Narrative Leaps

My too-often repressed sad and geeky side rejoices at the recent references to Quantum Leap that have been cropping up in Heroes. They began subtly, with the character Hiro Nakamura materialising in scenes of mid-western cornfields and weatherboarded homesteads akin to time-traveller Sam Beckett's childhood home, but the latest episodes have seen a marked escalation in parallels between the two U.S. television series. Hiro has had the odd Beckettian "Oh Boy!" slipped into his dialogue and his recent descent into brain tumour induced madness even saw him reciting Quantum Leap's iconic opening monologue. As if more keen eyed viewers hadn't noticed that the poor chap had been "trapped in the past... driven by an unknown force to change history for the better... and hoping each time that his next leap would be the leap home" for quite some time now! The writers managed to put the icing on the dramatic cake for me personally by also weaving in a clever homage to one of my favourite films, A Matter of Life and Death, in one of the latest episodes to air over her in the U.K. Hiro faced a trial while his tumour was being operated on, being judged in a kind of heavenly court and with his life dependent on the verdict. As his friend Ando watched the operation through glass and ultimately celebrated the survival of a bedridden and bandage-headed Hiro, the scenes mirrored the film exactly. For a fleeting moment it felt as if the majority of the major cultural reference points in my head were being shown on my television screen.

So what does all this mean? On a purely pragmatic level I can conclude that the people that write Heroes are a similar age to me and grew up absorbing the same media that I did. The television shows and films that first sparked their creative interest were the same as mine and it was inevitable that this would eventually bubble over onto the contemporary screen. Once you start following this train of thought, though, you begin to wonder what was so special about these particular media offerings that made them so memorable and inspiring. Originality has a clear role to play here. Consider the respective plotlines of Quantum Leap and A Matter of Life and Death. A genius scientist careering around in the space/time continuum, accompanied by an oft-married admiral in hologram form - where did all that come from? Or a hero pilot with a penchant for poetry somehow missing out on his alloted slot in heaven because of a pea souper fog, but finding love instead - could you think for a way of explaining that to potential financiers today? I'm almost tempted to write that you couldn't make it up, but of course you can only make it up, or at least that's what some supremely talented people did several years ago, the consequences of which were two of the most unique ideas for film and television entertainment that have ever graced screens large or small. Originality alone cannot hold the interest of an audience, though. They need to be captivated by a story.

The thing that first drew me to the film collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, of which A Matter of Life and Death is one, was the quality of the the narrative. These are well structured stories but it's not as simple as providing the audience with a beginning, a middle and and end. In fact, most of the films don't really end cleanly. Yes, Squadron Leader Peter Carter survives his brain tumour, but that seems to be only the start of his life with June, his love interest. In A Canterbury Tale the feared glue man is unmasked, but he is never really punished for his crimes and those complicit in his capture have their own stories to conclude beyond the scope of the film. They go off into battle or to pick up the pieces of relationships fractured by war. There is always some kind of redemption, but it is never complete or total, never too cosy. You get a profound sense of these stories being mere threads in a much broader narrative cloth. They are just spectacular facets of a life that we as an audience can recognise and relate to. They're fantasies grounded in reality, perhaps or just moments in time.

On one level the moments in time presented by Quantum Leap could be seen to be quite self contained little narratives of around forty five minutes in duration; episodic tales usually concluding with a happy ending and a little taster of where Sam Beckett would leap to next. Never having writers shy of piling on the sentiment, heroic Sam could be seen helping a young man with Down's Syndrome into employment, winning a crucial high school basketball game or saving his own brother from a sad demise in Vietnam. Each episode was complete in its own right, but regular viewing was rewarded with glimpses of the wider picture. We learned about Sam's childhood growing up as a boy genius, about his relationships and about the Naval career of Al ("... an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear..."). Perhaps we start to care what happens to him, even recognise aspects of our own lives in his, and thus we keep on watching. The door is also quietly opened for the viewer to ask broader questions about the collision between science and morality. Is it right for Sam to use his genius in Physics to travel through time and change history for his own benefit? Should he try and stop his fiance leaving him at the altar or save his sister from marrying an abusive man? Should he save his brother's life or tell Al's wife that her husband is in prison in Vietnam rather than dead? Again we as viewers are encouraged to make connections with a broader spectrum of ideas and outcomes beyond the central narrative, engaging and identifying more strongly with that narrative in the process.

In Heroes, too, we have been seeing lovable Hiro suffer as he grapples with both ill health and the ethics of time travel. He was intensely compelled to save the life of the woman he loved, even though several other characters warned against it, citing the clear dangers of meddling with history and the potential consequences of doing so for the present day. Overall as a drama, however, Heroes is very different to the shows and films that it pays homage to. It has a huge cast of characters displaying a wide range of superhuman abilities, each with their own back stories, families and friends. They interact in extremely complex ways across a diverse selection of geographic locations and we can go for several episodes without hearing from some of them, only for them to reappear and their particular story strand to by picked up again. There is an enormous amount for the viewer to have to take in and we have to accept a degree of narrative confusion if we are to continue watching the series. We are aware that the creator of the show, Tim Kring, has some kind of overall story arc in mind, but the conclusion that he is working towards is hidden from us. It's not like Sam aiming to make that leap home or Peter Carter being allowed to love June. We can only speculate as to where it's all ultimately leading , but we can probably assume that it won't be a conventionally satisfying end such as a happy-ever-after romance or a safe and sound forever world.

It is the nature of entertainment today that we rarely have a clear view of the end at the beginning. We sometimes strap ourselves in for the ride and see how the twists and turns pan out, but more than that we like to be in the driving seat too. A recent Sunday Times article about the computer game Heavy Rain spoke about our desire to be presented with multiple options, almost infinite narratives from which we can pick and choose according to how we play the game. Entertainment is becoming individualised. All stories have root in the ideas of one individual, but we are moving beyond just taking that individual's idea and creating something that can be universally understood from it, or creating broadly recognisable worlds to engage the audience. On one level, Heroes is Tim Kring's personal quest to take the narratives from his mind to some kind of public conclusion, much as Donald Bellisario wanted to do with Quantum Leap or Powell and Pressburger with A Matter of Life and Death. Kring's narratives, however, can be seen as modern, or even postmodern. They aren't conventionally linear. They have dead ends as well as loops, twists and turns. Characters come and go, sometimes never to be heard of again and sometimes we struggle to make sense of the flashbacks and connections, the subtle changes in histories and the perpetual shapeshifting. Accepting the Heroes universe is at times very difficult and direct identification with the themes and characters requires the audience to work quite hard. This is television entertainment for the interactive age, where people are used to being confronted with an abundance of choice or possible outcomes and having to navigate their own way through them. We may not be able to actually influence what happens on screen, but there is scope for us to interpret what's going on in many different ways, drawing the multiple threads together to make something very original for ourselves in ways that earlier dramas never allowed.

The references to older iconic television shows and films in Heroes emphasise the kind of time travel with which we are all familiar - the unstoppable forward movement of time, our existence in the present and our memories of the past. These shows and films paved the way for the complex serials of today. Their strong narratives and originality laid the foundations upon which new directions in screenwriting have been built. The writers of Heroes clearly hold them in deep affection, so they refer to them out of respect, but they also seem to want to demonstrate how far filmed dramas have come. They remember the old days fondly, but they recognise that they're at the cutting edge now, and they probably secretly hope that one day someone is going to reference their work in the stories that have yet to be told.