Why Can't Sam remember her?!

Yeah its good to point things out to people, but these people from this other board did it in a very unecessary malicious way. See back then for whatever reason I can't even remember anymore I used to do my writing on notepad which you can do nothing except write. You know as opposed to Word which you can add a background or put in images and do a spell check and change fonts etc... So I could not check my spelling. In fact it may have even been that we did not have Word, cuz this was back on the old dell I shared with my mom and I don't remember if it had Word. But anyway they did not take this excuse lightly and give me a break. It was mostly typos more than it was misspellings.

Anyway...Yeah....
 
Julia offered up a possibility and this is part of her post is something I wanted to comment on:

For all we know, the marriage could have been horrible and the real reason that Sam got into the accelerator chamber (in the changed history where he is married to Donna) isn't to prove his theories or risk losing funding but maybe the real, never revealed reason is that he was running away from a looney tune wife and a bad marriage.

As much as this may be a possibility, Julia, I have to argue against it. My problem with this possibility is that Sam later reunited Donna with her father. IIRC, he knew of Donna when he encounters her as a student and he has a desire to reunite her with her father and believes this to be the cause of her insecurity which led to her abandoning Sam at the altar. I find it just a bit odd that he would want to get in the accelerator to escape from Donna because if he was originally married to Donna, he would actually want to prevent Donna from being reunited with her father. Perhaps you might counter on this point that if he might have thought that by reuniting Donna with her father, this would help to cure some security deficit in her and help to improve her personality so that if he found himself back with her, ever, then she might be a different and more pleasant person to be with.

If this was raised as a counter-argument, I have a counter of my own and that would be that he seems to have a memory of being stood up at the altar and not that he had a crappy marriage that he was desperate to escape from for sanity's sake. I keep thinking that he would've remembered that he had a lousy marriage. Reuniting Donna with her father would have been for her sake if it was a lousy marriage and not for his sake, which was to prevent the heartbreak of being left at the altar and making her go through the marriage.

Maybe his desire to reunite her with her father was the desire to repair another tragedy in his life in addition to losing his father, Tom, and seeing Katie marry Chuck. I seem to like this alternative better.

Matthew
 
QuantumMatt said:
he knew of Donna when he encounters her as a student and he has a desire to reunite her with her father and believes this to be the cause of her insecurity which led to her abandoning Sam at the altar. I find it just a bit odd that he would want to get in the accelerator to escape from Donna because if he was originally married to Donna, he would actually want to prevent Donna from being reunited with her father.

Exactly and when they are reunited a second time in The Leap Back they clearly felt blessed to be together again, in the first sequence in which we see Sam and Donna together he spends several seconds just holding her obviously wanting to savor the moment since will Al out there he knew he could not stay. Not to mention the Balcont scene when they are both nearly naked in each other's arms. So it's made clear that their marriage is beautiful. So Julia while your thoughts here are respected and by me anyway admired as I love people who think outside the box as I try to do myself, I am going to have to respectfully disagree as Matt is.

QuantumMatt said:
Maybe his desire to reunite her with her father was the desire to repair another tragedy in his life in addition to losing his father, Tom, and seeing Katie marry Chuck. I seem to like this alternative better.

Actually in the novel Prelude which is a pre-leap story taking place while the project was still in development; Sam and Al are having a discussion in his office and Sam mentions wanting to save Tom, and he even visits the wall in Washington I believe where Tom's name had been engraved in the original timeline before Sam got his wish. There is also a scene where Sam is in his thoughts and he is wondering what his life would be like in so many alternate circumstances one of the main senerios being if Donna had not left him.

So it's suggested that the main purpose of Sam's wanting to travel in time was to go back and help his family and Donna. So although the novels are not canon information as they are just fanfics like any other only published; you have to admit that it makes a lot of sense that some of his subcontious during Star-Crossed remembered the desires he was having while devloping the project. And thus you are right Matt, his reuniting Donna with her father was a desire to help the people he loved as The leap Home was. Well also because he loved her very much and wanted to be with her because the reason he needs to reunite her with her father is so that she will not be afriad to commit and thus marry him. But being that he has a big heart and only wants peoples' happiness he probably would have been just as pleased with his job well done if she decided to marry the first guy she was engagded to. A wonderful man like Sam would see something like that as just as good a job well done because her happiness would be important to him.