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Dr. Samuel "Sam" Beckett is a fictional character and the protagonist on the science fiction television series ''Quantum Leap'', played by Scott Bakula. Initially, the audience knows very little about Sam, much as Sam knows little about himself due to holes in his memory dubbed the "Swiss cheese effect." ==Backstory== Sam Beckett was born at 12:30 pm EST on August 8, 1953, in Elk Ridge, Indiana to dairy farmer John Samuel Beckett and his wife Thelma Louise Beckett. As a child, he had two cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. Sam was a child prodigy, learning to read at age 2 and do advanced calculus in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess. Sam also played piano in a concert at Carnegie Hall when he was 19, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor, and his favorite song is John Lennon's "Imagine". Sam has a photographic memory, an IQ of 267, likes dry or light beer, and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his older brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam on April 8, 1970, but Sam leaps into his brother's unit and saves him on that day. Tom (Thomas Andrew Beckett) was a good athlete, an All-State basketball player, an Annapolis graduate, is a Navy SEAL Commander, and has a wife named Mary. Sam has one sister named Katie (Katherine Elizabeth Beckett), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive alcoholic named Chuck. They divorced and she is now married to Navy officer Lt. Jim Bonnick. They have lived in Hawaii with Thelma Beckett since 1974. Sam graduated from high school at age 16 and, following his brother's advice, attended MIT in the early 1970s. While at MIT, Sam and his mentor, Professor Sebastian LoNigro, developed a string theory of time travel ("Her Charm"; see below). Sam went through four years of MIT in two years, and continued through various colleges to eventually obtain seven doctoral degrees in music, medicine, quantum physics, archaeology, ancient languages, chemistry, and astronomy, but not psychiatry or law. It should be noted that, in the pilot episode, Sam is told he only has six doctorates; this was later retconned to seven. He speaks six modern languages including English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, and Japanese, but not Italian or Hebrew. He knows four extinct languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics. He's proficient in martial arts such as Judo, Karate, Muay Thai, and Taekwondo. He has won a Nobel Prize for physics, which he remembers during one leap ("The Wrong Stuff"). For this, ''TIME'' called him "the next Einstein". Sam's father suffered a fatal heart attack in 1974 while Sam was in college; the guilt of his absence during his family's time of need would stay with Sam for years. One of the few things that Sam cannot do is cook; 2 of his onscreen attempts at this, in the episodes "Another Mother" and "Good-bye, Norma Jean" failed humorously, as did his attempt at baking in "Liberation." He did however cook a meal for the work colleagues of the husband of the woman he leaps into in "Liberation," and there was nothing to suggest that it was anything other than a normal meal that everybody ate with no problems. No one ate the breakfasts he made in "One Strobe Over the Line," "What Price Gloria?" or "Liberation." He was able to make chitlins with Al's help in "The Color of Truth," but it isn't shown whether or not anyone ate them. As a young adult in the 1980s, Sam was a key member of the Starbright Project (details on the nature of the project were not revealed on the show), where he would meet some of his closest and most trusted friends: Al Calavicci, a decorated naval officer; a brilliant computer programmer known simply as Gushie; and Dr. Donna Eleese, the love of Sam's life, whom he met in 1984. Five years after the Starbright Project, Sam and Donna were engaged, but Sam was jilted at the altar on June 5, 1989 and never saw Donna again. On Sam's third leap, he meets Donna years before their actual engagement. Realizing that Donna's damaged relationship with her father is the reason why she can never commit to a relationship (as her father left her, she subconsciously feels that any man she meets will inevitably abandon her and thus prevents them from doing so by leaving herself), Sam drives Donna out to reconcile with her father so that she might get some closure. We learn later in the episode "The Leap Back" that as a result of this, Donna never leaves Sam at the altar, and they are married to this day. However, before "The Leap Back" Sam has no memory of Donna and his marriage. The reason for this is twofold. First, Sam's "Swiss cheesed" brain caused him amnesia in regards to his marriage. Second, Donna understood that in some cases, in order for Sam to successfully leap, it would be necessary for Sam to have romantic encounters with various women. In order to spare the "choir-boy" Sam mental anguish (it is established that, unlike Al, Sam takes vows of marriage very seriously) and to facilitate his leaping, Donna forbids Al or anyone else from alerting Sam that he is married. A few months later in 1989, Sam and Al spearheaded Project Quantum Leap, a time travel experiment based on the string theory Sam had developed while at MIT. The PQL facility was located in Stallion's Gate, New Mexico, in a primarily underground complex. In 1995, after constructing the necessary machinery, including a holographic imaging chamber and a supercomputer ("Ziggy") with access to vast historical databases, the project's funds were running thin. Eager to prove his theories, Sam prematurely stepped into the nuclear accelerator chamber and propelled himself back in time. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sam Beckett」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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