The device is often temperamental and must be struck a few times as it emits electronic beeping and whirring sounds before the information is revealed. He also updates Sam on future events and relates possible outcome probabilities using a handheld communication device in contact with Ziggy. Al helps Sam overcome some facets of his 'Swiss-cheese memory' and provides information on history as it originally happened.

Al, working with the project's artificial intelligence Ziggy (voiced by Deborah Pratt), determines that Sam must alter an event in the current period he is in so as to re-engage the Quantum Leap process and return home. He finds that Al has come to his aid as a hologram that only Sam can see and hear, as it is tuned to his brainwaves. When Sam gains consciousness, he finds himself suffering from partial amnesia, and is more surprised to find that his appearance to others, including what he sees in the mirror, is not his own face. When Al learns that funding for the project is in danger of being pulled because no demonstrable results have come from the project, Sam takes it upon himself to step into the Quantum Leap accelerator to prove the project works and is sent into the past. In the series premiere, Sam has theorized the ability to travel in one's own lifetime and is the lead of the government-funded Project Quantum Leap, operating from a secret laboratory in New Mexico Al oversees the project for the government.

Sam Beckett (Bakula), a brilliant scientist who has become stuck in the past as a result of a time travel experiment gone wrong, and his attempts to return to his present, the late 20th century, by altering events in the past for the better, with the aid of a hologram of his friend Admiral Al Calavicci (Stockwell), monitoring him from Sam's present. Quantum Leap follows the narrative of Dr.

Quantum Leap by John Peel