Quantum leap season 1

1 - 2 - Pilot
It all starts. We learn that Sam jumped in the accelerator; Al knows they’re not ready, the computer was against it, but Sam did it anyway. He wakes up thinking “we did it! ... did what? I can’t remember, I can’t remember anything, who am I?”, then he learns that he’s called Tom, has a pregnant wife and a son, and is a pilot. Looking at his image in the mirror he knows it’s not him, but at the moment that’s as far as he goes. 
When he sees Al, he doesn’t recognize him. Later that night, he starts remembering something, that he was raised on a dairy farm in Indiana until he was 18, had a sister Kate who married Jim, mom lives in Hawaii since dad died in ‘74, so since this is just 1956 he figures that his dead is still alive and wants to call him but doesn’t remember either the number or the name...
Al can’t tell him his surname or any personal information, and even tells him that they couldn’t retrieve him because he told people that he’s not the real Tom... he also tells him that they’ll try again on Tuesday so he tries pretending he’s the real Tom, but I guess his wife starts wondering after they kiss... problem is, he has a flight test on Monday... on the questionnaire designed to test how the flights affect their memory, he writes that he was born on 1953 and also about stuff they have never heard about... so they think he faked the memory loss like other pilots.
Before the test Al explains something about their project Quantum leap, which is fascinating :-)
Al tells him that Tom was killed during a flight trying to break mach-2, so if he puts that right he’ll leap. Al is an ex-astronaut apparently, so plans to help him flight the plane.. Al is a bit late though because he was at a ball game and met a girl.. still he arrives and helps him, and he ejects right before the plane explodes. Sam’s still there though, he didn’t leap, although Tom’s life has been saved. 
His wife went into labor when she heard the crash, and is having some problems.  Nine weeks too early. The choice is to give birth where she is but the baby won’t stand a chance, or transfer her to another hospital, but the doctors there think it’s too late, so Sam uses his medical knowledge - also insisting that everything he wrote in the questionnaire is the truth - to tell them to get her drunk and thus stopping the contractions, so they can save both. After that, he leaps.
Into a baseball player. Al tells him that both Tom and the baby lived, and they called the baby girl Samantha :-)
Sam says “I could be bouncing around in time forever” and Al “no, nobody lives forever” :-p
Sam has six doctorates, medical doctor is just one of them. Al is touched by his situation and tells him his surname: Beckett, so Sam calls Mr Beckett, in Indiana, and he can finally hear his father’s voice, telling him they’re related because he’s the son of his uncle John who went to Australia. 
Grateful that he could do that, he moves on on a very different spirit, and wins the game. Of course it’s two strikes first, then .. well he misses the third too, but the catcher doesn’t catch so Al starts shouting for him to run; the other team keeps not catching the ball so he keeps running all the way.
Then he leaps again, into a professor. The end.

3- Star-crossed
June 15, 1972
Sam is an English professor, supposed to talk about Wuthering Heights at Lawrence College, Ohio, named Gerald R. Bryant, as his faculty ID shows us, thanks. A student named Jamie Lee is obsessed with him and with poetry. She already told her dad and supposed boyfriend about ‘them’, seems even happy at the idea of a double suicide, to die romantically like Romeo&Juliet... :-/ how silly, romanticism is to live together, not to die together! Al tells him his reason for being here is to avoid the marriage between the professor and the girl that will ruin both their lives, but Sam thinks differently. He says he’s here to get a second chance. Donna is here, and they almost got married but she didn’t show up in church, although they would meet in twelve years.  
Al warns him about “Quantum leap rule numero uno: “the time traveller shall not take advantage of his position to improve or alter his life”, but he doesn’t care.  Al says: “don’t give me that sick puppy look, stop it”...
So Sam starts spending time with Donna, talking about astrophysics and time-traveling theories and telling her what Al told him about the string  in a circle and all that crumpled up... he thinks that Donna never got over the fact that her father left her and plans to get them together again. He’s in Washington at the Pentagon, and is supposed to leave for Vietnam the next day.
Three of Sam’s doctorate are in : medicine, astrophysics and ancient languages. Since the bosses are controlling Al he wore hieroglifycs to help him.  
He tries to have Oscar make peace with Jamie Lee by having him be a little more romantic, but she shows again at his place in a lovely Guinevere’s dress... and then Oscar shows up complaining that it didn’t work when he told her that her perfume makes him horny... yeah very romantic!
Sam, Donna, Jamie Lee and Oscar all travel to Washington in Oscar’s car, but Al has a point: Donna was engaged once before, before him, so she might grow up to marry that other man..  
When they get there, they’re not allowed in but Sam enters from a side door - it wasn’t locked, is it to be considered breaking and entering? Anyway, they reach the colonel’s room and Donna meets her father who tells her that he loves her.  
One of the guards notices a car with the plate from Ohio - why is that a big deal after Sam just told him that Donna traveled all night from Ohio?? - and then he also finds the open door, and now we see why there was one open: it had been taped so that it wouldn’t lock. The other guard calls the police for a break-in at the Watergate...
Oscar finally switches horny with ‘breathless with passion’ ..
It’s now June 17, when it all started, the Watergate Scandal and Nixon impeachment...
He leaps as soon as Jamie Lee kisses Oscar, into a boxer.

4- The right hand of God
October 24, 1974 - California
Sam is Cody, a boxer. His contract has been bought by a convent of nuns. If he wins heavyweight champions he'll give money to the nuns of St. Mary to build a chapel.
They own him now and he goes to live with them, supposedly to save money they say, but I don't see how since his girlfriend still lives in their apartment..
In the past more than once he took money to lose fights.
Now he starts training with sister Angela, who of course has a sad past, her family murdered when she was a little girl.
His girlfriend is Dixie, the sweet blonde stripper who likes to say "sprinkles on top".
He trains very hard for the next fight, and Al says that in the past the real Cody took a dive and lost.
Now Sam wants to fight clean, despite a boss wanting him to lose.
Sam bets all their money, Cody's and Dixie's, but on Ali's match, and he wins 48.000 dollars, so he can give 20.000 to the nuns, 20.000 they keep, and the other 8.000 they give to the boss as compensation and way out.

5- How the Tess was won
August 5, 1956 - Texas
A ranch owner wants his daughter Tess to marry someone, but she refuses. When he insists she proposes a contest: she chooses Doc and if he wins a week of challenges she'll marry him and together they'll own everything.
Sam is Doc, a vet secretly in love with her. One day she tires so much she faints, and he takes her home and undresses her saying she needs to cool down...  was it really really necessary to leave her with only her bra and panties on, in front of the kid?
At the end he wins but refuses the marriage; she's sad and goes to talk to him, and he confesses that he didn't do it for the land but because he's in love with her.
Cowboy Wayne shows up at Doc's door too, confessing that he also doesn't care about the land, he's always been in love with her and has written her a lot of love letters, so she'll marry him.
Al tells Sam that it was to be expected, tells him "you had a lot to overcome", and the explanation is Doc's face in the mirror... or it is supposed to be. What was wrong with it? We see it only for a moment. Was he older? Ok, maybe Wayne was cuter, but that's in the eye of the beholder right?
Sam hasn't leaped yet. Throughout the episode there was the little gag of the kid that looks after his animals and sings outside his door, and Sam didn't know his name.
At the end of the episode the little pig that the doc/Sam had saved escapes out and Sam goes after him calling Piggy, Piggy, and the kid starts singing PiggySue. Now Sam knows why he's there and the name of the kid. He calls him Buddy (as in Buddy Holly) and says "Buddy, why don't you try Peggy Sue, it might sound a little better" ...

6- Double identity
November 8, 1965
They speak Italian A LOT in this episode :-p and Sam sings Nel blu dipinto di blu.
Sam is Francesco 'Frankie' who's having a story with Theresa who apparently is off-limits because of Don Gino's orders.
Al is still trying to find a way to bring Sam back and this time their plan cause a HUGE blackout and it still won't work, of course. To make it work Sam has to be with the same person at the same place and doing the same thing he was doing when he appeared. We'll never know if the plan would have really worked if Sam had followed the instructions to the letter, instead he didn't have sex with Theresa... good thing maybe since Don Gino busted in with a gun and they started fighting a bit. Sam leaps into Don Gino and this time he thinks he'll be able to do something good, and when Frankie admits, with all due respect, that "I love her so much it hurts" he publicly approves of their engagement so that Don Gino won't be able to change it. Still no leap, until he realizes that he was there to make grandma win bingo...

7- The color of truth
August 8, 1955
Sam leaps into Jessie, a black man in 1955 Alabama. Before he knows anything about his new himself, he sits down at a diner and almost gets beaten up for it. He’s Miss Melanie’s driver and general factotum. Sam wants to help the civil rights war but Al tells him he’s there to save Miss Melanie’s life since she’s supposed to die the next day. 
His granddaughter Nell comes to take him home, where he has to cook, but a bunch of white shits leave a burning cross in front of their house scaring the girl.
Miss Melanie’s not too bad, although as an old lady she’s very attached to “the way things are, the way things have always been”; Poor Nell is thrown offroad by two white guys; Miss Melanie warns him as soon as she sees the car, they take Nell in the car, lulled into her arms, and he drives straight towards the first hospital even though that is a white-hospital... it IS against the law though, so the doctor says he can’t help, but Miss Melanie steps forward saying “I want you to help that child” so they do it. A nurse called the sheriff and he arrests him. He has the sheriff agree to keep Miss Melanie there for half an hour so that she couldn’t get killed in the car crash - what Al thinks they’re there to avoid - but as soon as she hears he’s been arrested she drives the car herself. Al is in her car shouting for her to stop the car, and at the last second she does and doesn’t die, thinking her dead husband saved her.. she has Jessie released from jail and she tells him that Nell is fine enough and has been moved to the other hospital. She sends him to take her salad at the diner as usual, like at the beginning, until she walks in at sits there and asks him to join her for lunch. And now he leaps.

8- Camikazi kid
June 6, 1961
Sam is Cam Wilson, a 17-year-old kid. His sister Cheryl is engaged to Bob. He drinks a lot, and Sam must stops Cheryl from marrying him. Sam remembers his own sisters who got married at 17 and had an abusive husband but told nobody. Cheryl’s wedding is in three days. He sees a bruise on her neck but she covers for Bob. At the wedding rehearsal, he makes a touching speech on how he’s proud of her, then in the bathroom he overhears Bob talking to his dad when he says he’s going to work with him so Cam tells Cheryl but Bob lies again and she believes him so Sam listens to Al and challenges him to a race. Cam and 16-year-old Jill modify the car to give it more boost. Thanks to Jill’s help and Al he wins the race, but then he’s so angry he tries to run him over. After that Cheryl gives him back the ring and when Bob tries to force her to stay with him Sam hits him : “don’t you ever touch my sister again”, and after that even his friends leave him. 
Cheryl goes home with Jill and Cam and then she leaves as she wanted to for Kennedy’s campaign and other charity work. Sam kisses Jill and then he leaps (she’s 16, but he’s supposed to be 17.. 
I don’t know how old the actress was).  He leaps into a man, holding a gun, standing in front of a dead man’s body...
Jason Priestley plays Bob’s s friend. 

9- Play it again, Seymour
April 14, 1953
Sam’s a private detective named Nick Allen, someone Sam and Al both say has a remarkable resemblance to Bogart, so much Sam asks “Am I Boogie?” but alas no, Bogart is with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden ( :-D )  but honestly I don’t see it. A vague resemblance, maybe, but nothing more.
Sam has a lot of de jà vu.. he knows everybody around. The dead man was his partner Phil, and Nick was having an affair with his wife Allison (Claudia Christian), well more or less since they never made love before. When he finds a manuscript or something in his office he realizes why it is that he knew what was happening: he read the book. 

He almost dies when he enters the elevator but the elevator is not there and he almost falls down.
Al finds the book and it turns out that the mystery was never solved, and also that Nick was killed too. (Al has been married five times already :p). Sam likes Allison too and is so annoyed at his warnings that she might be the killer that he becomes a little mean: "don't compare me to yourself; I think with my brain and I don't cloud my judgement with the bottle" but quickly regrets it "why do we hurt people for telling us the truth".
A guy, Seymour, wants to be like Nick and follows him around, but Nick tries to leave him behind when Al tells him that after his death Seymour and Allison disappear. Al warns him to stay away from LaGuardia, where Nick died, but he wants to find Phil's killer, but Seymour is taken away by 'Clapper the dropper' :p while he's distracted by some people who think he's Bogart...
Neither Allison or Seymour had anything to do with the murder, it was a man obsessed with her. With Al's help he has Lionel arrested and so Allison and Nick can finally be together... and Seymour, scared after Lionel tried to kill him, changes his mind and doesn't want to do that job anymore, instead he decides to write about it and will become a writer :p
Sam leaps again and finds himself in a bathtub, and a girl calls him "Miss" ...

I liked these last two episodes, my favs of the first season. Specially the last one, with its aura of 'noir film' about it, really good.