Sam leaps into a bar that is rather empty except for the bartender. He is amazed to see his own image when he looks into the mirror behind the bar. The bartender is Al, and the bar is named "Al's Place." Sam soon finds out that that day's date is August 8, 1953-the very day he was born.
We learn that he is in Cokeburg, Pennsylvania, a mining community, and it seems that many of the people who come into the bar look just like people Sam has encountered the last five years of quantum leaping, led by actor Richard Herd playing an old coal miner named Ziggy who to Sam looks just like Moe Stein, the name of the actor who was Captain Galaxy the time Sam became "Future Boy" a few years back. Unlike Sam's computer Ziggy-the one who was a man but became a woman-this guy is very funny, mixing up words and terms, such as saying "BVD" for "KGB," etc. There is even a miner called "Gooshie" just like the programmer Al and Sam work with. Just like the running joke about the programmer, this Gooshie also has terrible bad breath.
Sam knows something special is going on, but cannot figure out what. Even more perplexed are Al and Gooshie, because nobody leapt into the imaging chamber. They figure Sam must have leapt into himself, but they don't know when. They think maybe on his birthday, and start their searching with his first birthday-which slows them down because not until much later do they think of going back to the actual day of Sam's birth.
Meanwhile, with the bar full of coal miners, a long whistle sounds indicating a disaster. We learn two men are trapped because of a cave-in. Sam now thinks saving them is why he is here and he engineers a way to get some miners down to rescue the pair, against the direct orders of the mine owner who is fearful something will go very wrong and more will be killed, and the miners are rescued just in time.
But that's not why Sam is here. He has these philosophical discussions with the bartender, but cannot really figure out anything about what is going on. An old miner known as Stawpah helps him, but he suddenly vanishes, much the way Sam does when he leaps, and all the other miners seem to not know he was there, even though they were all talking with him and joking with him a short while before.
Al finally locates Sam and is amazed to learn that Sam thinks the Al that owns the bar is actually God. The bartender Al has told Sam that Sam himself is determining his leaps and not Al (the bartender). He says he can go home whenever he really wants to.
Sam, almost like he's having a psychiatry session, reveals that he really wishes to have a second chance at one leap-the time he might have been able to save Al's first marriage by didn't because the rules Sam developed for his project insisted that neither Sam nor Al do anything to improve their own lives, fearing that even a small change could later create problems.
This time, as the series concludes, Sam goes back to where he was talking to Beth, Al's first wife in an earlier episode and tells her about Al not being dead and being eager to come home to her. We conclude with a few words on the screen telling us that Al's history is now greatly changed. Instead of being a childless, five-time married man, (four divorces) Al and Beth have now been married 39 years and had four children together. We conclude with the words that Sam never went home again.
It's hard to figure out what to make of all of this. There were several elements of humor, some measure of closure involving Al and Sam but a lot of unrelated things that simply do not make sense.
Even if the bartender was God, why do so many of those miners look exactly like people Sam met before in other lifetimes? What was the deal with Stawpah-it was suggested that he is another leaper, although we were told definitively that he was a real man who died some time before.
The main point of the rules against helping your own life the series stressed years ago seems to now be ignored. So if the series went on, we'd no longer hear Al talking about his girlfriend Tina, nor trying to remember which of his five wives did something or other. We'd hear about his longtime wife Beth and their children, and presumably grandchildren.
But realistically, if the young officer returned from Vietnam and his wife was reunited with him and he didn't go through all those other wives, his whole life from the early 70s through the early 90s when Project Quantum Leap began and he hooked up with Sam would have probably been significantly different. I submit that if this really happened to him, it is likely he would have been retired, or have never encountered Sam, and never begun working together on the project. Sam would have had another observed all these times, at best. Indeed, once you change Al's broken first marriage and subsequent marriages into a long-lasting marriage, you change so much of his history that it could well have changed Project Quantum Leap. Perhaps the other observer wouldn't have done what Al did any of the dozens of times he saved Sam's life and the whole project would have come to a crashing end years before we got to where we ended this.
Al was heavily involved in all sorts of things that saved Sam's bacon through the years. If someone else had been in that role, there's a great chance that somewhere along the way, their methods would not have been as effective and Sam couldn't have had the success he had. In any of several cases, Sam would have been killed.
This episode was more enjoyable than many this final season-easily the worst of the series in many ways. I liked much of this finale, but not all of it. That results in a 7.
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