Quantum Leap question: What happens to the person who was in the body Sam inhabits? Don't they go into the future? Isn't it a body swap?

Help me, b.org. You're my only hope.

Quantum Leap FAQ:

18. Who is in the "Waiting Room"? What does it look like?

The leapee. To everyone at the Project (with the possible exception of Al (see #2), the leapee looks like Sam. The waiting room has been described by Don Bellisario as being a sterile, hospital-like room where the leapee is examined by the Project's medical staff. We've seen it a few times and it's big and blue, and located at the end of an isolated ocrridor. Once we got to see (and HEAR) the leapee when she entered the imaging chamber with Al, and she looked to us like the image Sam saw in the mirror. This is probably due to the same mechanism that allows us to see Sam as Sam [Bellisario's rules :)].

I just checked Wikipedia¹, and my mind is blown.

Later episodes make it clear, however, that Sam's entire body has traveled through time and that "the illusion of [his host's] physical aura" surrounds him, making him look and sound like that person with whom he interacts in the past, as well as to Al. Likewise, Sam's counterpart in the future is surrounded by a similar aura and looks and sounds like Sam to people at the project

IO9's premise to their latest article is invalid.

¹:No need to make the Jenny Shimizu mistake twice in one day

Yeah I remember an episode where Sam leaped into a double amputee and was walking around with invisible legs at one point. I think a pre-nosejob Jennifer Aniston was in that episode too.

On the other hand that might have been a fever dream of some kind.

And there was at least one episode in the room in the future where the leapee looked into a mirror and saw Sam, too.

I wonder if Charlie Jane will respond to me pointing out that QL is not indeed body-jumping. They're usually pretty good about that.

I only ever saw one episode of QL, and it was the one where he leaped into the guy just as he got electroshock therapy. That was a cool ep.

I tried to rewatch it a couple years ago, and hit a racially preachy episode and ran screaming. Tarnished good memories, that did.

I saw a couple of episodes but never got hooked. HOw did it work if he was not body jumping? There in his own body with an illusion that made him look and sound like the person he was displacing to others? Was the illusion light & sound or mind control? What happened to the person he replaced while he was there?

QL was never much with the sense-making. And I'm still kind of bummed out about how unsatisfying the finale was.

HOw did it work if he was not body jumping?

Once Sam stepped into the quantum accelerator thingy, he never stopped jumping from body to body. He never went back "home".

There in his own body with an illusion that made him look and sound like the person he was displacing to others? Was the illusion light & sound or mind control?

Never explained. In the beginning of the series, I think it was actually that only his mind was "leaping", but later on they wrote it as being his whole body - body-switching with people in the past. Which annoyed me because I think they did it for the amusement value of having big tall Sam walking around in dresses and high heels - with no explanation of how he could fit into them, or into the clothes of a man smaller than him, either. It just made no damn sense at all, and the show was stretching disbelief pretty hard anyway.

What happened to the person he replaced while he was there?

They had an alien/government abduction experience. They woke up in the Waiting Room, in Sam's body, and probably ended up believing it was all a hallucination or a dream. I always wondered what happened to them after they went back to their own bodies, after Sam fixed their problems. They'd have no recollection of what Sam did while he was "standing in for them", and he always made major changes in their lives - for the better, of course, that was the premise, but still - if you wake up from an intensely vivid and weird dream to find that days have passed, you've apparently done things you cannot recall, and your life is different and you've no idea how it got that way - isn't that, itself, kinda going to mess up your life? Sam was basically putting all those people in danger of being committed, of being thought insane or thinking themselves insane, and disappointing and/or frightening all the people around them that he'd managed to save/woo/impress/whatever?

And yeah, the series finale sucked. It was cool, right up to the point where we realized it made more questions than it answered, and we never really found out what *really* happened to Sam.

Wow, I have strong feelings about Quantum Leap. I watched that show during a very difficult part of my life, and it gave me something to enjoy and lose myself in, but I've never been able to re-watch any of the episodes with the same enjoyment.