leaper said:
ok this might have been discussed many times here in the thread but it still bugs me a little.I was watching the episode leap back and in one scene of the ep sam said donna how he felt in these 2 years of his absence,and donna said nothing.And here is the silly part if those 2 years passed and sam was traped in time for 2 whole year,then why the year was still 1999?:banghead why not 2001:hurray: i mean this doesnt make any sence.If i go back in time, i might be back in time but the time in my timeline will go on Its not gonna stand still.So why didnt we see that on ql?maybe that seems a little detail but it would be nice if they cleared that up with the time and not leave details like this one unexplained.
It might be fiction but it d be nice if they tried to make the show more realistic
These are details that are really just continuity errors. Why? Because
I can't even come up with a logical explanation for it. :lol The "present" year discrepancies occur in every season premiere. I think what happened is that Don Bellisario simply likes to keep the future a certain amount of years ahead of real time. So if a year passes in real-life, he'll make a year pass by for the "present" in the show, too.
In Season 1, Sam's initial leap took place in May of 1995 (Sam explains in "Killin' Time" that he created a secret government project in 1995). By at least the time "All-Americans" aired in Season 2, the year was 1996 (as evidenced by Al talking about the Super Bowl, which, in a bizarre coincidence, turned out to have the same teams play in the same year, with even the same score that Al mentions!).
In "Shock Theater," the leap year was 1954, and Al explains to Tibby that he's 43 years in the future, which made the present 1997. Just one episode later in "The Leap Back," the date is September 18, 1999. And in "Lee Harvey Oswald" the biggest discrepancy occurs when the date is revealed to be February 14, 1999. In "Star Light, Star Bright," Sam reveals the date to be May 1, 1999.
And finally, I believe in one of the early drafts for "Mirror Image," the year is supposed to be 2000, but this is never mentioned, so I believe it technically remains 1999.
So the bottom line is that Sam can bounce around to any year in no particular order, but the present year (we're led to believe, anyway), is supposed to be in real-time, meaning that for each year Sam leaps, a year goes by at the Project. But then you also have contradictions to that fact, where Al explains in "Genesis" that the Project has been popping champagne bottles for 6 days, when only a day went by for Sam. I think Bellisario always confused the idea of jumping around in time with the idea of having the present's time being properly consecutive.