Glee KILLED this week, people. And I mean killed. For the first time, the show put Artie, and the issue of disability front and center. The show sensitively resurrected the question of how Kurt's father is going to deal with his sexual orientation. And the show put Rachel firmly where she belongs for the moment: in the ensemble.
Y'all may be aware that I get sometimes (overly) cranky about the limits to the ways disabled people are portrayed in movies and television. So it was fantastic to have Artie, who has been more in the background than any of the other kids to this point, roll to the fore in this episode, and to have the show address disability head-on. Whether Artie was teaching the kids to pop wheelies in the chairs Mr. Schue insisted they try out, or, in a flirtatious moment with Tina, reassuring her "I want to be very clear. I still have the use of my penis." (and of course, sweetly striking out, if only for the moment) he was a person, rather than his disability. And it was wonderful to see him croon a wistful cover of "Dancing With Myself" while he toured the school from his perspective, and rock out in a duet of "Proud Mary" with Mercedes to close the episode.
The kids may have taken their new embrace of ability-based diversity a little too far. Rachel got Finn a job by wheeling him into a restaurant and declaring "He's handicapable and refusing to hire him could be construed as discrimination. My dads are gay." Sue took a girl with Down's Syndrome (who is introduced as one of the cheerleader's friends) onto the Cheerio's, prompting Will to treat her with suspicion. "You're asking me to treat this girl differently because she has a disability when it seems to me she wants to be treated like everybody else," Sue tells him after giving the girl a hard time in practice. And she's right--especially because it turns out her older sister, who is in a nursing home, has Down's Syndrome too. I'm still debating whether it was too much. But putting some genuine pain, and genuine love, in Sue's backstory made the show feel deeper than it did two weeks ago. And the fact that the show used two actresses with Down's Syndrome, rather than having someone play-act it, was effective, and smart, I think.
There's a ton of other stuff in there. The disability stuff just hit me particularly hard. But it was proof of how good the show can be when it's using all of its constituent parts (among the kids, at least. I missed Emma, but damn is the show better when Terri's gone) to their fullest extent--and to their fullest abilities.