When the TV show Glee first premiered in the spring 2009, it quickly became a family favourite in my household.  But it wasn’t just my household. Glee-mania swept the nation, to the point that I distinctly remember the outrage when an episode didn’t air due to the Superbowl. I was in the eighth grade when the show first started airing, and I was immediately captivated by the diversity of the cast and plot. The very original glee club was comprised of an Asian girl with a stutter, a black girl, a gay boy, a boy in a wheelchair, a Jewish girl with two dads, and your average white football playing boy. I believe this is why the show gained as much traction as quickly as it did.  Everyone who watched could see themselves in the characters. Over the years, the show touched on a lot of topics that made it even more relatable to its viewers. It’s been nearly a decade since the show re-popularized Don’t Stop Believing, but the hype for the show has been gone longer than is has been off the air.  It became apparent early on that while the show promoted acceptance of all, it preached a “do as I say and not as I do” mentality when depicting disability. The most obvious example of this would be the character of Artie – a wheelchair using student – played by Kevin McHale – an able bodied actor. Or the character of Becky, a cheerleader with Downs Syndrome, played by Lauren Potter, who was written to be the generally mean and unlikable minion of the shows main villain, Sue Sylvester.  Both of these characters drew complaints about the way they portray the disabled community while the show was still on TV, and there’s a million and one articles and blog posts already written that go into great detail about how damaging they really are. I do not want to rehash every argument that has already been made about these characters. Instead, I want to dive a little deeper into a season three plot arch which paints disability in a much worse light.