Years ago, at some con or another, you could only have a room party if you were part of an organized group. And so began The Cult of Scott Bakula. Their profession of faith is “His career died for our sins.” I haven’t joined, but I’ve long thought about it. Scott Bakula will likely never know this—unless somehow he reads this article, I suppose—but he got me through a rough period in my life by being there every day, twice a day in fact, on USA. No matter what else was happening, he was there at noon and midnight on weekdays.

Honestly his career has been doing just fine. He’s made some stinkers over the years, same as pretty much anyone, but I’ve always been comfortable in the knowledge that, if I wasn’t seeing him on TV or in movies much, he was off doing theatre and was probably happy about it. He’s one of a handful of performers who goes back and forth between stage and screen and always has, spending his first ten years in the business onstage before going to Hollywood, then returning to New York during the ‘88 writers’ strike. He was nominated for a Tony, then cast as Sam Beckett.

It is Sam Beckett who rescued me. My senior year in high school, which coincided with the last year of Quantum Leap, was exceedingly difficult for me on a personal level. Several people close to me died. I fought with one of my best friends after I’d supported him through the death of his father, and he started spiraling in ways I couldn’t help him with. I don’t want to harp on how hard that year was for me, but it was very hard, and I didn’t feel there was a lot I could rely on. Except Sam. Sam was there, and Sam would have helped me if he could have.

Sam is a challenging role. It’s true that everyone he Leaped into, he basically played himself trying to fit into their lives, making it a bit surprising that fewer people noticed there was something odd about an important person in their life. Just for starters, the confusion and bewilderment of the first episode, where Sam does not know what’s going on and knows that whatever it is, it’s not what he’s used to. Even if he doesn’t remember what he’s used to. And then just as he’s starting to figure out his place in things, he Leaps, and it’s all different.

In a way, it’s a hell of a metaphor for high school. Oh, you remember what went before better than Sam does, but it’s still a life that you know you can’t go back to. You want to, at least a certain amount, but there’s so much you have to do in the here-and-now, and just as you have something figured out, you start over at something new and different. The people around you are constantly shifting—but in an Evil Leaper sort of way, where they’re the same people but no longer the same people, because they themselves are dealing with their own issues and are in their own flux. It’s not perfect, but it holds up on at least a surface level.

Which is probably why I cried so much at the ending of Quantum Leap. After five years of watching Sam suffer through so much (not that I started the show at the beginning, I’ll confess), suddenly the floor was yanked out from under us. My mother, Gods love her, walked in on my crying and said, “It’s just a TV show.” But my feelings were deeper than the show even if Bakula hadn’t drawn me to the character so intensely. I always remember the episode as having aired in 1995, which it didn’t, and I hadn’t actually seen a fair amount of the show at that point because USA wasn’t playing those episodes yet, but it’s all blurred together in my head.

Another personal connection to Bakula is his Murphy Brown character. At the point he joined the show, my cousin’s kid was already occasionally on it, playing young Avery Brown. I tried to persuade my cousin Gina to bring me to set with her if Dyllan was ever on one of the Bakula episodes. She pointed out that they didn’t overlap, because they were the two men in her life, but I’m sure there was at least one episode and Gina failed me. I was a teenager with a crush, and what do you do?

I’ll confess to not really following a lot of his later career. I watched three or four episodes of Enterprise and couldn’t keep going, even for Scott Bakula. Which I made clear was what would keep me going if I could. He’s fine in American Beauty in a small and not terribly important role, but my goodness has that movie aged poorly. I haven’t watched any of his NCIS spin-off, which I will probably struggle through a bit of at some point. He’s done a lot of made-for-TV movies, and he’s done a lot of turkeys, and I’m often happier when he’s off doing Broadway.

But for me, Scott Bakula is inextricably linked to Dr. Sam Beckett. He never Leaped into my life, THAT I KNOW OF, but at the same time, he was there, striving to put right what once went wrong. In exchange, I have never accepted that final title card. That may be why I haven’t watched the new show, because I would be forced to accept that card—put there by network fiat, I’m given to understand—as canon. Which I will not do, so that I may in turn put right what went wrong for Sam.

Help me replace my copy of the soundtrack onto CD by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!