Quantum Leap Bosses Explain How That Game-Changing Season 2 Finale Sets Up a Potential Season 3
The following contains major spoilers from Quantum Leap’s two-hour finale on Tuesday. Proceed accordingly.
Ben and Addison finally reunited on Quantum Leap, and it felt so good, but also left us with a million questions about where they go from there.
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Tuesday’s twisty, two-hour finale revealed that Hannah (recurring guest star Eliza Taylor) solved the complex equation that was key to bringing Ben home — a solution that also required someone to take his place. Addison, who was originally supposed to leap, volunteered to make the sacrifice this time around. But instead of a swap, the army vet wound up in the same timeline with Ben, where she got to touch him for the first time in years. Their long-awaited reunion was bittersweet given that there are now two leapers — three if you count Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett — stuck wandering through time and space.
Executive producer Dean Georgaris tells TVLine that it was always in the cards for Ben and Addison to be further separated this season and then eventually brought back together.
“It was very early on in the process that we landed on the idea that Addison, who we’ve told the audience multiple times was meant to be the leaper, affirmatively chooses to become the leaper — which is also something we’d never seen on Quantum Leap before,” he shares.
Martin Gero, who serves as showrunner alongside Georgaris, notes that they were both “frustrated in Season 1 with the stagnation of the Addison-Ben relationship.” That played into why Ben and Addison found new love interests, in Hannah and Tom respectively, for Season 2. They needed to be able to “touch someone else,” otherwise it would feel like a “chaste long-distance relationship.”
“Now, their ability to physically occupy the same space, and having gone through a year of learning, it really blows open the doors for us as to what to do,” Gero teases. “We’re not going to do what you think we’re going to do with it. I really feel good about where our Season 3 could go, in a surprising and fun way.”
Read on for the rest of our interview with Georgaris and Gero, which delves into Gideon’s surprising arc, the Hannah scene that never was and how the Season 2 finale changes the game for the show.
TVLINE | Let’s get into the Gideon (played by James Frain) of it all because there were theories that Jeffrey would grow up to be Addison’s ex-fiancè Tom (Peter Gadiot). Was that ever considered? How did the Gideon storyline come about?
DEAN GEORGARIS: We started with splitting Ben and Addison up, and that gave rise to both Hannah and Tom, who we knew were going to be like their own benevolent forces from the universe, ultimately helping Ben and Addison get back together. And we knew [from the first day talking about Season 2] that Hannah was going to be the one who created this code. As we talked about what Hannah’s life would look like, we realized we wanted her to have children and then, very quickly, you start to have discussions about, ‘Oh, could that child have a role in the present?’ and landed on something that I think was really beautiful.
For all the help that Hannah gives Ben by creating this code, the finale is about Ben sharing the power of healing with her son so that he’s saved. It’s really subtle and he doesn’t do it with a punch [or] with the speech. He does it by letting Jeffrey experience the power of good gestures. [Note: In the finale, Ben enlisted Jeffrey’s help in saving a man’s life, which prevented him from becoming the evil billionaire in present day who took over HQ out of revenge against Ben for his father’s death. Instead, Gideon is now a benevolent figure who allows the team to use his quantum chip at no cost.]
TVLINE | Ben’s conversation with Jeffrey in that garage was touching and felt like it had an underlying message. What do you hope people take away from that scene?
MARTIN GERO: To the credit of the show, we didn’t come up with it, but I think it’s always been about how seemingly small gestures of kindness can have huge reverberations. Ben not only needed to show Jeffrey kindness, but he needed to let Jeffrey experience what helping feels like, how good it feels to play a positive small part in someone’s life, and then see how instantaneously that changes the world. There’s an old Hebrew saying that when you save one life, you save a world. That is what the show is about and what we’re trying to put out into the ether for everyone in a time where I think kindness is at an all-time low, unfortunately, in some places.
TVLINE | The HQ team receives help from Beth (Susan Diol) and Janis (Georgina Reilly), who let Addison borrow Al Calavicci’s (Dean Stockwell) Handlink from the original show. Did you use the original prop or was that a recreation?
GERO: It was a recreation. [Executive producer and original Ziggy voice Deborah Pratt] has some of the original ones, but they’re exceptionally fragile and should be in the Smithsonian, so we were very delicate with them. We were also able to get some of the original music from the original series in that Beth scene. We wanted to really embrace that honoring and celebrating the old show as much as we can.
TVLINE | Do you think that leaves the door open for Janis to return in a potential Season 3?
GERO: Honestly, it’s to our great failing that we couldn’t figure out a way to have Janis a bigger part of the season. We love Georgina… it was just that the season was so full of other people’s stories. We didn’t have time to get to them… Dean’s worked with Georgina before, I’ve worked with Georgina for over 10 years now, so it would be a real treat.
TVLINE | In the finale, Hannah nearly died in that building fire and Jenn was shot and killed during a standoff with Gideon. They both managed to survive — Hannah made it out and the timeline changed so that Jenn was never shot — but was there ever a discussion about killing either of those characters permanently?
GERO: We talked about [Hannah] dying, but in old age. There was going to be a scene where we got to see Hannah in [a retirement] home trying to get the last missing piece of the equation, and then see all these pictures of Gideon around and realize that Gideon is Jeffrey. It was a cool moment, but it just didn’t make any sense and it robbed Gideon of that heel turn.
GEORGARIS: [The HQ team] didn’t get to play a lot in Season 1 and we really wanted to get them all their moments and their arcs in Season 2. We saw that with Magic. For all that faith, we saw the cost that Magic paid. And with Ian, I loved when they stood up to Tom and took ownership of the choice of saving Ben. We knew we were looking for the perfect moment for Jenn to demonstrate what we have said about her — that she is loyal, that she is a badass, that she is a genius. The finale gave us that opportunity, and I don’t think there’s any bigger moment you can give someone than to let them die so that their friends can live.
TVLINE | We only saw some of the repercussions of that reset at the end of the finale, so what do you hope to expand upon in a potential Season 3?
GEORGARIS: I don’t think we’re going to turn into a show that’s going to investigate all the little ways that the butterfly effect may have rippled through. One of our standing beliefs is it can affect the lives of the people around you dramatically and then it ripples out. We’ve spent two seasons building up two great leapers and a supporting cast that now may or may not have a code that may or may not work again to pull people out, and it really becomes about what can we affirmatively do with this new dynamic. The fact that we can have a little more humor now because we don’t have this heaviness hanging over us. We spent two seasons building up a launchpad to a whole new journey.
What did you think of Quantum Leap’s Season 2 finale? Grade both episodes below, and then sound off in the comments!
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