Catching up on Quantum Leap, because I dropped the ball after the S1 mid-season finale last year and S2 is like five episodes in now, and oh my god... bawling my fucking eyes out at the episode about the trans high school athlete in season one.

The QL reboot doesn't centre around on individual episodes being focused on social issues in the same way the original show was, for the most part, which I think does work because it can avoid the implication of a person who is not part of a particular group coming in to take over a marginalised person's life and save them from a tragedy resulting from bigotry they face that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to save themselves from. And even without being About social justice, it's still moving the needle forward in that the show is very diverse in its ensemble cast in a way that is so seamless that I didn't notice for several episodes when I started watching it that there are no white male recurring characters.

But I do sometimes miss the focus on social justice of the original show and how it didn't lean away from social injustice as a show where time travel was the main conceit and... oh boy. This fucking episode. Tears. Non-stop tears. I don't think there was an episode in the original show that hit me this close to home, but Jesus Christ. This one got me right where I live.

I was obviously never an out trans kid on a sports team who faced that specific kind of harassment and who was turned into a hot button issue in a culture war when all I wanted was to be on a team with other kids, but in some ways having not been out as a kid made the scenes where Gia's peers loved her and accepted her hit all the harder. I wish we all got to be happy, normal kids. I wish none of us had to go through what trans kids—out, or stealth, or closeted, or questioning or not even aware we were trans yet—went through in the past and what they are going through right now. I want Ben Song to be all of our dad 😭