The original “Evil Leaper”, Alia (Renée Coleman), jumped into splashes of red light, instead of blue like Sam, and her missions focused on dealing damage. When her missions failed, she was tortured by an evil entity, strongly implied to be the devil himself. But Sam and Alia share one hope: that the next jump will be their homecoming. They both relied on a hologram facilitator and used a computer to predict the results of their interventions throughout history. Sam and Al had Ziggy, and Alia and her evil hologram counterpart, Zoey (Carolyn Seymour), depended on an artificial intelligence called Lothos.
Lothos may be bordering on Ziggy in function, but the malicious computer operating system controlled the red jumps. In the original series, Lothos was more advanced than Ziggy because Lothos could intentionally launch a leaper to a specific time and place. Sam subconsciously (with God’s help) controlled his leaps to places where good was needed, but not to a point on the map of time and location.
The Quantum Leap revival points to Ziggy’s technological advancement, as it is now common knowledge that Ben jumps along a defined trajectory, which he manipulates by applying a gravity catapult maneuver, allowing him to jump further back in time and beyond his own lifespan while holding a mapped track follows. from a plan of historical points, people and places. dr. Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) discovered this and described it in episode three, “Somebody Up There Likes Ben.”
The mysterious jumper at the end of episode five confirms that Ben jumps through the power of computer coding, and not just his subconscious, when he accuses Ben of chasing him through spacetime. It’s not clear yet that this other Quantum Leap project is bad, but the few words spoken by the new jumper definitely put Ben on a different team.
Not a fan of the original Quantum Leap will probably forget that Sam was able to turn the evil jumper, Alia, into the good one. The last time we saw Alia jump, she went out in a blaze of blue glory, as Sam always does. The visual of her jump was no longer marked by the angry red light of Lothos.
A big question arises when the audience will meet this other jumper at the end of ‘Salvation or Bust’. How did he find Ben? Sam’s efforts to protect Alia from her evil hologram, Zoey, offer a possible answer. Sam hypnotized Alia, making her completely forget who she was, shielding her brainwaves from Lothos’ and Zoey’s discovery, and they couldn’t find Alia to force her back into the dark side due to this amnesia-induced brainwave- shield.