My mind interpreted the evil leapers as being from beyond Sam’s original future, where his technology may have been built upon by another (evil?) scientist, possibly so that leapers could travel beyond their own time-line. Alia had no concept of Sam but Zoe appeared to know of his existence, that suggests prior knowledge of his experiment/him and sinister motive? Future evil scientist would also know Sam is still bouncing around and maybe wants to eradicate him so that he doesn’t interfere with his masterplan, so he sends Alia after him (she may or may not know her true purpose due to the swiss cheese effect, although they clearly remember each other when they meet again at college but her mission in that episode is not revealed). Somebody at HQ gave Alia orders to assassinate Sam when they met – who and why? Maybe the whole reason for the Evil Leaper upsetting the course of history is to lure Sam to leap back to fix it in the hope that Alia would then trap him. The great thing about the fact they only saw each other when they touched, meant they easily could have been co-existing in Sam’s other leaps without knowledge of each other because they didn’t touch then. What also came across strongly was that Alia was an innocent being forced or bribed into doing evil – possibly serving an “alternative sentence” for a crime paralleling her with the character of Angel escaping prison (for a minor demeanour) which enabled her to escape her “higher authority”.

Of course this is all conjecture, it was more than likely just an idea to shake things up without putting too much thought into it. I like the fact that they kept the sci-fi/science fairly vague so there was plenty left to the imagination and you couldn’t pick holes in the theory!

When it came to the finale, I was gutted to read Sam never returned home. Even leaving it open for future episodes, you’d hope that one day he gets to retire. The leaping isn’t preventing him ageing, he comments on his grey hair in the finale so presumably he will continue to age and eventually die. Surely he should be able to leap home, then recruit a new leaper? I don’t really understand the idea of sending Al as the next leaper when Bellisario set up a perfect continuation with Sammy-Jo working at the project, isn’t she the logical choice? With her genetic tie to Sam, you’d expect she’d feel in her genes the need to leap and an “unexplainable urge” to rescue Sam (which we know is because they share a paternal bond). Its a shame they never went with the concept of her spin-off series because I think that could have worked well. Is the movie still going ahead? Maybe Sam will leap into an episode of NCIS…