Quantum Leap (2022)- 2x05 - One Night In Koreatown
For the second time, the new Quantum Leap tackles serious contemporary issues through the lens of history to address social injustice. Despite some clunky dialogue, the episode mostly succeeds!
In 1992, Ben leaps into Daniel Park, a young Korean-American working at the family shoe store with his brother Sonny and father Jin, just as the LA riots begin.1 In the original timeline, Jin is killed defending his small Koreatown storefront, leaving Sonny and Daniel to keep their father’s store alive out of guilt instead of following their dreams. Unfortunately, Jin treats Dwain—a young Black man and creative genius who predicts the 90s sneaker boom—with racist contempt; he calls Dwain a “criminal,” “punk kid,” and “thief”. Dwain and Sonny just want to start a sneaker line together! After a number of shared traumatic experiences, Jin winds up protecting Dwain from a potential police shooting as the group snags an abandoned ambulance to get Sonny to the hospital after he is accidentally shot by his father. Ben puts right what once went wrong (on a small scale, in the lives of this one family, not in relation to systemic racism). It’s an excellent example of how Quantum Leap can tell an affecting, smaller story against the backdrop of broader world events and tragedies.
When I first became interested in TV criticism, it was because of episodes like One Night in Koreatown. I wanted to better understand how TV, as a storytelling medium, could be uniquely reactive to current events, and could use its varied storytelling mechanisms to reveal injustices. In cultural studies, it’s a maxim that media affect and reflect reality, and I always felt like, of all media, that was most true of television.
While Quantum Leap’s exploration of the LA riots does not explicitly reflect any particular recent event,2 it’s not as if we lack for recent examples of systemic racism and police brutality (which, unfortunately, remain evergreen topics). This is also kind of the point of these kinds of episodes, which connect Magic’s experiences in 1967 to Dwain’s experiences in 1992 to contemporary accounts of such violence. Quantum Leap’s procedural engine is uniquely situated to tell exactly this kind of story.
Procedural Storytelling: The politics of this episode are complicated, but the shorthand the show uses mostly works. It was clever to set this episode right after Addison and Ben take a break; it meant that someone else could share the spotlight with Ben—in this case, QL could tell a story about a Korean man leaping into a Korean man, with Magic, a Black man, as his partner, whose arc this episode involves struggling with his own past traumatic experiences of police brutality. It’s the perfect set up for this show to address this specific injustice/story, engaging in part with the tension between Black and Korean residents of LA at the time. As Ian articulates later (see quote below), so many subjectivities are exposed in this horrific series of events that it can feel impossible to build a comprehensive understanding of what happened and why it happened. The LA riots were driven by systemic racism, the injustice of the justice system, and police brutality, but they also laid bear violent tensions between different communities/visible minority groups, and many innocents were killed or injured.
This episode takes the time to paint a picture of that complexity by setting the stakes and story, not in the crowd reacting to the verdict, but in another community swept up in the destruction. Anchoring that story is the connection between an old man with anti-black prejudices and a young black man who regularly frequents his store.
Is it perfect? No, but I think it serves as an incredibly effective episode of a show that has not always dealt sensitively with this kind of complex/nuanced topic. For example, it did a great job exploring how different people may interpret the notion and context of looting differently. While we see images of people breaking down doors and windows and running off with shopping carts filled with goods, Sonny also goes to the local supermarket to find necessary supplies (which Dwain comments on as “ironic”). Is it looting to deal with an emergency situation by seeking food and water, to protect your family? Is that the same thing as running off with TVs and brand-name shoes?3
Still, one area where I think the show pulled some punches, to make a stronger point about system racism, was in framing both Dwain and later Magic as model citizens. Jin perceives Dwain as a “thief” and “criminal” due to his blackness, but he’s actually a brilliant young man with scholarships to Ivy league schools. Dwain is exceptional, not “just another poor, angry black kid with no prospects or future ahead of [him].” But what if he had been a “poor, angry black kid?” Would Jin have been justified in his beliefs? Of course not, but the show wants us to see the best case scenario—the story of a man whose prejudices are reversed in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
I get it, the show didn’t have time to tell a messier story, that’s fine, but then Magic tells his story of a similar event in 1967. He explores how folks had “rightfully” reacted angrily “demanding justice,” that “people were scared, looking for help,” so Magic “tried to do [his] part, until four cops stopped [him and his cousin] at a red light. All [the cops] saw were two black men in a car they assumed was stolen. [Magic] tried to explain that [he] was on leave [from the military],” but the cops assaulted them anyway, tossing them aside like they were “no better than trash.” Like Dwain, Magic’s story is a concrete example of prejudice in action—innocent Black men brutalized because of systemic racism. This is self-evidently abhorrent. But, in my view, I think that even if they had stolen that car, the cops would still not be justified in their actions.
In the shorthand of TV storytelling, I completely understand why the morality here would be flattened. I hope that all people would be horrified by this worst-case-scenario—a police beating without justification rooted in anti-black racism. But I also want to live in a world where we don’t need to tell that version of the story for the victim to garner sympathy. I think about how real-world victims of police violence, like Michael Brown or George Floyd, are sometimes described in media and by critics as “no angel.” As the Niemann Lab at Harvard explains: “…we at times portray crime victims as either completely innocent (“angelic”) or beyond redemption (“evil”). Most human beings exist in a space somewhere between those two poles.” Narratives of ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ permeate our understanding of victimhood, but I wish those stories could grapple with complex realities and still leave room for empathy despite flaws.
Serial Developments: It was nice to take a break from the Addison/Ben drama, but the show really wanted to remind us that it remained invested in their relationship and story long-term. Enter the absolute worst (network-notes-required?) segue I’ve ever heard in TV dialogue (it gave me an enormous amount of emotional whiplash). We get it, the show wanted to lampshade/acknowledge ongoing drama without addressing it in the context of an already incredibly packed episode; it was the right call to mostly ignore Ben and Addison’s relationship issues. But dialogue like this, to me, seems to come from a place where episodic storytelling and serial developments are off balance:
[In response to Magic’s concerns about Ziggy struggling to analyze the data for Ben]
IAN: Well, the LA riots are one of the most complicated events in recent history. I mean, there were so many different points of view. So much information and misinformation between the police and the media and the people on the ground. The reality of the situation shifted from moment to moment, so there was really no objective truth. Just a whole lot of fear and rage and violence.
MAGIC: Well, just keep at it.
(momentary pause)
JENN: Is it just me, or is anyone else still reeling from the whole Ben-Addison blowout?
IAN: Oh my God, thank you! I feel like we’re kids in the middle of Mom and Dad’s divorce and everything just went all Kramer vs. Kramer.
JENN: I was actually thinking it was more a War of the Roses scenario. Minus the attempted murder.
MAGIC: Yes, everything is incredibly awkward right now, but can we please stay focused here!?
(momentary pause)
ZIGGY: Beep boop beep boop.
IAN: Oh. Blunt force trauma to the head. That’s what killed Jin. Right outside of his store. It’s awful.
Lest you worry this was the only clunky dialogue, I give you more very bad exposition.
MAGIC: Ever heard of the long hot summer?
JENN: Summer of 1967. Race riots broke out in cities across the country. (beat) I went to a school that wasn't afraid to teach black history
It can be hard to sell content addressing important social topics (and I agree 1000% with the sentiment)… but these lines did not feel like the earnest edutainment and overwrought melodrama in Let Them Play; it was just cringe-inducing bad writing.
Unfortunately, they decided to give Jenn most of this clunky dialogue, which seems to make Jenn the audience surrogate, provided with social justice learning opportunities. In the same scene, she later asks if “there [was] anything [he] could do to fight back.” Magic of course explains that “hell no, Black kids have that talk before their parents will let them out of the house on their own.” This is an incredibly important thing to talk about (again, it’s horrific), but the dialogue is so bad and Jenn (who has just told us that she learned Black history in school!) should definitely already know this.
As for other ongoing character and serial developments, I’m not sure that it was the right call to also introduce an alcoholism-related storyline for Magic this episode. Especially when said alcoholism was more tied to losing Ben than to the episodic plot. There were big enough issues to explore around systemic racism and police brutality without introducing yet another incredibly weighty topic. I think that the stakes for Magic were serious enough, including his history with police violence, that this extra character development had limited room to breathe; still, Ernie Hudson is a strong performer and he certainly sells the pain of the last few years in a few short speeches. The connection to Al (who lost Sam three decades earlier, explicitly mentioned) was made all the more explicit given Magic’s new(ish) relationship with Beth (Al’s widow).
Still, it was nice to have Ben and Magic talk about the consequences of Ben Leaping. Losing Ben caused Magic to fall of the rails, while Ben tries to comfort him by explaining that Magic didn’t fail him, Ben chose to leap and made all this happen.
Ultimately though, for me, it mostly just pointed to my broader storytelling structure concerns. Quantum Leap is doing a lot more showing than telling here. The strength of a show about revisiting and fixing historic wrongs is that it can, through the Leap itself, demonstrate exactly the point it wants to make. We can learn about systemic racism through the lens of a story set during the LA riots. But, as I’ve argued in each and every S2 review (I promise I’ll drop this complaint at some point soon), if the show had implemented a flashback structure to fill in the three year gap, we could have been shown more of Magic’s challenges instead of just told about them via monologue. But that’s just how this season has chosen to unfold—Addison tells us about her grief, Tom tells us about his wife, etc. Given the chosen structure, it makes a lot of sense that Magic’s three year gap would be explored in this way. I just wish it had been different.
Legacyquel Baggage: I wasn’t super happy when Janis (one of our main connections to the OG series) was sent off to Hawaii offscreen, but I also wasn’t expecting Magic to be dating Beth, Al’s widow. As EP Deborah Pratt explains: “[Beth is] another anchor to the original series.” I still don’t know if these anchors serve as more than Easter eggs for older fans; Magic and Beth are two characters from the OG series, and they can either exist as part of the modern plot, just calling back to past events, or they can be part of stories that move the OG series plot forward—like finding Sam. I suspect at this point it’s more of the former, but who knows. Maybe not even the show!
Thanks again for your patience this week, glad I got this up before 2x06. See you soon!
The 1992 LA riots began in reaction to the acquittal of four police officers charged in the brutal beating of Rodney King, a Black man, an event that was caught on camera. Most of what I know about the riots (as a Canadian) comes from Slow Burn, a longform podcast that dives into complex events in recent US history. Almost all of the context I have for the LA riots come from here, including stories about Koreatown. My goal is to discuss this episode and its content as sensitively as possible, in the context of broader discourse on the event and system racism, but I may still get things wrong. Please feel free to let me know!
Notably, the first 6-8 episodes of Quantum Leap S2 were filmed back-to-back with the end of S1 both ahead and in anticipation of the writer’s strike. In recent years, with binge releases and years-long breaks between seasons and release cycles, TV may not always have the same power to react in real time that, say, past primetime lineups might have (like the non-canonical episode of The West Wing, Isaac and Ishamael, a response to 9/11).
Hurricane Katrina is another helpful example of what it means to loot. As discussed in this retrospective article from The Guardian, “While television images did capture people grabbing electronics and other valuable goods from local retail outlets, the majority of looters were hunting for bare essentials such as food, water, diapers and medicine.”