If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

My review of the modern incarnation of Quantum Leap S2E5 episode One Night in Koreatown.

I don’t think I can keep this one short because there’s too much packed in the episode, plus it connects to me personally. I didn’t think it would except for the fact that I lived in Orange County, CA (right next door to L.A.) in 1992 during the Rodney King riots, and I was working for Child Protective Services. But that’s not the part of my history that came up watching the show.

Ben (Raymond Lee) leaps into 18 year old Daniel Park, one of two sons of Jin Park (C.S. Lee) who are running a “Mom and Pop” shoe store in L.A.’s Koreatown. It’s April 29, 1992 and Ben is helping customer Luisa Rojas (Analisa Velez) try on some shoes.

A black kid named Dwain (Benjamin Flores Jr.) comes in saying Ben’s older brother Sonny (Danny Kang) was going to hook him up with some shoes. Rojas has to get to work at the hospital (she’s a nurse) but will be back before closing to pick up her shoes.

Ben follows Sonny in the back to get Dwain’s shoes except the shoe box is filled with cash. Yeah, it’s a WTF moment. Going out front, Sonny hands Dwain the “shoes” while Jin is ranting on about Dwain being a thief and he’s going to call the cops the next time the kid shows up.

To be fair, Sonny tells Ben that Jin doesn’t trust anyone who isn’t Korean and so it’s not that he just hates blacks.

Addison (Caitlin Bassett) is all too happy to give up the hologram role at this point, so Magic (Ernie Hudson) steps in. She says she has her phone if anyone needs her and leaves.

One of my predictions comes true and we discover that Magic has been dating Beth Calavicci (Susan Diol) for the past year. He promises a nice dinner out, but will be working late at the project. Beth tries to talk him out of going at all, and we find out why later in the episode.

Magic volunteers to become the hologram and for this one, and he probably wishes he had stayed out of it. Jenn (Nanrisa Lee) also tries to talk Magic out of hologram duty, but he says he’s a Navy SEAL and doesn’t rattle. We find out how wrong that is.

Magic shows up in 1992 in time to see the television announcement of the Rodney King verdict where the four officers videotaped completely brutalizing King were acquitted.

The riots (“protests”) start almost immediately and sweep toward Koreatown.

Okay, some background. Sonny gave money to Dwain because they’re going to start their own custom sneaker business. The big chains are making it so stores like Jin’s can’t compete. Daniel is joining the Marines and will be leaving in just a few months. Poor Jin.

Jin and his wife came to the U.S. with nothing. Mom’s gone and the shoe store is Jin’s legacy. It’s all he has and he expects his sons to run it after him.

Magic says that Ben is there to save Jin’s life. We find out Jin has a shotgun which he bought to protect the store from robberies. Now he plans to use it to protect it from looters.

I should say there’s some accurate history here. When Rojas comes back for her shoes, Ben walks her out to her car. On the rooftop of neighboring businesses, there are Koreans with guns ready to defend their property.

Read Korean Americans who remember 1992 riots fight to save LAPD station and ‘When looting starts, shooting starts’ for details (the latter also mentions the more recent George Floyd riots).

The street is already trashed and Rojas’ car has been incinerated. Ben goes all social justice on her and the audience about how unjust the verdict was, systemic racism, and how upset and insulted the black community is. Rojas snaps back that she’s angry too, but she’s a single Mom and that’s her only means to get between home and work. Now that she can’t get out, how is she supposed to reach her children?

As I’ll explain in a bit, it’s not just about the anger of the “protesters.”

Back at the store, she uses the phone to call someone to take care of her children. Now it’s understandable at this point that there are no other customers in the store, but there haven’t been any other customers since Ben leapt in. Business must really be bad.

All exits from Koreatown are blocked and the National Guard won’t be there until morning. Magic starts giving Ben ideas about securing the store, including moving merchandise away from the front window to make it less tempting for looters. Jin wants to take his shotgun to the roof but Sonny volunteers instead (but then he never takes the gun or climbs to the roof).

Magic gets a call and has to leave the imaging chamber for a while. At the project Beth has shown up with Magic’s brown bag lunch, except no one thinks it’s lunch.

Okay, Beth was married to Al (the late Dean Stockwell from the original series) who was Sam’s (Scott Bakula) hologram, but Beth seems to be privy to every little piece of knowledge about the current project, including being let inside the main control area. How did she get security clearance?

In Magic’s or maybe Tom Westfall’s (Peter Gadiot who is absent again in this episode) office, Beth pulls an empty bottle of Scotch from the bag. Magic explains that he found it in the back of a cabinet, immediately emptied it, then threw it out. Beth is doubtful and apparently who can blame her?

After Ben was “lost” and the project shut down, Magic started drinking. He admits to being an alcoholic, but Beth turned him around. He’s been sober and in recovery for about a year now. I’m glad Beth didn’t pull the bottle out in front of everyone, but they seem to know all about it anyway.

The project lost Ben three years ago. How long did they look for him before it was shut down, one year or two? If it was one, and Magic started drinking after that, then he was drinking for one year and is now sober for one.

But wait. Jenn and Ian know about his drinking implying he was hitting the bottle while they were still at QL looking for Ben. Did Magic have absolutely no alcohol issues before this? At the engagement party for Ben and Addison in the pilot, I don’t recall if we saw Magic drinking or not.

Usually, an addiction doesn’t come out of a (proverbial) clear blue sky. Magic was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam around 1970. A lot of servicemen were using all kinds of substances during the war, but we don’t know about Magic. If he had an alcohol problem before and it were known, it would have affected his security clearance and he’d never have been allowed to lead the project. Of course, he could have hidden it. There are a lot of functional alcoholics in the world drinking but still maintaining.

Bottom line is that, assuming this at all resembles a real life addictive process, there’s a lot more going on we don’t know about. At the end of the episode, Magic calls Beth and asks her to attend a meeting with him. Presumably this is a recovery meeting, but I guess we’ll see.

In 1992, the store is boarded up but Dwain arrives and begs to be let in. If the police see him out there, they’ll assume he’s a rioter and his life won’t be worth spit. Magic reappears to Ben and tells him he absolutely has to go out there and get Dwain, who has just run off. This contradicts what Magic said before about staying off the streets. Clearly this is Magic and not Ziggy trying to save Dwain.

Ben and Sonny go out (somehow prying all off the lumber that had been blocking the entrance before) and Magic guides them to Dwain. Magic’s looking really stressed at this point and the kid barely escapes the cops. Ben takes Dwain back to the store while Sonny goes to a nearby food place for supplies (in the middle of a riot with violent protestors and trigger happy cops everywhere? Plus why wouldn’t any business in the area also be either boarded up or deserted?).

Magic finally reaches his limit and saying “I can’t do this,” bails from the imaging chamber. As he goes back to his office, Jenn and Ian tell each other this looks like when he was drinking. In his office, it seems as if Magic is reaching for a bottle or something, but that makes no sense. The last thing he’d do would be to keep booze around, especially at work. But he pulls away.

Jenn goes in the office to talk to Magic but also says she’ll give him his space. He tells her about the Long Hot Summer in 1967 when a series of riots occurred. Apparently in Detroit the cops arrested 80 black people outside a club for absolutely no reason. There were riots as a result which set the stage for what happened next.

Magic was home on leave from the Navy visiting family. He and his cousin were pulled over, dragged out of what they presumed was a stolen car, threw them to the ground and pointing guns at them, put their boots on their necks and beat them senseless with their batons.

I hate to put it this way, but Magic’s choice of words, even in a highly emotional state as he recounts this to Jenn, comes off like a prepared speech denouncing systemic racism. He says whether it’s 1967, 1992, or today…

“Sparks of injustice may vary but systemic oppression will always light the fuse and no matter how much progress we make – it seems like it never changes.”

Yeah, I get the show wants to make a point, but historically, the showrunners make it by taking a large, blunt instrument and bashing it repeatedly in the face of the audience.

At this point, I noticed that the conversation is happening between a black man and an Asian woman. Ian isn’t there but they are also trans/gender non-conforming. None of the other people we saw last episode who run the project in the background are present. Of the only two white, cisgender people who regularly show up, Addison is down in the gym minding her own business and who knows where Tom is. I wonder what would have happened if Addison or Tom had walked into Magic’s office at that sensitive moment? Would it have been too complicated to write?

Back in 1992, Jin is really unhappy about Dwain being there and still thinks he’s a criminal. Ben gets into an argument with Jin in Korean which, at the end, Jin asks when did he learn Korean? This is all the more strange as toward the end of the episode, Jin speaks to Sonny in Korean. The age difference between the brothers isn’t that much so why would one know Korean and the other wouldn’t?

Sonny’s still gone but the looters arrive. There are too many and Jin, Ben, Dwain, and Rojas retreat to the store room. The looters loot and leave. I wonder why they didn’t break into the store room as well since there would certainly be more expensive shoes in there? Oh well.

The place is trashed and Magic conveniently returns. Nice timing.

I wonder what happened to those Koreans with guns who were on the rooftops right next to Jin’s store? We didn’t hear any gunshots and no mention was made of them during this time. They conveniently disappeared.

Throughout the episode, we see the effects of the rioting and looting, but the only black person in the 1992 environment is Dwain. We do see white cops periodically, but all they do is threaten to shoot people (you see this in a bit). The show was crafted to say that there was widespread rioting and looting, but at no time do you see any of the perpetrators. I’m sure that was constructed to keep the focus on Ben, Jin’s family, Rojas, and Dwain (and the cops) but to remove the wider scope of “action.”

Even if the rioting were justified, it’s still rioting and a lot of people got hurt who weren’t involved in committing any sort of injustice. Rojas wasn’t hurt, but what if she’d been in her car when it was torched?

The store is trashed and Sonny is missing, but otherwise everyone’s okay. Jin seems to be in a state of shock and Dwain, Rojas, and supposedly Ben are trying to clean up.

Clean up? The store’s in a shambles. What’s there to clean up? Besides, if you intend to eventually file a police report, you want to leave everything the way the looters left it. But this was just to get people out of the way while Ben and Magic have a very strange conversation.

Ben regrets yelling at Jin. He blames his unresolved issues with his own Dad for that (something once mentioned in a first season episode and ignored again until now). He also says he’s still on edge because of his breakup with Addison.

Magic abruptly confesses to being an alcoholic and relates how he started drinking after the project lost Ben. Magic blames himself but Ben counters that he made the decision to leap himself. Beth pulled Magic out of the bottle and has been really supportive. Ben and Magic tell each other they are there for each other.

What is this, group therapy? This is no time for such a talk. There’s still the potential for the whole world to come crashing down on Jin and his store. But this isn’t the end of the soap opera.

Ian finds Addison down in QL’s gym (we should all be so lucky to have a fully equipped professional gym where we work). They go down there for no apparent reason except Ian blames themselves for their future self (the tenses and pronouns are a bit of a stretch) coming back in time and telling Ben about Addison. This made Ben leap and especially during today’s very difficult leap, has put both Ben and Magic through the emotional ringer.

This ends with a tender hug but just like Ben and Magic’s therapy session, why did this conversation have to happen? It served no useful purpose and feels like so much angst laden filler. This episode’s identified shared emotion is guilt.

Ian gets a call from Jenn. Ziggy’s freaking out.

Ziggy is freaking out (sorry the screen cap has such poor resolution). Lots of noise and flashing emergency lights and stuff. Apparently Ben changed something when he brought Dwain back to the store (remember it wasn’t Ziggy’s idea to rescue Dwain, it was Magic’s).

Like so many other things in this episode, Ziggy’s proverbial meltdown is ridiculous. According to Ziggy, Ben prevented Jin from dying but as a result, someone else is going to die. We just don’t know who. I wonder if Ziggy’s issues have to do with that dodgy processing chip we learned about last episode?

Jin and Dwain get into another argument. Dwain says regardless of his receiving three full-ride scholarships to the ivy league school of his choice, just like everyone else, Jin only sees him as a black thug.

Why does Dwain have to be so accomplished? I mean even if he ended up being a plumber or working in a warehouse, he still doesn’t deserve to be judged unfairly.

Jin’s reaction is to grab the shotgun but Ben manages to stop him from shooting Dwain. There’s a noise in the back of the store. Jin thinking the looters have returned, swivels around and shoots. Unfortunately, it’s the long absent Sonny who gets shot. Good thing the looters didn’t realize it was so easy to get in through the back door.

Somehow there’s a fully equipped and undamaged ambulance that’s been abandoned down the street. Imagine that when everything else out there is broken and burned. Rojas is a nurse but can’t help him in the store. Magic says Sonny will die if he doesn’t get to a hospital soon.

They get him to the ambulance, but as Dwain tries to start it, a bunch of cops appear out of nowhere, order him out of the ambulance, and threaten to shoot him. This is Magic’s worst nightmare.

Jin steps in between them and begs the cops to not shoot. They need to get Sonny to the hospital. Then the cops are called away and reluctantly leave without getting to kill anyone.

I don’t know the specifics of what happened in L.A. that night. Usually, when someone’s been shot, police will try to render assistance either until medical help can arrive or they will escort the ambulance (a good idea in a riot torn city) to the hospital. Instead, they just leave without a word.

Oh, all the cops were white.

On the way to the hospital, Magic delivers the good news. Sonny makes it. He and Dwain go into business and launch a virtual sneaker empire. Jin uses the insurance money from the store (see, he had insurance) to invest in their business. Once Daniel gets out of the Marines, he goes to business school and becomes the company’s CFO. All’s well that ends well in the inkwell (well, we never find out what happens to Rojas).

Ben leaps.

Like many of the episodes from the first season, this one takes a highly emotional and volatile situation and spins it. We see a carefully crafted perspective designed to highlight the writers’ message and suppress the rest of reality.

In Autumn of 1970, I was a high school student in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Homecoming game was coming up and I had just started dating a girl who wanted to go. There were riots occurring in various parts of the city. I don’t recall the context. As far as I know, it wasn’t a “Long Hot Summer,” or a “Rodney King,” or a “George Floyd” situation.

Having just looked, the closest items I can find out about it are Documentary examines Rancho High School race riots during civil rights era and 1970: Racial unrest sparked deadly violence.

My parents struggled with the decision but then said I could go. I’d be with a group of kids so that probably helped.

I don’t remember anything about the game or about that day at all until we were walking away from school. Their car was in a parking garage a few blocks away. There were people milling around everywhere and a cop car was parked at every intersection.

I fell behind my friends and was walking alone. There were a group of about six black guys. I kept walking, wanting to catch up with my friends. One of the black guys said something like “Hey” and lightly touched my hand.

Then the sky fell in. All six of them jumped me. I saw my glasses flying through the air and curled myself up into a ball. I don’t remember much pain and it was over quickly. The cops probably saw it happen and ran to stop the beating.

Someone started to pull me out of the gutter. That’s when I felt the blinding pain in my lower back as they straightened me up. One of the black guys had beaten me across the lower back with a bicycle chain. The pattern of the chain was still on my back which is how the EMTs could tell.

A news photographer ran across my field of vision, stopping just long enough to take my picture. It was on the front page of the evening and morning edition of the paper. I was a minor celebrity at school once I had healed enough to return to class. It was a pretty humiliating kind of attention.

A stream of blood was coming out of my nose. Not dripping, it was a faucet. Decades later, I had to have surgery for a deviated septum which I figure was a long-term result of this.

One of the ambulance attendants went off about those “n-words.” I started to say something about how he shouldn’t call them that and stopped myself. I remember thinking “Look at what just happened to you.”

No, I didn’t become a raving racist spewing the “N-word” around. However, it’s not like there weren’t consequences.

The Sheriff’s deputy was a black man. When he asked, I really couldn’t describe what my attackers looked like in more than generic terms. I wanted to identify them. I wanted them to get caught. I wanted them to be punished for what they did to me. As far as I know, I never saw any of them again and I’ll never know how any of their lives turned out, for good or for ill.

For a solid year after that, being alone around black people terrified me. I’ll skip going over specific examples. Decades later I had a series of anxiety attacks which may or may not have been some sort of result. I still get nervous when people come up from behind me.

My experiences are probably easy for people to discount, most certainly by the people who wrote the episode, and by those who will praise it. After all, I didn’t suffer from systemic racism. As a young man, I actually was stopped twice by police suspected of committing a crime but I was released both times unharmed.

I didn’t suffer what Rodney King suffered. I didn’t suffer what fictionally Magic suffered. When I walk into a store, no one automatically suspects that I’m there to steal. I’m told I have loads and loads of white privilege which means I have no room to complain about anything.

But regardless of the underlying reasons why I was attacked, why in fiction, an innocent Luisa Rojas had her car destroyed just because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, regardless of the emotional wounds suffered by so many people of color over so much history, it still doesn’t make it right, just, and certainly not legal to victimize other people in response to your being victimized.

I suppose, in a sense, you could say I, and many, many others like me, are collateral damage to “systemic racism.” If, in this case, black people weren’t victimized, they wouldn’t have victimized me.

No matter how much I try to understand and empathize, I still remember the fear and carry the residual anxiety over half a century later.

I remember in response to the protests, looting, riots that occurred after George Floyd’s death, social media carried videos and photos of white people washing black people’s feet in repentance, white people putting on heavy chains in remorse, even members of Congress on bended knee.

That’s not something I’m prepared to do. Yes, there is injustice, racism, and many terrible things that happen in the world. Some groups of people are generally regarded and treated worse than others. I deny none of that. However, that’s not my fault. I didn’t deserve to get the living shit kicked out of me because of it. Neither did anyone else who was hurt, had their homes and businesses destroyed, lived in fear in their own neighborhoods, and those who were even killed in the name of outrage over injustice.

Maybe this is why most of the white characters/actors in this episode were elsewhere when Ben and Magic and Jenn were talking and relating.

I get where the episode is coming from and as far as it goes, it has a message, through as I said, one carrying a particular spin. But there’s much larger story behind it and I’ve only told my one sad tale, or should we…

“…let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” -William Shakespeare – Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2

I fear the only things we have to share are the sad stories of the death of hope. The showrunners, writers, cast and crew of Quantum Leap share tales like this that, whether they mean to or not, separate us from each other, all in the name of “justice.”

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. The promo to the next episode: “Secret History.”

Addendum – November 10, 2023: Here is my follow up to this review and commentary: Kenneth Darlington, Race Riots, and the Justification for Violence.