[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Quantum Leap.]With Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) completing his final leap of the season and the battle with Leaper X coming to an end, you’ll have to wait for Season 2 of the NBC series Quantum Leap to see what comes next for the team. Whether Ben and Addison (Caitlin Bassett) will ever be reunited, when Ben might return home, and who or what their next threat could be, are all unknowns to speculate about until then.

After screening the finale, Collider got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with showrunner Martin Gero, in order to get the rundown of what’s next. During the interview, he talked about how traveling to the future came about, whether viewers will ever find out who Ian (Mason Alexander Park) found for Ben to leap into, the fun in having the cast play different versions of their characters, the resolution of the Leaper X storyline, the scene they decided to remove from the end of the season finale, how much they’ve thought about long-term plans, whether Scott Bakula still could make an appearance, and how they jumped right into shooting Season 2, which is currently in production.
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Collider: When did you know that you wanted to leap to the future for the finale? And did you always know that it would have to be Ian there waiting for Ben?

MARTIN GERO: Yeah, it made the most sense. In all incarnations of, “Why did Ben leap?,” it had to have come from future knowledge that Ben couldn’t have. So, when you think about, “Who would have done that?,” Ian is the only character that makes sense to have done that. And the future part was something that had been set up, but to be honest, the original idea of what that meant shifted, as we developed the season. But it really crystallized when it made sense to us that the reason they needed to go to the future was time. Ian needed more time. The math was so complex that it would take another 10 years to get right. They have access to a time machine, so Ian was able to return to their timeline and work for 10 years, to try to figure it out, basically.

Image via NBC

At the same time, who exactly did Ian find for Ben to leap into? Ian makes the comment about how hard it was to find somebody for Ben to leap into, so how did that work?

GERO: That’s a story for another day. I’ll leave that open to the fan community. I would love to read people’s short stories about who that person is.

It’s one of those fun questions that it feels like you could just never answer and it still would be like a cool thing to have out there.

GERO: Absolutely. We don’t plan on answering it. Not this season, and not next season. We talked about it a lot. We have an internal logic for us, but it’s fun to just leave it out there.

What was it like to figure out how you wanted to represent the future, what you wanted to show of it, and how you wanted that to reflect in Ian? We don’t really see much of it, but we get so much from it.

GERO: I think that’s key. Even the old show, which I obviously have an extreme affinity for because I’ve dedicated the last year and a half of my life to bring it back to television, when you look at their version of the future now, it’s all a little hokey with plexiglass and lasers. To be fair, there’s no version of the future that works five years from now, so we were like, “Let’s try to keep it as contained as possible.” With 12 Monkeys, they were underground and hiding. So, the fact that Quantum Leap was underground and could have caved in, to give a little sense of the sky, but then we could contain what we saw of the future to not make it too silly, if that makes sense.

You really get so much from Ian and Ian’s reaction. You can feel such weight with how Ian is with Ben.

GERO: Yeah. Mason [Alexander Park] is truly a phenomenal performer. There’s nothing that we can throw at them that they can’t do. We’re constantly looking for ways to really show off how incredible Mason is.

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It was a very interesting choice to have 2023 Ben leap into 2018 Ben, for what’s supposed to be the final leap. What did you enjoy about getting to show us some of the past of all these characters while also still playing with their present?

GERO: As far as time travel goes, Back to the Future 2 is my favorite time travel movie, and certainly this episode is a big homage to that. The show can get plotty. The show has a lot of time travel math. I think putting the leap anywhere else would take it away from what we wanted the show to feel like. We wanted the show to feel emotionally satisfying as well, and not just about Ben doing a random leap that will eventually save Addison’s life. We wanted to get him in the muck of it, so there was no better place than the creation and the early days of the Quantum Leap program.

When we last spoke about the series, at the start of the season, I asked you about the possibility of other leapers showing up and you had said that could potentially happen, and obviously, it did. Did you know, from the beginning, that you wanted to bring in Leaper X, and did you know how you wanted that to play out, over the season?

GERO: Yeah. It was the first thing we tried to figure out, when I took over the show. This end has been what we’ve been driving towards. We stopped and we were like, “Okay, how does the show end, emotionally? How does the show end, plot wise?” And then, we’ve been working backwards. So, having the first cross with Leaper X as early as episode five let you know that there was a bad guy in here. And then, we slow rolled his reveals until later and later in the season, so that it could get the momentum going into the finale. We have an incredible writers’ room, and it’s tricky doing a time travel show, especially with people two people that can travel through time independently, so we needed to make sure all the rules made sense and that we were doing it right, that Leaper X’s goal made sense, and that we misunderstood it. We thought it was just about killing Addison, but it really was, “No, I’m gonna blow up the quantum accelerator. We can’t have you rallying around her death and making her a martyr. We need to end the program now.”

With the Leaper X story wrapped up, are you going to have other leapers in Season 2, or will that not be part of the story anymore?

GERO: It won’t be part of the story in Season 2. Season 2 will be devoid of Leaper Xs.

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We leave this season not knowing for sure if Ben returns and with that close-up on Addison’s face that’s kind of hard to read. What would you say about that? What made you decide not to give a totally straight answer on the ending?

GERO: We had actually shot a scene that went right after that. I’m sure it’s not a surprise to anyone and I don’t think it’s a spoiler that Ben doesn’t make it home. I’m sure there will be a promo, immediately after [the finale], for Season 2. There was a scene where they discussed, “What do we do now?” And it was good. Everyone was good, but there was something about the momentum of the story and the score that we didn’t want to have to over explain it. The audience gets what happened. Caitlin [Bassett] sells it in that look of, “Oh, no, this is not going how it’s supposed to.” And then, we’ll pick it up in Season 2 and explain what happened.

How far ahead have you thought about the long-term plans for this? Do you know how you want the show to end up, whatever season that is? Do you have a certain amount of seasons that you have basic ideas for?

GERO: It’s such an unusual show. When we were doing Blindspot, I really did have an idea of what that last season was gonna be about, or what each season thematically was about. With this one, we’ve known, since pretty early on, what Season 2 is gonna be, and we have a brief idea for what Season 3 is gonna be. Beyond that, it’s a show that is a little more segmented than other TV shows. We’re trying to make it feel like a series of novels that you really love, with each season having a very clear beginning, middle, and end. And so, we have a great novel planned for Season 2, and a really great idea for what Season 3 would be. In many ways, we’re trying to make the show less plotty in Season 2. There will be serialized aspects, but there was a lot of having to explain time travel math in this first season, and now that we don’t have to do that, it gives us the page space to really explore these characters in a fuller and greater way. We have such a tremendous cast that to be able to lean into what they do great is very exciting.

Is there any new chance or new talk of Scott Bakula making a guest appearance? Is that a hope that you keep alive?

GERO: The door is always open. He knows my number. We would love to have him. But also, he’s just been so great. He’s been very kind to the show and has said nice things about us. We will always have that connection to the old show, and if he ever wants to come over to the lot in Burbank, I will have a drive on for him, whenever he wants.

Image via NBC

What made you decide to bring different members of the team into the leaps as holograms? Obviously, you could have just stuck with Addison communicating with them and relaying information, so what made you decide to have them become part of some of the leaps?

GERO: It’s two-fold. One, we don’t wanna kill Caitlin. Caitlin is in everything. Even Ray [Lee] gets a couple of days off an episode, as we shoot the present day stuff, but Caitlin is in everything. She’s in the present and the past. So, part of it was that, but also, the leaps are where the show exists. To really get to know Ian and to get to know Jenn and to get to know Magic, everyone will get a chance to be the hologram more in Season 2. It allows us to spend so much more screen time with them and get to dimensionalize those characters in a way that’s really exciting and fulfilling

There are so many things that happened all season, but there is a lot that happens in the finale. How did the cast react when you told them where everything was leading? What got the biggest reaction, and from who?

GERO: They were all stoked. We had told them pretty early that this is what was gonna happen, but they’re so great. I think they were all so excited to mess with their looks. Part of the main concern with everyone, going into the episode, because it’s constantly cutting from one character in the past to that same character in the present, was that it was just gonna be so confusing. One of our early ideas was to just color code everything. Everything in 2018 is amber. Everything in 2023 is blue. Everything in the future is gray scale. And then, visually, we changed their looks up. They just did such a great job. I was so in awe of our cast being able to track everything that was going on, but then, 2023 Jenn carried herself a little differently than 2018 Jenn. It was so fun to watch. And also, Caitlin was doing scenes with her own self. It was really amazing.

I thought it was a really interesting twist to have Ziggy be the mole. In hindsight, it becomes so obvious, but it was not easy to see coming because your brain is automatically thinking that it has to be a person. What led you to Ziggy? Why was it important to not only do that, but also to not have Ziggy be bad, and instead just be technology that’s being used in different ways?

GERO: Yeah, exactly. It’s a benign force. It’s just recording everything. Obviously, the future has access to that recording and is using it against us. We just thought that was so much cleaner than having evil Addison, or Baddison, as we would say. We went down a lot of paths, for who that mole could be, but this just felt like the cleanest and the easiest to undo because, once that foe is extinguished in the future, Ziggy can be back and a member of the team in Season 2, without the emotional baggage of, “That was shitty, that you did that in the future.” It’s something that we could visualize and characterize in the present, as opposed to knowing about somebody who betrayed us in a scene, that we maybe were never gonna be able to see.

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Now that you’ve done a season of the show, how will what you learned affect things for Season 2? Are there things, production wise, that you realized you could pull off, that you didn’t think you could pull off? Are there ways you can push things even bigger and further because you know how to do it now?

GERO: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. You learn so much during the first season. The first season of a TV show is brutal. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a lot of work. You’re starting everything from scratch. You don’t have a shorthand with the team that you’re working with. You’re making mistakes constantly, where you’re like, “Oh, I thought we would be able to do that, but we can’t.” Sometimes there are pleasant surprises and you’re like, “Well, that turned out way better than I thought it would.” We have an incredible art department. We have an incredible crew. It was really just an education for us, as to like, “Oh, this is what we can do on this. These are the parameters of what our show is,” and now we can write more directly for it, so that we’re filling the frame, every episode. We’re moving at a higher capacity now, just having figured out how the production works. We’re basically shooting continuously. We haven’t stopped filming. We’re already shooting episode four, which has allowed a momentum there, that has been very, very useful. It’s really allowed for a bigger scope for Season 2. Our season premiere is the biggest episode we’ve ever done, including the pilot. It’s huge. So, we’ve really figured out how to physically make the show better, if that makes sense.

Quantum Leap is available to stream at Peacock.