Sam Beckett's skills allow him to adapt to the various situations in which he finds himself, although many of those situations still take him off guard with comical results.
19 Facts About Sam Beckett
1.
2.
Sam Beckett learned painful things from his past that likely inspired him to travel through time in the first place.
3.
Sam Beckett tries to do the right thing no matter what, although when the leaps hit close to home, he tends to lose perspective and make irrational decisions; at those times, he requires Al to guide him back to the right path.
4.
Sam Beckett was a child prodigy, learning to read at the age of two and do advanced calculus in his head at the age of five.
5.
Sam Beckett played piano in a concert at Carnegie Hall when he was nineteen, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor, and his favorite song is John Lennon's "Imagine".
6.
Sam Beckett has a photographic memory, an IQ of 267, likes dry or light beer, and likes microwave popcorn.
7.
Sam Beckett knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was nine years old.
8.
Sam Beckett graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and, following his brother's advice, attended MIT in the early 1970s.
9.
Sam Beckett 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.
10.
Sam Beckett speaks six modern languages including English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, and Japanese, but not Italian or Hebrew.
11.
Sam Beckett is proficient in martial arts such as Judo, Karate, Muay Thai, and Taekwondo.
12.
Sam Beckett has won a Nobel Prize for physics, which he remembers during one leap.
13.
However, before "The Leap Back" Sam Beckett has no current memory of Donna and his marriage.
14.
Eager to prove his theories, Sam Beckett prematurely stepped into the nuclear accelerator chamber and propelled himself back in time.
15.
Sam Beckett is startled to see a stranger in the mirror as he prepares to shave.
16.
When Sam Beckett corrected the timeline, he leapt forward, but not all the way home; this time, he found himself assuming the identity of a minor-league professional baseball player named Tim Fox.
17.
In "The Leap Back," Sam Beckett switched places with Al, who leaped back into 1945, and later in the episode was able to leap himself back into Al's place in the past.
18.
In "The Leap Between the States," Sam Beckett was able to leap outside of his own lifetime and found himself in the American Civil War in the life of his great-grandfather; the explanation was that Sam Beckett's close genetic link with his ancestor allowed him to do this.
19.
Two early episodes, "Play It Again, Seymour" and "The Americanization of Machiko" had Sam Beckett leaping into dates prior to the date later given as his birthday, August 8,1953.