Last night, NBC's Quantum Leap reboot pushed a radical trans agenda, promoting inclusion of biological males in girls' sports and female locker rooms.
Monday's episode, "Let Them Play," was a full hour of trans propaganda. The show ignored, dismissed or derided the pain felt by young female athletes who have had their sports and privacy invaded by biological males.
The reboot, which premiered in September, is a new version of the classic 1980's show in which a scientist travels through spacetime, taking the place of others and correcting mistakes.
"Let Them Play" begins with the new scientist, Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee), leaping into the place of a 2012 high school basketball coach. He leaps into the middle of a game just as one of the players has suffered an injury. Song sends an alternate, Gia (Josielyn Aguilera), to play instead.
Controversy is soon ignited because it turns out the alternate is actually a biological male, a trans "woman." Gia is also the coach's child.
The rest of the show descends into a lecture about how Gia should be able to play and how amazing trans kids are. Opposition to Gia playing will only drive him closer to running away from home, it's alleged.
The fact that Gia cannot be in the same locker room as the biological girls on the team is portrayed as cruel. A mop falls on top of Gia in the janitor's closet where he changes.
A teammate's mother fights to keep Gia from playing.
"We had to fight for Title IX," the mother tells Gia's parents. "So I'm not gonna sit here as you take away women's sports because you think there's no difference between boys and girls."
But this concerned mother is portrayed as a cold, uptight Karen-like figure. Gia's own mother dismisses her concerns with the magic word, "inclusion."
In the end, Song succeeds in having Gia play as a full participant on the team and the female teammates all encourage Gia to change with them in their locker room.
Janay: 'Ey, you're done going into that janitor's closet, Mendez. Girls' locker room is for all girls, period.
Girls: Mm-hmm.
Gia: What about your mom?
Amanda: I told her she should let us decide who we change with.
Janay: And I told her the alternative is making the school nurse give us all blood tests and strip searches.
Shruti: Yo! They would do that to us?
Janay: They do it to black women all the time.
Gia: Adults are so weird, I swear. [All chuckle and agree]
Shruti: So what I want to know is, are we a team?
Amanda: Not without Gia. [All cheer]
Girl: Ooh! I like that.
Janay: 'Ey! Are we a team?
All: Not without Gia! [Chanting] Not without Gia! Not without Gia! Not without Gia!
That scene is a Hollywood psyops, with a bit of race-baiting tossed in for good measure.
The reality is that girls don't feel comfortable changing in front of trans students, but they face bans and retaliation from school administrations for speaking out. Girls have had to deal with the trauma of being exposed to male genitalia against their will in locker rooms due to trans policies. Those stories of violation never make contemporary Hollywood scripts.
During the episode, we learn that Gia announced he was trans in the fifth grade. It's unclear what degree of puberty blockers and hormones the character has been given or if he is yet castrated. How any child can be certain they are trans at ten years old and encouraged onto a life-altering path so young is also never addressed.
It's too bad Quantum Leap went down a woke, tiresome road with this episode. Up until now, the reboot had not pushed an ideological agenda too intensely. It had been the rare reboot that actually honored the original source material and attempted to capture what made the 80's classic fun in the first place.
The new version does have a programmer character named Ian (Mason Alexander Park) who is clearly gender non-conforming. But up until this point his physical appearance had been a sidenote rather than an ideological hammer. In this episode, he's utilized specifically to push the radical trans agenda. At one point, Ian tells his colleague Addison (Caitlin Bassett) that "trans kids are magic."
This woke turn is disappointing for a show which had seemed to be avoiding the reboot curse and actually produced interesting story lines with engaging narrative arcs.
Let's hope the show returns to what makes it work and does not repeat another week of left-wing lecturing.
