From: kbos@carina.unm.edu (Kurt "Some Guy" Bose)
Subject: The NEXT EL Episode...(Idea/Conjecture)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 09:46:57 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Here's what I wouldn't mind seeing:

Assumption:  All the discussion about Evil and Good needing to coexist.
Question:  What if the extermination of Sam means not that Alia ceases to 
           exist, but that the BGU must find a replacement for his agent?

Premise:  By the next appearance of the EL, Alia has been "punished", or 
        sent back into the lives of cannibals, mass murderers, and baseball
        owners.  She counts Sam responsible for her predicament (helped by
        Zoe's poisonous words...thing Iago here), and now hates him, thus
        squashing the "not evil enough" contingent.  At some point, we see 
        Sam leaping into someone in his own past, as we have seen before.
        Alia is already there, and as Sam watches, she does something to
        change history, so that Sam winks out of existence, to be replaced
        by some guest actor.  Yes, it's been done before, in "Leap for Lisa",
        but in this case, the wrinkle is this:  Al lets slip, for whatever
        reason, that by stopping Alia's plans, this replacement will go back
        to whatever has happened in the original timeline, before said leaper
        became involved with PQL.  In this original timeline, something bad
        happened to the good leaper (perhaps he died at a point in time 
        between the decision to begin PQL and the time the first test subject
        (now the good leaper) began leaping.  To bring Sam back now will 
        cause the guest good leaper to go back to what would have happened 
        had Sam founded PQL, that is to say, the guest leaper's death. (How
        did PQL get started without Sam behind the project?  Why, the tape
        from SLSB, of course.  :) )  The good leaper must make the decision 
        whether or not to sacrifice himself by thwarting Alia's plans to
        stop Sam from ever leaping.  (And for those who wish to subscribe to
        the God/Devil/Christian thing, we can make this guest leaper an
        actor of Hispanic heritage named Jesus.  :) )

          Or, if you prefer, have Alia kill Sam in one of his leaps.  Al must
        affect history to save his friend the only way he knows how...by 
        stepping into the chamber and leap into the timestream himself.  A
        touching episode with Gooshie as the Observer, as Al must fight his
        own swiss-cheesed brain to manipulate history to prevent Alia from
        killing Sam.  Of course, if Sam's murder is prevented, Al will never
        have had to leap, and we can get him home to continue as Al's observer.
        Again, Al leaping has been done once, but the setup is different here,
        and you can't honestly think that there's only one storyline that
        would be possible with Al leaping.  (Wasn't a large point of the Al as
        leaper episode that the handlink didn't work?  Here, the twist serves
        to give Al another one of his "marquee" episodes, and allows those who
        want Zoe to meet Al their chance.  BTW, it wouldn't surprise me in the
        least if this second idea were to happen, in one form or another.)

-- 
Kurt Bose (as in Daisy, not Rose) * kbos@carina.unm.edu * Make outs, not walks!
TONIGHT-In "Ryecatcher", Holden Caulfield foils a plot to turn his old prep
school into a right-wing military acadamy run by Neo-Nazis. 8PM(7PM C/M) Ch. 7
                                                        -The Book of Sequels...