Character of Al makes no sense.
He is a Navy Admiral and acts and talks nothing like it. Complete character fail.
shareI said that before...seems too much like a hippie
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MovieChat Forums > Quantum Leap (1989) Discussion > Character of Al makes no sense.
This question reminds me of my... 3rd... NO! 2nd wife... Kimberly? Stefanie?
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I have to agree, both with the comment that he doesn't act like a Navy admiral (at least on NCIS, the character of Gibbs is believable as someone who was in the Marines), and with the comment that Al acts too much like a hippie. Every time Al starts evangelizing about recycling and the environment, I just roll my eyes and wait for the end of the self-righteousness.
Who cares? It's a TV show.
I'm not sure Sam always acted like a person who had been a child prodigy their whole life either. People who are completing university degrees before they are older than high school age often have trouble relating to those around them, because their lives have been dedicated to furthering intellect rather than social skills.
If Sam had such trouble, the show wouldn't have been as good. He had to interact with a new set of characters each and every week.
Such with Al. If he had been serious, and approached each leap with military precision, the character wouldn't have been as entertaining and the show would've suffered.
One thing I do like about Al, despite his basically complete failings as a character is that his, ahem, unusual taste in what he wears at least makes him interesting.
More often than not (at least in the last half of the run of the series), the wild outfits Al wears are far more interesting than the individual plots of the episodes in which he appears.
His wardrobe was great!!
shareI think the wild wardrobe was a symptom of his life after his wife Beth divorced him. If you remember the finale, it says that Al and Beth were married for at least 39 years. So Al's wild lifestyle and womanizing are almost certainly an outgrowth of him returning from his time as a POW and finding out the love of his life had divorced him, rather than waiting for him.
Once Sam fixes that, i doubt Al would have had quite as wild a wardrobe, and for sure not the wandering eye for the ladies that we see for the majority of the show.
He is not in the navy anymore so why should he behave like he is?
shareAl has had a storied life. Abandoned by his parents and raised in an orphanage, he eventually spends time with a pool shark who is like a father to him. Even though he's Italian-American he wound up in the south and took part in civil rights protests. He joined the Navy, became a Golden Gloves boxing champ and an astronaut before shipping off to Viet Nam where was held prisoner for 5 years. He comes home to find his wife has remarried some nozzle. I guess he continues on in the Navy because he eventually makes the rank of Admiral, gets married 4 more times along the way, and then meets a child prodigy with whom he goes off to a secret lab in the desert to create a time machine out of Legos. Something tells me he's not the run-of-the-mill military man.
Hello naeemak.
Anyway someone's job or designation doesn't define them. Al lived a full, eventful life that shaped him, he was just in the Navy for a big part of it.