Read more about Dr. Sam Beckett at: Wikipedia

Official Site: NBC

Initially, the audience knows very little about Sam, much as Sam knows little about himself due to holes in his memory dubbed the "Swiss cheese effect."

Sam Beckett (no relation to the playwright, Samuel Beckett); Social Security number 563-86-9801; Department of Defense Umbra; top-secret clearance number 004-002-02-016) was born at 12:30 pm EST on August 8, 1953, in Elk Ridge, Indiana to dairy farmer John Samuel Beckett and his wife Thelma Louise Beckett. As a child, he had two cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. Sam was a child prodigy, learning to read at age 2 and do advanced calculus in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess. Sam also played piano in a concert at Carnegie Hall when he was 19, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor and his favorite song is John Lennon's "Imagine". He has a photographic memory, an IQ of 267, can cook, likes dry or light beer and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his older brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam on April 8, 1970, but Sam leaps in his brother's unit and saves him on that day. Tom still dies in Vietnam. Tom (Thomas Andrew Beckett) was a good athlete, an All-State basketball player, an Annapolis grad, is a Navy SEAL Commander, and has a wife named Mary. He has one sister named Katie (Katherine Elizabeth Beckett), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive alcoholic named Chuck who divorced each other later on. Now she's married to a Navy officer, Lt. Jim Bonnick, and they live in Hawaii with their mother, Thelma, since 1974.

Sam graduated from high school at age 16 and, following his brother's advice, attended MIT in the early 1970s. While at MIT, Sam and his mentor, Professor Sebastian LoNigro, developed a string theory of time travel ("Her Charm"; see below). Sam 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, Archeology, Ancient Languages, Chemistry, and Astronomy, but not psychiatry or law. It should be noted that, in the pilot episode, Sam is told he only has six doctorates; this was later retcon to seven. He speaks 7 modern languages including English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, and Japanese, but not Italian or Hebrew. He also speaks 4 dead ones, one of them being able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. He has won a Nobel Prize, field unspecified, but probably for physics. For this, Time magazine called him "the next Einstein". During his college years, Sam's father suffered a fatal heart attack in 1974; the guilt of his absence during his family's time of need would stay with Sam for years.

As a young adult in the 1980s, Sam was a key member of the Starbright Project (details on the nature of the project were not revealed on the show), where he would meet some of his closest and most trusted friends: Al Calavicci, a decorated naval officer; a brilliant computer programmer known simply as Gushie; and Dr. Donna Eleese, the love of Sam's life, whom he met in 1984. 5 years after the Starbright Project, Sam and Donna were engaged, but Sam was jilted at the altar on June 5, 1989 and never saw Donna again. On Sam's third leap, he meets Donna years before he himself gets engaged to her. Realizing that her damaged relationship with her father is the reason why she can never commit to a relationship (as her father left her, she subconsciously feels that any man she meets will inevitably abandon her and thus prevents them from doing so by leaving herself), Sam drives Donna out to her father so that she might get some closure. We learn later in the episode "The Leap Back" that as a result of this, Donna never leaves Sam at the altar, and they are married to this day.

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