were ordinary. That was what we started off with, that rule, which I broke a couple of times later in the show. The reason he could only leap into his own lifetime was to make the show believable. I didn't want it one day he'd leap into Rome and Caesar's time. I didn't want that. I wanted every show to feel like it could really happen. And that's why it had to be contemporary.

- [Ziggy] What kind of challenges did you face in producing a show that relied heavily on guest actors?

- The show was an opportunity to use a lot of actors. I never found that to be a challenge, I found it to be an opportunity. I liked the idea of being able to pull different actors in from the acting pool. The stories that we wrote gave us that opportunity, which I think was very positive for the show.

- [Ziggy] Is it true that the format of the show was intentional and allowed you to use existing resources, sets, and costumes?

- Because we could leap into just about any place in any time we did use a lot of the sets that existed at Universal. We'd drive around and see a set and think, how can we put that into a story? And we did it quite often. It gave the show production values that it would normally have, using sets that had been paid for by another show. My favorite set was the bar.

- What d'ya got on tap?

- By the way, my dad had that bar, that bar was exactly replicated from the bar I was raised in until I was 18 years old and went off to college, including the beer taps, which were from my dad's bar, which was a real time trip for me, to be standing on that set as if I was standing at home 18 years or 20 years before.

- [Ziggy] How controversial was it to produce the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes?

- First of all when I created the show I wanted to use ordinary people because if you use ordinary people, you can't, you're not changing history with somebody famous. But I got to the point where I wanted to do Lee Harvey Oswald, because I had served with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marine Corps. And I knew Lee Harvey Oswald. There were so many stories about multiple shooters and multiple people behind it that I believe that Lee Harvey was the only guy that did it. And I knew that his type would react that way. So I decided to do the show. That episode was a little different for me because I started the same way I do any episode, I just start writing and something comes out, but here I knew I was going to use Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew that he was going to kill Kennedy in his lifetime. So I had to work around all that. It was an interesting episode to write, dealing with somebody who actually lived, killed the precedents.

- [Ziggy] Was the evil leaper storyline planned from the beginning?

- Evil leapers were only in, I believe, about three episodes. I didn't have any plans to continue them. They were put in an episode by another writer. And so I let it go on for the three episodes, but I never really felt comfortable with the evil leapers. That's just a personal thing. I don't know why I didn't feel comfortable with them, other than they were evil. So maybe I'm not too comfortable with that. It didn't feel the same as the other episodes to me, it felt different and it was different. And I don't know that it was different in a good way.

- Alia is not gone.

- [Ziggy] What were some of your ideas for a potential season six?

- I didn't have a plan for season six. It was going to be the same thing, to tell all the stories that we could tell. "Quantum Leap" had the great ability to tell any kind of story. There was no a running line that you couldn't get away from, you have to just go with whatever story was being told. I just planned to do a lot more individual stories

- [Ziggy] Was Bruce McGill intentionally cast in the series finale, "Mirror Image," as a callback to the pilot episode, "Genesis Part I?"

- Bruce was an actor that I loved working with and I wanted to work with him again. And so that final episode I put Bruce in it. He was in the first one and put him in what turned out to be the last one. It was a, he's a delight to work with. Purely the producer's desire to have him in the show.

- [Ziggy] How would you envision a modern reboot of "Quantum Leap?"

- I think if I did "Quantum Leap" today I'd do it just the same way I did it decades ago. I would tell the same type of stories, doing stories of individuals, their challenges. I would be able to use more sets from other shows and more modern sets, but it would basically be the same show. What made the show great was the stories and the interaction of the people, not the sets or the costumes or anything. How today's audiences would view the show, I don't think that view it any different than they did when we created it. It's the stories that were so good. And the people that I cast in the roles that made the show come alive. And I think the same thing would happened today. Wish I could do it again. I wouldn't serialize it. I got away from that. Never did it in the old show and I wouldn't do it in doing it again. I'd follow the same format.

- [Ziggy] What happened to Sam after the finale? Will he live forever, leaping at will, or will he eventually die? If he dies, what happens to his body?

- I think Sam went on leaping through time. I don't think he ever went home. When that last episode ended and the show went off the air, fans were of two sections. One section was that Sam went on leaping forever. And the other section was that no, Sam leaped home and they wanted him to leap home. The fans have wanted him to leave home were upset with me. I got a lot of, not nasty, but I got a lot of negative letters from fans like that because I said that he went leaping on. Sam leaping on is the way the story has to go. Can't stop, it's his life work. He's making a choice to leap on because he has so many people to help, which every episode he helped somebody and he had to keep doing that. So he made a very conscious choice to keep leaping. He could have chosen to leap back home, he had that ability. I'd like to think that Sam could live forever but I doubt that would happen. I don't think anyone can live forever. So I think at some point his life had to come to an end but maybe along the way, Sammy Jo, daughter that he had,

- [Sam] What's yours?

- Sammy Jo.

- There's a 91.9% chance that Sammy Jo Fuller is your daughter.

- She could take up the mantle and it would continue.

- She has an IQ of 194. So she got her brains from her father.

- Potentially I saw that, that Sammy Jo could take his place and it would be a different show, but she would keep leaping the same way that Sam did. But I couldn't have done it because Scott Bakula was so integral to the character and so important to the show that without him I don't think the show could have gone on.

- [Ziggy] What do you think happened to Al when Sam was left leaping forever?

- Well, that's an interesting question. What happened to Al? [laughing] I hadn't thought what happened to Al. Dean Stockwell probably did. But I think Al would have been traveling along into the future along with him, would still be there as a sidekick. It would have to continue the storylines just as they had. Sam's connection to Al was like an umbilical cord. I don't think you could separate the two. Where Sam went Al would follow. Al wouldn't pass away, it's television.

- It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

- Thank you for all the questions. Hopefully someday Dr. Beckett will return home, but probably not. "Quantum Leap," may it come back again. [bright music]