Metempsychosis

CW: Sexual assault

I haven't seen the TV show Quantum Leap since it was first on.  I guess it's stuck with me, though.  Quantum Leap was one of those "vagabond" shows, the ones that go back probably as far as serialized entertainment.  A man wanders around and fixes other people's problems for them.  Too many of them to count - Have Gun, Will Travel, Route 66, The Incredible Hulk, Highway to Heaven.  It's usually men.  Women who go around fixing other people's problems are called "busybodies".  So you wind up with protagonists like Jessica Fletcher, where the joke people make is that she's secretly a serial killer, because people are always getting killed around her.

Anyway, from what I remember of Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula gets stuck in a time-travel experiment that's gone wrong, and the result of that experiment is that he travels around the 20th century inhabiting other people's bodies.  And he solves their problems, and then he jumps into somebody else's body and that's the cliffhanger for the next episode.  Who is he going to be this time?

Scott Bakula always looks like Scott Bakula, but when he looks in a mirror he sees the person everyone else sees him as.  He has an invisible friend who knows he's Scott Bakula, but nobody else can see the invisible friend.  He's the obvious audience surrogate/person to explain the plot to.

What I remember about the show is that he wound up in women's bodies a lot.  Well, that makes sense - once you establish that precedent, more than half the people on earth are women.  No reason to not keep doing it.  My memory is that in those episodes the audience surrogate character would make an occasional wisecrack, because that was how you were expected to deal with that stuff back then, but that ultimately he was there to persuade the rest of us in the audience was that it was OK and not creepy that Scott Bakula was wearing a dress.  I don't remember how Scott Bakula looked in a dress.  I don't think he looked particularly good, but I don't think he looked particularly bad, either.

Unlike a lot of shows that dealt with what the ICD-11 draft is proposing to call "gender incongruence", it wasn't necessarily the point of the show, not after the first time at least.  And it wasn't a comedy.  What I remember of Bosom Buddies was that it had one joke, and it was that Tom Hanks was wearing a dress.  Similarly "Just One of the Guys", the joke was that she supposedly wasn't _really_ a guy.

It was pretty clear that Scott Bakula was a guy who happened to be in a woman's body that episode.  There was no intent to be affirming or anything like that, but I wonder how trans men feel about the show.

A lot of trans people, I guess they explore gender through what's called "transformation fiction".  I guess the gist is that some character winds up magically in the body of the so-called "opposite character".  This character never seems to experience dysphoria.  Sometimes they get frustrated about being treated differently by society, but none of them seem to hate their bodies.  Given the opportunity to choose, often they will choose to stay in their "transformed" gender.

With Quantum Leap, my perception of the show was that it dealt more with a concept often called "the transmigration of souls", or "metempsychosis".  I didn't necessarily hate my body or wish I had someone else's, but the idea of trying on someone else's body really appealed to me.  Or, because I can be greedy, maybe even multiple bodies at once.

Mostly this happened in comic books.  There was a character in a comic I didn't read much called Triplicate Girl.  Later, because female character development in comics = trauma, one of her bodies was killed, and she became Duo Damsel.  I don't know if "Damsel" was a legit endonym women used for themselves, if it had a connotation _outside_ of helplessness and submissiveness, or if the writer was just being a clueless dude, though I have my suspicions.  I was really curious about what it would be like to inhabit two bodies at once.

The character of Jon Osterman also did this in the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comic book "Watchmen".  The more I think about it, the more I feel like Jon Osterman was kind of a shitty character.

Osterman was, in-universe, a nuclear technician who was killed by a fictional analogue to the infamous "Demon Core".  Over the course of several weeks, he painstakingly constructed himself.  Or rather, _something_ painstakingly constructed itself using his consciousness as a blueprint.  Moore had previously made his reputation in comics by doing something sort of similar with Swamp Thing, in his second issue of the comic revealing that Swamp Thing was _not_ the tragically deformed body of Alec Holland at all.  Swamp Thing was something far older, wiser, and deeper, something whose destiny it was to transcend Alec Holland's personal trauma.

Jon Osterman doesn't go through any of this personally, but he shares this sense of apotheosis, of transfiguration, of a man being transformed into a god.

He seems to be kind of a shitty god, though.  He has, except when the plot requires it, this expansive knowledge of past and future, of his own actions, but he views it as being all predestined.  He is aware that he will treat first Janey, and then Laurie, terribly.  It doesn't ever seem to occur to him that he could choose to _not_ do this.  I understand gods are supposed to be inscrutable and alien creatures, but what possible reason could he have for "surprising" Laurie by macking on her with two bodies simultaneously, even though he has full foreknowledge that she _doesn't_ want this?  Why would he, when Laurie calls him on this, directly lie to her and tell her he thought she would enjoy being "surprised" in this manner?  What "god" is capable of justifying macking on a 16 year old girl despite already being in a committed monogamous relationship?  It's one thing to follow Nixon's orders in Vietnam, another entirely to treat women the way he does, with no reckoning or narrative resolution in sight.

Moore, in a work designed to deconstruct the superhero mythos, doesn't ever question Osterman's willing perpetuation of a fundamentally misogynist relationship model.  The big reckoning between Laurie and Jon on the moon isn't about the two of them at all - it's about Laurie's parents.  Osterman is presented as being literally not even on the same planet as, the domestic psychodrama of Laurie's mom, Sally, choosing to have consensual sex with her attempted rapist.  A week earlier Osterman was trying to have a threesome with Laurie.

This is not theology.  This is a tortured justification of male "obliviousness".  The only conclusion I can reach on this character is that Jon Osterman is not, in fact, the god others take him to be, just an immensely powerful abusive shithead.