LA Comic Con 2025: Talking Time Travel with Benjamin Raab and Deric Hughes

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time travel. The idea that you could go back in time to see historical events or talk to people who are long dead or travel forward to see what the future has in store for us is not unique to me. While it was popularized by H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the idea is behind the short story “Rip Van Winkle”, is seen in religion, and – of course – has been studied in science/physics since at least Einstein.

So, when I saw that LA Comic Con had a panel on time travel to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, I was there yesterday. (See what I did there?) Moderated by Angela Relucio, two of the panelists were writers and co-executive producers on the rebooted Quantum Leap (at the time, it had just gotten cancelled after its second season).

Now, Quantum Leap (the original) is one of those shows I am Not Normal ™ about. I became a fan when it first premiered (and becoming a fan of Scott Bakula at the same time), and then found it again in the early 2000s when I discovered fan fiction (and became a fan of Dean Stockwell then), and then found it AGAIN about five years ago when Jennifer Lee Rossman was liveblogging her reactions to watching the show on Twitter.

I have all the official books, the comics, several of the original episodes on VHS, the season 1 & 2 on original DVD (when I gave up because how very dare you take out ‘Georgia on My Mind’ at the end of “MIA”?), and the series as a whole on Blu-ray. While I was initially hesitant about the idea of a reboot, when I heard that Deborah Pratt was going to be part of it, I decided to give it a shot (since, to me, she was the one who wrote the best episodes and kept the show grounded in its roots). I actually was starting to really enjoy it just as it got cancelled.

With all that in mind, I took the leap (yeah, yeah) and reached out to Deric Hughes’ representative and managed to snag an interview with him and Benjamin Raab after the panel.

These two are not new to writing together: they’ve known each other for a while, getting their start being staff writers on the Syfy show Warehouse 13 (an amazing show, btw). As I do when I interview writing pairs, I asked how they worked together and how they resolve any differences that may come up.

“We kind of subscribe to the best idea wins,” Raab started. “You may not always agree at first, and sometimes there’s a little bit of convincing to go, and eventually someone’s got to say, ‘Okay. You know what? You’re right, I’m wrong,’ and that’s basically the great equalizer.”

“That was the thing early on in our writing career,” Hughes continued. “We realized that you have to check the ego at the door. We’re here to serve the story, the characters, and want to tell the best story possible. And sometimes, if your idea is not the best idea, then you give in and you find a way to make it work. And I think that’s the secret sauce to any good partnership is collaboration to the fullest extent. What works that really is going to get it out there in a way that people respond to, right? That’s because we’re not just writing for ourselves. I mean, we definitely like to write fun stories for ourselves, but at the same time, we want to write something to entertain other people as well that find something as interesting as we do.”

Raab jumped back in. “It’s also having complementary skill sets. We both bring something different to the table, which is why it works so well. I’m very much the nuts and bolts guy, and Deric’s always got ideas that I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s super cool’. So how do I figure out how to put that down? And then we work on that and make sure that it all works. Usually, I’ll be stuck on something, and he’s like, ‘Oh, try this.’ And that works.”

I next asked how they balance their ideas and dealing with higher ups that may not like said idea.

“I mean, listen,” Raab said pragmatically, “when you’re on a show, it’s their product. You are creating their product. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if they don’t want to put it on the air, you’re not going to do it. So how do you take the thing that you maybe disagree with but give them what they’re looking for, because they’re the one footin’ the bill.”

I then segued into talking about Quantum Leap. As I told them, as much of a fan I am of the original show, it isn’t really a show about time travel: it’s an anthology show that uses time travel as a framing device. However, in the reboot, they did play a bit more with the time travel: in one episode, for example, they went into the future.

They both are geeks themselves – they met at a comic shop, after all – and so I asked them if that was the intention all along or was it something they realized they could do as the show progressed?

“Season one was figuring out how far can we go?” Raab responded. “Like how time travelly can we make the show? And that’s where, you know, studio and network notes push back, and you go, ‘Oh, this is only as far as we can go.’ But we recognize we wanted to find a way, because we were telling the story of a guy trying to get home. Like: that was an active thing. It wasn’t just, ‘well, eventually, he’ll figure it out.’ It was no, he’s got the love of his life back home. How does he get back to her? There’s gonna have to be some time travel elements. There’s gonna have to be an episode here or there where you’re like, ‘Okay: we’re gonna dig into the nuts and bolts of time travel and try to make it work, and tell a larger story that isn’t just the guest star of the week. And season two, obviously, was a lot more than season one, but season one had its elements.”

“We were just finding its footing,” Hughes said, “and again finding what is the show? And shout out to Deborah Pratt: she carried that torch all the way from the original series and for the last twenty years of really trying to bring this back to life. And then when she started working with Steve and Bryan {Stephen Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, the creators of the rebooted version}, they were really able to get it over that hill. But once the show started getting made, then you’re like, ‘Okay: what’s the real show?’ Again: figuring out who are these characters? How do we play with them? How do we service them in such an interesting way that it’s not just Ben Song? Because you have this fantastic cast of characters back at Quantum Leap headquarters, right? All of that was like trying to figure out… like it’s a dance of who tangos best, right? Then once you do that, then write to those strengths. Really sort of be able to build in a way that by the time that we got to season two, we were like, ‘Oh, we get the show. We know how to do this show, and everybody understands what type of show you’re telling.’”

Raab continued, “One of the things that we had the benefit of that the original series didn’t have is that we did have a home cast to focus on and give them stories that mattered to them and to the audience.”

This led to a discussion of the increased diversity of the reboot. Ben Song was Korean American, we had Ernie Hudson playing ‘Magic’ Williams (a character Sam leapt into in the original series) and the head of the organization, and the head programmer, Ian Wright, was nonbinary (and played by nonbinary actor Mason Alexander Park).

“Ian’s story about being a trans person of today was very important, very relevant,” Raab added. “Written by Shakina, who in her own experience had a lot to say. This character gave her the opportunity to do that. And when we wrote ‘One Night in Koreatown’ (written by Raab, Hughes, and Shakina and is about the 1992 riots in Los Angeles), we created an element of backstory that actually synced up exactly with Ernie Hudson’s experience. We did not know that he lived through the 1967 riots in Detroit. He experienced it firsthand. When he got that script, he was like, ‘You didn’t know that this was my lived experience?’ We’re like, ‘No, we just thought it would be something that made sense and thematically connected Magic’s character with what Ben was going through.’”

“He thought it was very important and he wanted to tell that story as well,” Hughes said. “So the fact that we got that opportunity to bring those two together that way. Again: shout out to the original series, but how much more interesting would it have been if you had been able to tell stories about Gooshie, right? But you only had Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell holding that show together.”

I asked if they typically have the whole idea first before starting the script or if they work it out as they write it. (Keeping in mind that this definitely varies not only from writer to writer, but from idea to idea.)

“For the episodes that we wrote,” Raab started, “I mean ‘One Night in Koreatown’: it was a very easy one to break for us, because we just kind of knew what the story was going to be and laid it out very succinctly. The Western (“Salvation or Bust”) I feel like you had to kind of figure that one out a little bit.”

“We had to figure it out because we were actually working on a whole other episode,” Hughes interrupted. “And when things all suddenly change because of budget restrictions and time, and they were like, ‘We need to actually shoot something on the lots. We have this Western town where that will save us so much money. Can you come up with an idea?’ And we’re like, ‘Okay. We think we got something.”

“On time and on budget,” Raab added with a smirk.

Quantum Leap was always a social justice show. However, as is the case with many properties today, when the cast was announced, a certain segment saw Mason Alexander Park’s casting (among other aspects) as ‘making the show woke’. I asked them about their thoughts on that.

“To some people, that’s a pejorative,” Raab said. “To others, it’s a positive. It depends on what side of the fence you’re on, right? But we wanted a show that’s meaningful. We wanted a show that could both entertain you, educate you, and enlighten you a little bit.”

“We wanted to have the perspective of where we are right now,” Hughes continued, “and not forgetting what happened in the past to help inform where we are right now.”

Hughes is an acknowledged ‘blerd’ (Black nerd) and Raab is a white man. As such, I asked them how they incorporated their own experience into their writing.

“It was just like having the characters that already exists allows you to put a lot of that in there,” Hughes responded. “Having conversations with Ernie, having conversations with Ray, having conversations with Mason as well as Caitlin and Jen. It’s like: everybody brings something to the table, and you’re like, ‘How can we put that into the characters? How can we put that into the story that you know is important to them as well?’ Because you don’t want to be like, ‘Here are the words: say the words that we just wrote.’ You want them to be just as invested. And I think that was so beautiful about that show was how collaborative everything was.”

On the panel, they discussed a little bit of where the show was going to go if it had gotten renewed for a third season. I asked them to talk about that a bit more.

“Like we said in the panel,” Raab said, “the plan was to make Addison the leaper. Have Ben be back home trying to get her home and flip the script that way. She’d be the first female leaper.” {Fangirl Angie here to note that actually there was a female leaper in the original series: we had Alia, an ‘evil’ leaper that Sam tried to redeem in season 5.} “That was the whole point: she was the soldier designated for that project that was supposed to go into the machine. And because Ian had come back in time and told Ben what was going to happen, he took it upon himself and f**ked it all up.”

“Pie in the sky,” Hughes added, “was like: there were talks, and it was just like bringing Sam back. Like that would’ve been really cool to see Sam stepping out of the accelerator. We brought him home, and now Sam is helping Ben trying to bring Addison home.”

Of course, time travel is slightly different in each story that uses it. There are certain rules and tropes that tend to stick around: becoming your own grandfather (Futurama), the plot creating an alternate history/timeline (the Back to the Future trilogy), and more. So I asked if they had a favorite time travel trope/paradox.

“Gosh,” Raab said thinking, “I mean, I do like the Groundhog Day version. The Edge of Tomorrow I think is a great movie. I f**king love that movie, but again not because of the time travel. The time travel is just a vehicle for his growth as a character, and that’s what I really enjoy.” (Hughes’ favorite is the Futurama one mentioned above.)

Why are people drawn to stories with time travel?

“To get a second chance,” Raab said immediately. “I think it’s the ultimate in second chance stories.”

“If I can do it all over again,” Hughes added.

“Either do it all over again or like ‘I want to be in the time that is not mine. I want to experience what the world was like.’ Like, if you’re a history fan, there’s no greater playground than the past, right? So much has happened that is built to the world today: what it would be like to experience the things that have come before that were seminal and that changed the way the world is.”

I asked if they could tease anything they were working on then. Now, a reminder that this was last September, but they mentioned a comic book sequel to The Last Starfighter for Mad Cave Studios.

“It’s an unofficial sequel,” Hughes said. “I mean, Jonathan Betuel (writer of the movie) is a part of it. So it really is with his blessing. It picks up where Alex and Maggie, after they leave the stars. They go back to Rylos, and the story picks up about six months after that.”

While Quantum Leap may be cancelled, the original series is available on the Roku Channel and the reboot is currently streaming on Netflix.

Benjamin Raab can be found on Instagram, BlueSky, and Threads; Deric Hughes can also be found on Instagram, BlueSky, and Threads.

Meanwhile, if you want to unlock an un-skippable scene from me / get a 30-minute-long presentation, just ask me my thoughts on Quantum Leap.

See all my LA Comic Con 2025 coverage here, and see my highlight reel from the con on the Geekiary’s YouTube.

Author: Angie Fiedler Sutton

Angie Fiedler Sutton is a writer, podcaster, and all-round fangirl geek. She has been published in Den of Geek, Stage Directions, LA Weekly, The Mary Sue, and others. She also produces her own podcast, Contents May Vary, where she interviews geeky people about geeky things. You can see all her work (and social media channels) at angiefsutton.com.

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