TV News: If you watched the Agatha finale, you likely got that sweet audio described trailer for all the Marvel content coming in 2025. Granted, I hope Deadpool and Wolverine isn’t waiting that long, but the rest all feels 2025, including Daredevil: Born Again, IronHeart, Wonder Man, What If Season 3, an animated Spidey series, the Marvel Zombies offshoot, and a Wakanda show.There are movies planned next year too, most notably Captain America 4, which releases in February theatrically, with Anthony Mackie now as the lead.
TV Shows Watched: Agatha All Along: S1E8 and S1E9 (Disney plus), Jurassic World: Chaos Theory: S2E3 (Netflix) with audio description, TeaCup: S1E7 (Peacock) with audio description, You Would Do it Too: S1E2 (Apple plus), It’s Florida, Man: S1E1 (MAX) with audio description, and Bad Sisters: S1E1 (Apple Plus) with audio description.
Podcasts, YouTube, and movies: None
I decided to go back and try and get into the critically acclaimed Bad Sisters, which I initially gave up on after 2 episodes a few years back. So, we’ll see if I can get sucked into that mystery.
Mostly, I wanted to have a discussion about one word. “Healthy”. Now, this is where people can never give me crap for giving passes to companies I’ve worked with, or even on shows I’ve previously praised for having excellent audio description. Today, we’re talking about Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, a show I love. deeply.
But the third episode of this season focuses on recent amputee Brooklyn, who lost her hand in an encounter with a dinosaur. It is a very Brooklyn centric episode, not really focusing on the other Nublar Six unless they coincide with Brooklyn’s “where have I been?” The unfortunate use is when they move into the flashback, and refer to Brooklyn with her hand as being healthy. I was thinking about how this translates to amputees, or to even people who were simply born without a particular limb. Often in the blind community, the conversation of ableism and ableist terms is brought up a lot, and I think to choose “healthy’ as the way to describe Brooklyn, then suggests she is not healthy anymore because she is an amputee. Her loss of hand has nothing really to do with her overall health, and as Brooklyn proves, she’s still quite adept at being able to get herself out of a tight situation even without her second hand.
I’m sure people will have strong feelings on this. It sucks to lose vision, and I can’t imagine losing my hand. but I can imagine doing all the work, getting past that, and then hearing something like this that would suggest to me that I’m otherwise unhealthy. or, considering this is a kids show, suggesting to a kid that either they are unhealthy, or that a family member might be, as a result.
I know what they were trying to do, and I know you have limited space and time in which to say it. I’m certain this felt like the best way to connect the dots, but I think the deeper implications here are that while we’re so laser focused on our own views of ableism and accessibility, we forgot that we might have an overlap in the amputee community, and we maybe just made someone unintentionally feel unhealthy as a result.