Michael G. Blake is a character who appears in the Season Three episode of Quantum Leap titled "A Little Miracle". The part of Michael Blake is played in the episode by Charles Rocket, also would appear later on the series as U.S. Navy CDR Dirk Riker, a young Al's old flight commander in 1957, when he was wrongfully accused of murder in the trial of the commander's wife Marci in the Season Four episode "A Leap For Lisa".
About Michael[]
On Christmas Eve 1962, Sam leaps into Reginald Pearson (Milan Nicksic) who is the valet to business tycoon Michael Blake. Michael is a thoroughly unpleasant sort (though he is opposed to firing Sam despite his incompetence as a valet and his meddling in his personal life) who is planning on tearing down the 5th Street City Mission / salvation Army building in order to build his masterpiece project "Blake Plaza", a swanky hi-rise. Turns out that Blake has a knack for taking small businesses, which include mom-and-pop ones, into big money making ventures, by buying them, conglomerating and automating them, as he also, as Al tells Sam, that he's "put more people out of work than The Great Depression".
In a freak coincide, Michael also just happens to have very similar brainwaves to Dr. Beckett, and so, is able to see Al until Al changes the frequency slightly so that Michael can no longer see him. Sam is sympathetic to the Salvation Army and so promises Salvation Army Captain Laura Downey (Melinda McGraw) that he will find a way to save the building... with her help, of course. Although Sam believes his task is to save the 5th Street City Mission / Salvation Army building, Al points out he's also there to save Michael from himself, Sam, as Reginald tries his best to appeal to Michael's conscience concerning the builing of the plaza and the tearing down of the mission, as he drives him by the neighborhood where the building site is, which happens to be the neighborhood he grew up in, as he sees images of boys playing in the street, which happens to be he and his old friends of years past.
Whe Michael runs into into one of his old buddies, Max Wushinski (Robert Lesser) now a vender selling chestnuts on a street corner, he tells him the sad story of one of their childhood friends named Charlie, who committed suicide after losing his job at the bakery on the block, not knowing that Blake is now the owner, after the new "owners" automated it, and of he "hitting the skids" because he couldn't find another job, drinking heavily, and then deciding to throw himself in front of a bus, leaving behind a wife and 5 kids. Al urges Sam to keep on working on Michael's conscience, as Sam drives Michael by the mission where they see Laura and the other people work at the mission singing Christmas Carols with the children and their families.
Michael is seemingly persuaded to rescind his decision to tear it down, until he suddenly has another change of heart as a little boy who's family had been housed at the mission gives him a trojan horse ornament, and then asking him, in mistaking Blake for one of the homeless people there "Do you have a home?", as he thinks that Laura and Sam, or Reginald, put the boy and the other kids up to it to try to tear at his conscience.
With the help of Al and ziggy, as Al, who dresses up as "Jacob Marley" and poses as "The Ghost of Christmas Future" shows Blake that all of his wheeling and dealing in borrowing and mortgaging left him financially bankrupt, as he then showed him a holographic image of the completed "Blake Plaza" building, and then, a TV news story exactly 13 years later to the date, on Christmas Eve 1975, of him in court fighting to keep the Blake Plaza, which he loses, as Blake also sees the plaza again, rechristend by its new owners "Union Plaza", as Al then tells him that in losing the building, his life, which acutely lacked love or compassion for others, he had lost the one thing he lived for, and committed suicide, jumping off of the top the building, which strikes a nerve in Blake, as he finally changes his attitude concerning the city mission; while he still builds "Blake Plaza", he puts the mission on the first floor.
More good news about his change of heart in action in "the Spirit of Christas", is that within six months, he and Laura marry, and eventually have 3 children together, as the demons of his past are exercised as he has a family that loves him, and people he can love in return.