In the original timeline of this contemporary Quantum Leap project, Addison is the leaper. According to Ian and Leaper X/Marine Richard Martinez (Walter Perez), society collapses after Addison starts leaping through spacetime and Quantum Leap is blamed for everything bad. Martinez then leaps to go back in time to kill Addison but not before coming up with the idea to nuke HQ. Ian leaps after Martinez to advise Ben and HQ is nuked after Ian leaps back home from their forewarning mission. Ben is not the first leaper since Dr. Sam Beckett went ca-ca in the Quantum Accelerator. By my count, he’s the fourth person to leap in the sequel series. And Ian is the first known person to leap and return home, which means it’s possible that Ben (and Sam?) can do the same.
Back to Ian and Ben in the future wasteland. Ian has spent decades devising a new code, a cheat code, that Ben has to memorize before the Accelerator sucks him out of the future. Ian’s final instruction is for Ben to give past-Ian the code and to remember that “we need each other…it takes 2” but Ian is cut-off as the Accelerator becomes too powerful for Ben to resist its pull—and Ben disappears before Ian can finish the instruction. It’s a credit to the expert storytelling that all of this happens in the first 5 and a half minutes of “Judgment Day.”
Ben’s next leap takes him into his own past body on the day of his first date with Addison in 2018. This blessed day is also targeted by Martinez as his destination point for disposing of Addison. Leaping into one’s own body is a big risk. If Ben changes anything in the 2018 timeline it could create a paradox that may erase someone from existence, cause Ben and Addison to never fall in love or rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime killing everything that ever was, according to Janis Calavicci’s (Georgina Reilly) risk assessment of Ben’s leap.
Ben doesn’t stick to the original timeline at all, at least not beyond making sure they order egg rolls instead of scallion pancakes on their dinner date. He even tells Addison that he’s a time traveler…himself from 2022. Addison doesn’t believe him, so when Ben tells her to take his car home, lock the doors, arm herself and tell no one where she is, Addison calls Magic (Ernie Hudson). Who wouldn’t? Magic is the boss/friend everyone turns to in times of trouble. The problem is that Martinez uses Magic’s body for his leap to 2018. Addison didn’t just call Magic, she calls her own assassin.
When Martinez leaps from the future, his aim is ending Addison, but he has since run probabilities through Ziggy and learns that the whole Quantum Leap team must die to truly put a stop to the project once and for all. Martinez initiates the Accelerator to implode and wipe out all life within a three-mile radius just before he shoots Addison in the arm. Future/past Ben and future Martinez/past Magic brawl it out as the Accelerator spins out of control. When they charge at each other, the Accelerator transports them both backwards through all of Ben’s and Martinez’s crossing-points. Until they finally land where they met, in the Old West ca. 1879, and Martinez is gunned down and falls through a rooftop fence to the dirt road below in perfect Western fashion.
We see Martinez die, but what about Magic? It’s his body that leaps as Martinez’s host, which means that when Martinez dies, so does Magic. And how will the fabric of the universe handle the leaps of two leapers double-leaping, not just in the sense that two people leap, but two people leaping simultaneously as the body-hosts of two leapers? The only hope is that when future-Ian says “it takes two” and perhaps they weren’t just talking about two people entering the cheat code at the same time.
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